Marketing

How to Hit Big Time With Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is the game changer, the magic wand, or the Midas touch you have been looking for to transform the marketing landscape. Since marketing has become consumer-centric, there is the absolute need to understand what and how the consumers feel and even why they feel so every time.

You need to be in touch with the consumers on a one-to-one basis round the clock. Conversational marketing gives you the opportunity to relate to the consumers on how, where, and when they want your product or service.

Any time you spend dilly-dallying could spell doom and disaster for the brand as your competitors can easily grab up the opportunity. Conversational marketing gives you an edge and a competitive advantage over other brands in the market.

Authentic relationships which can only arise through conversational marketing and which every brand needs to stave off the overwhelming competition in the global market these days are built on trust and transparency. Push marketing no longer works, you must listen, and respond to what your customers are saying.

It’s only when you have put in place a means of getting to listening to your customers that you can find out what their current level of awareness is of you and your type of product or service. This may sound outlandish to you bearing in mind that it seems practically impossible to attempt responding to the large number of potential customers and promptly too, you expect to visit your website.

Honestly, you must see the whole idea as daunting taking into consideration what it takes to get customers to complete the traditional form on your website with their information or what they’re looking for and the time it takes to get back to them. You need to stop fretting, the iteration of new technology has made it possible for you to engage your customers in a live chat.

Live chat allows for instantaneous responses. The days of waiting for weeks to hear from someone are over – conversations are always happening and in real time.

With conversational marketing our accepted response time can drastically change — friends can make plans faster, families stay closer, and businesses provide answers instantly. In the age of live chat, customers expect conversations to happen how, when, and where they want and you will be positioned to respond promptly.

The whole idea may sound intimidating, right? However, it’s not as complicated as you think. It’s obvious that the technology we use to communicate seems to have changed, the simple truth is that the core elements of communication are intact.

The expectation of people is that conversations will remain helpful, personal, and empathetic. We have only graduated to a situation where conversations will be held at scale. That’s the power of conversational marketing.

You only need integrating today’s sophisticated tech and seamless bot-to-human prospect handoffs. Chatbots don’t take a real person to run 24 hours a day, you can keep them active…24 hours a day!

Chatbots are incredibly powerful communication channel that has a strange way of breaking down the walls between support, sales, time, and marketing in the following ways.

1. Use website chatbots

Conversational marketing can easily quadruple the conversions achieved by your traditional forms. While forms aren’t exactly dead, landing pages can still be a hurdle, prospects may not want to deal with.

Imagine how pissed off you can get when a stranger comes up to you and simply asks “Name and phone number?” rather than introducing themselves and building a rapport. You would likely be taken aback and maybe even vexed.

Put yourself in the shoes of these prospects that’s exactly the way they feel with these unfriendly, irritating, and time-consuming forms they have to fill up on your landing page.

You will realize that your prospects are willing to provide their contact information to a chatbot without much bidding and quite naturally, through the course of conversation. The bot can prompt a visitor to keep going and reach the conversion point, in a case where the prospect tends to stall in the process of conversation.

The potential of using chatbots for your brand is huge. You can:

  • Collect information that lets you build a sales pipeline full of qualified leads
  • Offer better customer service and a superior buying experience
  • Address a pain point—which can’t be done if visitors were to just fill out a form
  • Make the sales teams understand potential customers better, by asking qualifying questions
  • Improve the sales cycle while saving the sale’s rep time—all the time, giving a more personal experience that mimics face-to-face marketing
  • Catch their attention because you say things they’re already thinking
  • Make them feel like you understand them (because you do)
  • Enhance their understanding of the value you offer. Let them understand what you’ll do for them.

That is the reason over 100,000 businesses are using them to deliver messages to consumers faster. And a step in the right direction if you want to hit the big time.

2. Prompt response to leads

Your potential or even engaged customer wants results at and as when due, which sometimes could be on the spot. Chatbots don’t eat, they don’t sleep and they don’t celebrate many holidays.

So, when you’ve got visitors crawling your service pages at very odd hours, your conversational marketing AI can provide the same consistent response in the morning, noon, or at night. The ace inbound marketing enjoys is reaching the right people, when, and how they want it.

Chatbots remove the hurdles of odd hours and time spent waiting for a salesperson to help a customer. When a chatbot asks if a lead wants to talk, it’s not interrupting or catching them at a bad time.

Rather, your brand is there to react at the exact moment they’re thinking about you. Unlike your traditional marketing forms, your chatbots can answer specific service-related questions and collect contact information for customers at the perfect time, all the time.

The round the clock working of the chatbots ensures that your sales team could wake up to an inbox full of leads. These can be from fully-converted leads that booked their own meeting through your chatbot, to incomplete leads.

Your sales team only needs to follow up on incomplete conversions or partial contact info, in an effort to simply continue a conversation that’s already in progress. When it comes to the time to set up a formal sales meeting, conversational marketing can empower your buyers to set the meeting themselves. You don’t need to spend time and resources nurturing your leads into making an appointment.

The question is not whether you need conversational marketing, it’s more on how ready you are to integrate it into your business. The more information a lead provides, the more invested they become, making them increasingly receptive to your messaging.

Photo Credit: fairfaxcounty Flickr via Compfight cc

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About John Ejiofor

John Ejiofor is a curious life-researcher, whose quest to finding answers to life's pertinent questions has led to founding Nature Torch. This blog aims to debate and explore many questions about our earth -- including those a lot of people are uncomfortable with asking. He has been published on some of the internet's most respected websites, which you can find online.
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