One of the biggest trends and buzzwords in marketing this year is conversational marketing. This is where you as a business, talk to your customers when and where it is convenient for them. It is not only a powerful tool for improving the customer’s experience but it will also help generate more sales! One of the most important parts of building customer relationships is having conversations and making time for your customers. Engaging in conversational marketing shows your audience that you care about them before they even become customers. This can be done through one-to-one interactions across many channels such as live chat, chatbots, and messaging apps.
Live Chat
Wouldn’t it be great if you were searching for a product online such as cologne and a cologne expert was there to help you find one based on certain flavour notes you like? That’s what conversational marketing does! It allows a user to search for a product on your website while also receiving the assistance they may need, without having to leave your website. Brands who do this show they aren’t just advertising products, but that they care about their customer’s needs even when they aren’t their customers yet. This allows customers to have good quality communication with people online, asking questions from wherever they choose. Live chat is becoming increasingly popular and 73% of customers say that they are happy with live chat experiences.
Chatbots
Ever wondered how ‘Sarah’ or ‘Josh’ is so quick at responding to your messages on the website you’re on? That’s because the website you’re on has likely integrated ‘Chatbots’ which uses AI to respond to your messages quickly. This is different to live chat which involves human-to-human interaction. Chatbots are run by AI in order to give your customers real-time answers to any questions they may have. This means your customers can receive assistance at any time no matter how many requests there are from other users needing assistance. The response time is also extremely quick as the answer is pre-written with software. This means you can have conversations with your customers without you even speaking to them! Chatbots are the fastest-growing brand communication channel and the majority of consumers (87.2%) that have used them have neutral or positive experiences. Chatbots have also been found to save businesses up to 30% on customer support costs. So why not use Chatbots and let ‘Sarah’ or ‘Josh’ respond to your customers’ messages instantly!
Messaging Apps
Have you ever seen a Facebook page message you on Messenger to help answer any questions you may have? This is another form of chatbots, and Facebook has over 300,000 active ones. Facebook Messenger is the second most widely used messaging platform, with over 1.3 billion users worldwide. Using Messenger as a platform for conversational marketing is extremely effective as you can connect it to your Facebook Business relatively easy. It also allows you to easily communicate with your customers who follow your Facebook page or prefer using Facebook. It’s simple to set up so it’s a great starting point if you want to get involved in conversational marketing.
Conversational marketing doesn’t just have to consist of live chats, chatbots, and messaging apps. It can also include interactive content on your social media. At Naked Marketing, we aim to create content that our customers will engage with through likes, comments or even sharing posts! For example, we created a ‘this or that’ post where our customers could guess which posts received more engagement. We encouraged customers to comment their answers and then ended the post with suggestions on the content they can use to receive more engagement themselves. This not only educates them on social media engagement but also allows them to have fun when engaging with our post!
Overall, it is clear that conversational marketing is an effective tool in order to communicate with your customers. With our current climate of working from home and working remotely, people are spending more time online. Using live chat, chatbots, or messaging apps is extremely beneficial as it allows your customers to still have that one-to-one communication experience they would get in a store. As long as you still ensure to have conversations with your customers yourself, this is a great opportunity to effectively build customer relationships, loyalty, and great consumer experiences from anywhere!
Get started with conversational marketing today! Contact our team and have a chat with us about how we can help you use conversational marketing in your marketing strategy.
