November 8, 2024
Conversational marketing – turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers
Most brands realize that nowadays communication should be built around the client and businesses do everything to offer customers an effective solution to the problem as quickly as possible and make communication as comfortable as possible for them. And consumers value such an approach, the statistics proves it – 72% of B2B customers expect a deep understanding of their needs, reflected through personalized experiences (Salesforce) and 62% of customers expect companies to adapt based on their actions and behaviors (Salesforce).
The above can be reached only by a modern personalized approach based on chatting on the website or messaging – conversational marketing. Read our article and learn what conversational marketing means, its features and benefits for your products and services promotion and brand development.
Conversational and traditional marketing overview
The meaning of conversational marketing goes from the name itself, – a solution establishing two-way interactions between businesses and their customers, and including such tools as mobile messaging and artificial intelligence. Brands communicate with target audience via digital messaging channels to promote their products and services, learn consumers’ needs and create better engagement and satisfaction, and boost business profitability. Why is it so effective? The key factor here is conversational marketing features enabling better targeted and data-driven customer communication campaigns. It is real-time, personalized, engaging, flexible, scalable and tracked.
Traditional marketing is any promotional material that appears offline. Businesses usually place these marketing materials in places where their audience is more likely to see or hear them. Examples of traditional marketing include radio, TV and newspaper advertisements, billboards, and direct mail campaigns. The main power of traditional marketing lies in the possibility of personal interaction and the ability to create an emotional connection with the audience. It is also easily perceived as traditional channels are often treated as more reliable and location targeted, especially effective for reaching local customers.
Why conversational marketing plays the main role in the modern market
First of all, because brands can actively utilize the above mentioned powerful features to conduct a variety of activities and reach plenty of goals. The main worth of mentioning are:
- Promote products or services
- Send reminders, notifications and alerts
- Authorize access
- Establish automated customers’ support
- Collect customers’ and market data
- Accumulate consumers’ feedback regarding products and services
- Track and respond customer service issues
- Automate monitoring
- Troubleshoot the gaps of marketing campaigns and business strategy on the whole
It’s hard to imagine that businesses tried to arrange at least some of the above activities before conversational marketing spread only with the help of traditional marketing.
Wide application area is already a huge benefit of conversational approach to marketing. But there are far more advantages of such business communication.
How conversational marketing benefits your business
Conversational marketing is a cooperation story – listening and reacting relatively. And only such an approach will benefit your company a lot by:
- Accurate and detailed customers’ data. You can gather information about clients’ tastes, preferences, interests, shopping behavior, etc. This data helps to personalize the customers’ experience.
- Alive leads. The tool and technologies enable to collect only active and hot leads and manage them efficiently.
- Less communication distractions. Real-time and instant communication easy to be tracked ensures no disruptions and delays in customers’ interactions.
- Improved customers’ engagement. Timely and personalized 2-way communication initiates a positive interactive environment comfortable for customers to engage.
- Trust, loyalty and satisfaction. As per the 1st item in this list, the approach enables to collect customers’ data, and this knowledge in its turn makes conversations that are targeted and personalized. It boosts customers’ loyalty since it makes the buyers feel that you know and value them.
- Boosted conversion. Real-time communication ensures that customers get exactly the information they and when they need it in order to make a decision to purchase.
- Short and convenient purchasing procedure. The interaction with the audience through different channels significantly shortens the sales process. You reduce the communication and engagement times, and directly accompany your customers to purchase without wasting time and effort.
- Cut costs. Automated customer communication enables better allocation of human resources and costs reduction.
- Increased sales. Logical result taking into consideration all the above fulfilled successfully.
How to do it properly and make it work?
All points of conversational marketing you discovered from this article sound impressive and inspiring, but what are the exact instruments and work principles of it?
The major instruments are instant messengers and chatbots. These tools are based on customer oriented working principles:
- possibility to message at a convenient time for the audience
- prompt interaction
- 24/7 availability
- messaging via customers’ preferred channels
- consideration the previous context
ImLink ensures your messaging effectiveness via well established communication with your clients across a range of most popular messaging channels:
From our blog you can get comprehensive information regarding each channel application, features and benefits.
Prior to the channel selection we offer our customers a comprehensive consultation for maximum customization according to your business goals, and free of charge trial to make sure the chosen solution provides desired results.
Please complete the form on our website. Our manager will contact you and offer the options for cooperation and connection.