The Complete Guide To Conversational Marketing

In 2022, digital devices are the best conversationalists, and personalization is the gold standard of customer service.

Personalizing customer engagement is always top of mind for brands. Whether it’s a review website or social media platform, people expect meaningful personal connections and immediate feedback from brands. 

So it’s only natural that consumers want to feel like they are being heard and understood, and conversational marketing can provide that experience.

How To Start a Marketing Conversation

Businesses strive to capture the right moment when people are ‘on goal’ but have only partial attention to spare. Capturing such moments allows brands to deliver personalization, convenience, and quality customer support to consumers.

There is no denying that a business with more profound and holistic insights into its marketing and sales efforts can foster business growth and facilitate the transition from leads to customers. In fact, insights-driven companies show more than a 30% growth in business revenue, year over year. 

Capturing first-party data, pulling in a high volume of qualified leads, and utilizing a conversational approach across various marketing channels enable businesses to lead prospective clients through the sales funnel and close the deal.

But before the conversion takes place, brands need to understand how to initiate a marketing conversation and target specific audiences.

Use the Information You Have About Customers

When you leverage captured data and learn about your prospects, you can gain insights into which campaigns, channels, or keywords drive more leads and sales. 

For instance, by implementing conversational marketing software and a call tracking solution, you can get essential information on your target audience and clearly articulate how your product can help them reach their goals. 

Show That You Know Your Audience

Understanding customers’ pain points, needs, and strengths is crucial for the success of your campaigns and marketing personalization efforts. 

Optimizing a sales lead management process with Phonexa’s LMS Sync can help you create content that resonates with your prospects, improves brand awareness, enhances lead capturing, drives high-quality traffic, and more.

Create an Information Loop

Businesses often utilize CRM with email marketing to ensure successful conversational marketing outcomes.

If you want to leverage an email marketing channel, consider forming an information loop beginning in the subject line. This way, you can intrigue your audience enough to open your emails and read them religiously.

Identify Trends

Businesses equipped with call analytics and conversational marketing software can put customer data into perspective, compare different datasets, and identify trends or blind spots.

If you are looking to simplify the process of creating more efficient campaigns and gain access to the data-analyzing resources, this set of marketing tools can be an excellent choice for your brand.

Ultimately, implementing the right tech stack and introducing automated conversations are barely enough for brands to understand conversational marketing. 

What Is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing is a marketing method that involves having a real-time conversation with your customer about your product. But in fact, it’s so much more than that. Think about it as speaking to your customer instead of speaking at him.

As an engagement tactic, it can help you construct intelligent response flows, trigger dialogue-driven activities, and figure out the best way to communicate with consumers to yield the best possible results. 

Let’s explore how using a conversational marketing platform and developing a strategy can move the needle in your sales and marketing goals.

What Is a Conversational Marketing Platform?

Since this method is consumer-driven, customers hold all the power. It’s rooted in technology that primarily uses artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots. Conversational marketing platforms enable businesses to use a personalized approach based on customers’ needs and wants and allow for a 1:1 interaction.

How To Create a Successful Conversational Marketing Strategy

A successful conversational strategy can help businesses build long-term customer relationships and create authentic experiences via chatbots, messaging apps, live chat, etc. It is a relatively new way of using conversations to move consumers down the sales funnel and prevent them from feeling lost.

Adding live chat is one of the ways to appeal to prospects and customers and ensure that your business is accessible. In fact, people are 53% more likely to purchase from companies using live chat.

Brands need to develop products and strategies with the customer experience in mind. It means that you must focus on the following factors when creating your strategy:

• When mapping out the user journey, ensure you engage visitors on multiple channels.
• Implement solutions that will help you understand your audience better, identify trends, and create response flows.
• Utilize IVR and other tools to direct interested website visitors and callers to specific departments or business representatives.
• Refine the customer journey by tracking, customizing, optimizing, and improving the lead flow and customer engagement.

A successful strategy depends on fast and reliable access to customer data, including the communication history and detailed customer information. For companies looking to implement conversational strategies, it’s crucial to capture, store, and organize data. 

With the help of marketing automation solutions and CRM, brands can create more seamless interactions with the audience, elevate customer experience, and provide only high-quality customer support.

