Marketing is an ever-changing field. Keeping up with both technological and societal changes requires constant adjustment. Conventional or traditional marketing techniques generally involve ‘spray and pray’ methods of advertising: TV ads, newspaper ads, posters, flyers, and so on.
It wasn’t possible until the age of the internet to target your marketing and optimize your audience. Marketing has gone from being a completely impersonal, one size fits all approach to creating an actual connection with customers. Customers today are most happy when being treated as people.
Marketing should therefore be focused on creating a genuine bond between you and your customers. Standing out from the crowd in today’s hyper-competitive market often requires not just acknowledging the customer as a person, but in showing the human side of your own company and team. This approach is known as conversational marketing.
What Is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is digital marketing aimed at building relationships, trust, and natural communication with customers one-on-one. This is done primarily through live chat but also through phone or in-person conversations at your brick-and-mortar if you have one.
To a lesser extent, email marketing that initiates conversations can also be considered part of your conversational marketing in the sense it can be shaped to start conversations.
The explosive growth of the internet has spurred the creation of many different marketing tools and strategies. Most are more targeted than the old, traditional forms of marketing, but some such as viral marketing are very much a shot in the dark.
Conversational marketing leads to better relationships with customers. People who have conversations with real people at your company are more likely to remember and use your company when the opportunity arises in the future.
Why Is Conversational Marketing Important?
As soon as the customer lands on your website, conversational marketing can go into effect. Many websites have live chat or chatbot widgets that deploy almost immediately, similar to the way that BirdSeed’s Live Chat and Knowledge Library tools are immediately available when the landing page loads.
Google gave rise to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry and made precise audience targeting much more effective. But proper SEO brings potential customers to your website and that’s all; once Google and your SEO have brought the visitor to your website, the burden is on you to convert that visitor to a customer. Conversational marketing increases customer connection, leading to increased conversions and customer retention.
What Are The Critical Aspects Of Conversational Marketing?
Any digital marketing aimed at building relationships, trust, and natural communication with customers one-on-one can be considered conversational marketing. There are distinguishing factors between conversational marketing and more traditional forms of marketing:
Providing Multiple Avenues For Communication
For effective conversational marketing, it’s important to offer multiple channels for your potential customers can contact you. This isn’t a traditional marketing style of one size fits all; it’s much more personalized and requires that you offer the option that your customer is looking for.
Live chat is king in the arena of conversational marketing because of the ease of deployment and convenience for the customer.
Phone conversations are indispensable for many industries that need customization, high levels of detail, or an extra-personal touch.
Face-to-face conversations in your physical location, if you have one, or video conferencing are also important options to have available.
Instant, Interactive, Engaging
An important aspect of conversational marketing is the capability of instant, real-time, one-on-one engagement with your customer. Conversations give your customers immediate answers to their questions and better user experiences.
Conversations are also the quickest way to convey information back and forth and ensure the least amount of misunderstanding since both sides can easily express any confusion and clarify their meaning.
Incorporating Effective New Technologies
Without the completely new technologies that have been created in recent years, conversational marketing would have remained something that was only possible face-to-face and over the phone.
Live chat has quickly become the choice for many companies seeking more personal interactions and engagement with their customers. Chatbots are another quickly-growing area of development and touted by many as conversational marketing, though we disagree. It’s not possible to have a conversation with a chatbot, and customers are very easily frustrated and driven away by automated, irrelevant responses to their questions.
Though AI is becoming increasingly complex, it is not something that can rival a person-to-person connection. Chatbots are best suited as substitutes for FAQs. BirdSeed instead offers the Knowledge Library tool for instant and easy access to answers while providing the same instant access to Live Chat if the customer has specific needs that can’t be resolved by an FAQ.
Stay Competitive With Conversational Marketing
The internet has opened the field of competition to a degree that has never been seen before. Your business could be competing with a company on the other side of the country or the globe depending on your industry.
Competing on customer connection and experience helps maintain your competitiveness in our competitive world since improving those areas decreases customer churn. Companies that compete only on price, shipping speed, etc will struggle endlessly with logistics and reducing prices when possibly all their customers want is connection and a better experience.
Conventional Marketing Vs Conversational Marketing
Conventional or traditional marketing relies on spreading your message to as many people as possible. With audiences available instantly all over the globe, the spread of an advertising message today is less relevant than the targeting. Best practices for marketing today always involve optimizing your targeting to reach the most relevant audience who are the most likely people to convert.
Many companies have taken the vast power of targeting tools available since the growth of the internet and abused that power. Targeting, tracking, and observing user behavior has been taken to extremes by many companies, and overly aggressive marketing has turned some users off from advertisements altogether.
