Why conversational marketing is essential to your Business?
Marketing is a dynamic discipline that has evolved and continues to evolve over the years. Traditional marketing is mostly used to talk about offline advertising strategies such as publishing in newspapers, sending emails or covering street walls with posters. Today, in the age of ultra-connectivity on the Internet, marketing has evolved and new types of marketing have appeared. Companies must think about implementing conversational marketing in their business to create human bonds with their customers.
What is conversational marketing?
With the growth of the Internet, marketing has begun to integrate more and more digital tools into its processes, creating or reinforcing various marketing strategies such as viral marketing, SEO or relationship marketing. By providing customers with information tailored to their needs through personalized advertising. Relationship marketing promotes customer engagement and loyalty.
Conversational marketing is a form of relational and digital marketing. It allows companies to build stronger and long-lasting relationships with their customers through automated, real-time conversations on social media or the company's website. E-mail campaigns, FAQs, forms and chatbots are perfect examples of conversational marketing tools. In this article, we will focus more specifically on chatbots and voicebots.
A chatbot is a conversational robot specifically programmed to instantly answer questions from its users. Whether it is designed to help customers get brand information, find the perfect product, or even buy it directly, a chatbot promotes customer engagement and helps generate leads and increase customer relationships.
What are the pillars of conversational marketing?
Conversational marketing can take multiple forms. It can be an emailing campaign, an FAQ, a machine or even a chatbot. However, conversational marketing is originally based on three pillars without which it would not exist nor could it be incorporated into a business’s marketing strategy.
1. Multiple channels of communication
First of all, if marketing is crucial for a company to gain in visibility, it is also important to establish a dialogue between the business, the leads and the customers. These conversations happen by email, by phone, and more recently via a plethora of different tools such as social media, apps, and websites. Ideta allows anyone to create chatbots or voicebots and to deploy them on multiple communication channels. By being present on various communication channels, companies can have an impact and attract people from multiple age group and background.
2. Instantaneity and interactivity
Instantaneity and interactivity are also cornerstones of an effective conversational marketing strategy. With the development of internet and instant messaging, the demand for interactive services and spontaneous conversations has become more and more widespread. Customers like to get precise information quickly and it has become a requirement in order for businesses to grow customer relationships.
3. The evolution of new technologies
The evolution of new technologies also greatly participated in the emergence and development of conversational marketing. Without the invention of new technologies and new ways of communicating (such as emails, text messages, social media, etc.), conversational marketing would not exist or would at least not be as widespread. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) started making conversational marketing very complex. One had to know programming in order to be able to create chatbots and voicebots. However, it become possible to create chatbots and voicebots without coding. With Ideta’s software, creating a chatbot is very easy and anyone can do it! Future evolutions in the sector of new technologies will most certainly develop conversational marketing and make it even more widespread.
Why take the plunge?
In an increasingly connected and digitized world, a strong conversational marketing strategy is essential for companies to remain competitive. Whether generating new leads, meeting customer needs and expectations, or strengthening customer engagement, conversational marketing, especially chatbots, is rapidly becoming a key component of any marketing strategy.
1 - Traditional marketing works poorly
For a large majority of people, traditional marketing is seen as intrusive with a very negative image, in particular, interruption marketing which is very intrusive. It cuts off our occupation to present an advertising message. Advertising is then not experienced as useful, as a value proposition responding to a need, but as a constraint. Having an advertisement for my cat's litter box when I look at cooking recipes, it kinda breaks everything :)
Moreover, we are assailed by images, promises, advertisements on various supports and more and more digital. This marketing is nothing but the reflection of our society where abundance reigns. An abundance of products, an abundance of content, an abundance of media reactions, hyper reactivity...
Companies are forced to differentiate themselves and must be creative. They are constantly seeking to reinvent their marketing strategy while targeting more channels.
The observation is more and more scathing... the customer feels oppressed, spied on, and little listened to.
2 - Advertising, must be personalized and consented by the client.
To regain attractiveness, marketing must put the customer's need at the center of the equation. The customer must feel loved, listened to and understood.
Ideally, the consumer should have solicited its content, which would be fully personalized. Beforehand, he would therefore have given his consent to receive a certain type of advertising. This is generally referred to as permission marketing.
The user's full attention is given to this type of marketing, which is voluntary. They receive personalized offers that suit them.
3 - Conversation allows to interact and understand the customer's immediate need.
Most methods of customizing content are not permissive. They are based on the use of cookies, trackers that monitor users' browsing habits.