Did you miss our 10-minute guide on call tracking and conversation intelligence? Download it here to learn more about how businesses are leveraging call tracking and conversation intelligence technology to launch and manage winning call campaigns for your organization.

Automation in Conversational Marketing Strategy

Disruptive conversational marketing technologies paired with automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can add timeliness and significance to marketing conversations. For that reason, more and more businesses are adopting these technologies.

This trend became particularly notable during the COVID-19 pandemic when multiple companies shifted their resources to developing customer-centric approaches and solutions.

Source: CMSWire

As you can see, the top result indicates the importance of digital interface in customer communication. In this case, a digital interface is simply a medium through which people interact with brands.

The second noteworthy result indicates the growing need to invest in automation technologies because of their role in virtual communications with consumers. These technologies are not necessarily limited to chatbots and messaging apps. They can include various solutions like user behavior recording, call tracking software, or email marketing. 

Let’s take a closer look at the most popular solutions and technologies used in conversational strategies.

Chatbots

Today, business does not happen in a single time zone or city. Instead, it happens every minute in multiple locations. For that reason, companies use chatbots to keep up with the volume of online conversations and provide round-the-clock customer support.

Here’s how chatbots can help businesses communicate with the target audience:

• Promote specific products and content
• Provide answers to FAQs
• Collect customer feedback

Social Media

Conversations occur daily through Instagram, Facebook Messenger, TikTok, and other social media platforms. Creating business profiles is one of the ways to give customers a place to be heard and address their questions about your product or service. 

Asking the audience to contribute their content, running contests, and asking questions to increase engagement are just some tactics businesses use to connect with customers and build trust.

Call Marketing

A phone call is not only one of the most reliable data sources but also a critical aspect of the conversion journey. Around 65% of consumers would instead contact a business by making a phone call. It’s only natural since people are extensively accustomed to the acoustic method of interaction.

Businesses often utilize call intelligence solutions like Phonexa’s Call Logic to track call campaigns with a dedicated phone number, acquire detailed attribution on the call traffic, and adjust their conversational strategies. 

On top of that, brands can also use an IVR tool and conversational marketing analytics to fine-tune their sales funnels, create customizable journeys, and obtain critical information from clients.

Conversational Marketing Examples

Let’s look at a couple of examples illustrating how some of the well-known brands run conversational campaigns.

Sephora

As a globally renowned retailer of beauty products, Sephora runs numerous effective conversational campaigns. For example, the company used two Facebook Messenger bots offering appointment booking, makeovers, shade matching, and other services.

Later, the company started using another chatbot that offered makeup tips, gathered customer information, and redirected users to the company website. Here’s what it looks like:

Source: Chatbot Guide

Levi’s

Many customers know Levi’s brand is about creating “clothes built to endure anything.” The company is determined to deliver customer service round the clock and provide them access to product information.

The company initially used a Virtual Assistant chatbot but then switched to the web-based bot that supports online chats with customers and provides answers to frequently asked questions.

Source: Levi’s

Today, the brand’s conversational strategy mainly incorporates social media and email marketing channels to lead customers to sales through recommended purchases and tailored offerings.

Benefits of Conversational Marketing

Delivering personalized digital experiences and extending them throughout the user journey and across marketing channels is the primary goal of a successful conversational strategy. 

Every conversation with a brand matters precisely what conversational marketing helps businesses realize and leverage. Now that we’ve covered the basics of conversational marketing, let’s recap all the benefits this method offers to brands.

Here are some of the customer service aspects a successful conversational marketing strategy impacts the most:

• Customer satisfaction through personalized digital experiences and conversations
• Improved customer engagement, loyalty, and trust
• Brand awareness and differentiation
• Access to valuable customer data and insights on active marketing campaigns
• Campaign scalability and increased conversion rates
• Refined customer journey

The Future of Conversational Marketing

While it is still a mystery what 2023 has in store for brands, customer-centricity is here to stay. Today, one-on-one interactions and conversational marketing are the leading approaches to customer retention, acquisition, and engagement. 

The probable development path of conversational marketing is the introduction of conversational AI and new automated messaging spaces. This way, businesses will stay ahead of the competition and leverage brand-specific conversational tools to create unmatched customer experiences.

Schedule a consultation with one of Phonexa’s marketing automation experts to learn how call and conversation intelligence solutions can help your business leverage customer insights and reach maximum profitability.