Customize Marketing & Ads For Each Client
This highlights the importance of conversational marketing. Potential customers who are frustrated by aggressive tracking and targeting may only be accessible via conversational marketing techniques.
In marketing today it is important to make your advertisements focused on what the customer needs. If you provide the satisfaction of their need and create a personal connection with them as well, you can easily gain a loyal, returning customer who will use your website again and again.
There is no substitute for actually interacting, engaging, and getting to know the customer on a personal level. It may even be required to convert users who are jaded by companies constantly competing for their money with no concern for them as people.
The Best Communication Is Conversation
Conversations are how humans were designed to communicate. We went from spoken language to inventing writing, but the most natural form of communication is still a conversation.
And conversation remains the most natural form of communication. Conversation creates the strongest emotional connection for your customer and improves their user experience. A chatbot can’t create an emotional connection between your company and your customer. You literally need a personal touch by providing human-to-human engagement.
Genuine Interaction & Full Understanding
Conversations are ideal when getting to know what a customer needs. Every first-time customer is essentially a stranger until you get to know them. Learning about someone is easiest when you have one-on-one, instant communication between a company representative and the customer.
It allows for quick communication of information, with the most opportunity for clarifying any misunderstandings. Customers will be reassured that you listened to and understood their needs because you did actually take the time to listen.
Live chat and phone call requests place the customer in control of any interactions. Encouraging and incentivizing the customer to engage with you helps them start the conversation. That leaves the customer control of starting the interaction and gains ‘buy-in’ because the customer has requested a conversation and given you permission to respond to them.
Building Trust Enhances Communication
Anyone who has successfully held a sales role at a company knows how essential it is to build a relationship with a customer. Not only do you want to get to know the customer, you want share information about yourself.
It isn’t a matter of rushing them through a transaction. Considering the interaction as a conversation first, transaction second helps to create an atmosphere of trust with the potential customer. You can learn more about what they need and establish an emotional connection with them.
Allowing the customer to get to know you encourages them to share information you need to make a sale.
Involve Your Customers
Building an emotional connection with your customers encourages them to become ambassadors of your brand. Enhancing their user experience with personal connection will increase the odds your customers will recommend your products and services by word of mouth to their own circle of friends and acquaintances.
This strategy doesn’t just encourage customers to spread the news about your excellent products or services, it also increases the likelihood of your customers forming groups and talking about your products among themselves.
Satisfied customers are also more likely to share your products on social media. You can also give coupons or other incentives for your customers to share your products or leave reviews.
Raising engagement is a great way to get people involved and participating with your brand.
Increase Engagement
Implementing Live Chat side by side with your other BirdSeed tools supplies your customers with easily accessible engagement opportunities. The Live Chat tool encourages engagement and is always immediately available to potential customers by becoming a paid subscriber.
You can pair the Live Chat tool right next to Knowledge Libraries containing FAQs, and a Call Request option, and send instant video responses to a customer using Live Chat that start conversations and boost your website engagement.
Direct Conversion Tools Increase Engagement, Leads, & Revenue
When a customer is engaged through Live Chat and has their engagement, connective, or informational needs met, they are much more likely to convert and become a paying customer. Live Chat is easily one of the best ways to engage your customer and execute your conversational marketing strategy simultaneously. More conversions means more revenue.
BirdSeed also offers direct conversion tools for lead generation such as Email Capture, filling out a Contact Form, and Scheduling a Meeting. These tools provide your customer with options to begin the next steps with your company and trust you with their time and contact information. Allowing multiple ways to contact your company isn’t always necessary. But it can capture more visitors if they are (for example) willing to schedule a meeting, but not to fill out a form.
Implementing Live Chat
If you haven’t signed up for BirdSeed already, you can get started and have your Live Chat tool up and running in as little as 15 minutes!
Implementing the Live Chat tool on your website is fast & simple:
And done! You’re ready to Live Chat with customers!
Connecting & Engaging With BirdSeed
BirdSeed’s full-featured Live Chat, including instant video responses, and Call Request tools encourage and provide the conversational marketing your company can use to boost your customer satisfaction and grow your revenue.
All of BirdSeed’s tools were designed to increase visitor engagement and grow your revenue. With a suite of 12 powerful website engagement tools, you can find the winning combination of tools to boost engagement for your website and deploy it in minutes.
Use our All Access or All Access Pro plans to engage with all your visitors, all the time. Get started with BirdSeed today and engage your customers in ways that have never been possible before.
12 Powerful Tools
With 12 tools in one, the combinations and options to use BirdSeed are limitless.
See the full list of tools or click on one of the features below to learn more:
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