With the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), companies using these methods will have to reinvent themselves. The implicit consent (opt-out) of cookies is no longer sufficient. The simple visit to a site does not count as consent. A clear consent is required that can be interrupted at any time.
Conversation is one way to address this issue. Each response from the consumer is a mark of consent in the exchange of data. Each message must therefore be relevant enough to push the consumer to interact again.
In addition, the communication allows to know the real tastes of the user at the moment. The recommendations are therefore not based on past, obsolete data but on current and live data.
4 - Communication is a means of exchanging data while building a climate of trust and proximity.
Humans differ from many animals by their social sense and their need to communicate. With the arrival of digital technology, we have tended to forget this key element.
The experienced salesperson knows that the exchange and understanding of the customer's needs will allow them to establish a climate of trust conducive to making a sale.
Marketing must become conversational again.
The consumer is invited to provide data to make the conversation more relevant with more value in the content. Exchanges are increasingly individualized and relevant.
If the conversation is well constructed, the user's trust only grows and their tacit agreement to give personal information as well. A well-constructed one-to-one relationship can lead to a transaction.
5 - Communication helps build a strong brand ambassador community.
Communication with a participative marketing strategy allows to create a community that wants to express itself and share common values.
For the brand it is a way to :
- Know what the community thinks about its products and more globally about its company. This is essential to understand consumer expectations.
- Respond in real time to their requests, expectations and to create a proximity, a climate of trust. The brand image is all the better for it.
- Build a group with a strong sense of belonging. The brand and the community are in the same boat. Both have a sense of loyalty. Some fan communities go so far as to tattoo the brand logo to prove they belong to the brand.
- Develop sharing and word of mouth. The community becomes an ambassador for the brand.
6 - Conversational marketing strengthen customer engagement
By implementing real-time automated chatbots on their various communication channels, businesses can significantly strengthen customer engagement. When checking the business’s website or social media, customers have access to the chatbot and can use it for all their queries. As chatbots give instant answers, customers are more tempted to start a conversation with them than to send an email to customer service which will take several hours or days to answer. Customers also like to play around with the chatbot, and you can give a real personality to your conversational chatbot that really reflect the personality of your brand.
Some chatbots even go viral, like Akinator. Akinator is a fun chatbot created in 2007, with the only goal of entertaining you. It's a chatbot that asks you questions and through your answers he can guess what you are thinking about, this viral chatbot is now accessible on Google Home and it is still really popular.
7- It allow to easily and quickly inform customers
Implementing a conversational marketing strategy into your business will help you easily and quickly give information to your customers. Chatbots and voicebots are very powerful. Unlike livechats which are non-automated chats with a human interlocutor, chatbots are programmed to instantly and automatically be able to answer almost every questions customers may have. They are trained to be as humanlike as possible and to know how to help customers in multiple use cases: whether it is to simply give an information or help customers find a product.
8 - Chatbots can increase your sales by generating new leads
Thanks to the easy and interactive access to information or help for customers given by tools like chatbots, conversational marketing becomes a real strategy to increase a business’s sales. Indeed, by growing and developing customer relationships throughout real-time, interactive and automated conversations, a business can truly boost its sales. Using conversational marketing is thus a great way to make your business thrive.
How to implement a conversational marketing strategy into your business?
1. With Ideta’s chatbots
One easy way to implement a conversational marketing strategy into your business would be to create and then deploy a chatbot or voicebot on all your communication channels. One could think that they should know the basics of programming in order to create a chatbot, however, with Ideta, anyone can build a chatbot or voicebot without writing a single line of code. With Ideta’s software, it is now possible to create and deploy conversational chatbots without coding by following four very simple steps.
2. By keeping an eye on your KPIs
In order to know if your conversational marketing chatbot strategy is efficient, it is important to keep an eye on several Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). First of all, the number of times customers will ask the chatbot to be redirected to a human interlocutor can showcase the capability of the chatbot to correctly and accurately answer users’ questions. Moreover, it is important to analyse the response times as well as the number of failures to answer customers’ queries. Sending customers a satisfaction survey once the chatbot has given them an answer or solution can be a great way to know if customers are happy with the way their query was handled or if you need to review your chatbot.
Conclusion
In conclusion, conversational marketing is a way to acquire, animate and manage communities. It helps create a climate of trust conducive to sales. Moreover, interaction allows to obtain clean, non-obsolete data while respecting everyone's rights. With the evolution of new technologies and customers’ wish to be able to obtain information through real-time chat on multiple communication channels, conversational marketing is becoming a key element of businesses’ marketing strategy. Chatbots are a great way to put in place a conversational marketing strategy as they can be built by anyone and deployed on a plethora of platforms.
