What is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing is a new marketing tool used by businesses to improve user experience and achieving more sales. It is becoming increasingly popular since businesses are looking to cut costs and build strong relationships with the audience from the beginning. It is a technique with no-strings-attached human conversation. With its popularity on the rise, it is only right that we dive deeper into conversational marketing and what the future holds for the same. 

What is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational Marketing is the process of interacting with customers via dialogue-driven activities. Contrary to one-way brand communication, it allows businesses to focus on discussions and interactions with the customer, making it a two-way street. 

Sales and marketing professionals are always busy trying to beat the algorithms and drive traffic and revenue. As a result, it becomes almost impossible for them to cater to each customer individually on a one-on-one basis. With that being said, conversational marketing has emerged as a successful tool for sales and marketing worldwide over the past few years. 

Today, customers do not have to wait for hours to get a reply. With the help of chatbots and artificial intelligence, businesses have developed the latest conversational marketing techniques that blur the lines between human-to-human and human-to-computer conversations.

Latest Conversational Marketing Trends

Messaging Platforms

Messaging platforms are playing a huge role in promoting conversational marketing. It has become as easy and simple as chatting with a friend. For instance, WhatsApp allows businesses to create business accounts to handle customers. It is estimated that Apple handles around 40 billion iMessage notifications per day.

The combination of messaging platforms and chatbots encourages customers to put up their queries on a day-to-day basis with the expectation of receiving a quick reply. As a result, the year 2022 is supposed to be a big one for conversational messaging platforms since the conversational advertisement is on the rise. 

More Businesses Will Adopt Chatbots

Chatbots are proven to be useful when it comes to squeezing Return on Investment from your marketing efforts. The purpose of chatbots is to turn anonymous traffic into potential leads and they have been serving the purpose right. Chatbots increase the interest of the customers leading to cultivating customer and brand relationships. 

In the future, chatbots will play a significant role in converting more visitors into potential leads. Perhaps a major reason behind businesses betting on chatbots is that they are available round the clock. So, while you rest at night, your chatbot will communicate with the customer and answer basic questions so that you can follow the lead as soon as you wake up. 

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence has come a long way in analyzing customer behaviors and search patterns. Countries like Russia, China, and the United States are working 24/7 to deploy artificial intelligence in almost every sector especially technology and vehicle manufacturing.

In the coming years, AI-backed conversational marketing will prove to be a driving force for customer acquisition and retention in many businesses. 

More Focus on Customer Data

Conventional marketing techniques have been using a formulaic question-and-answer scenario for a very long time. However, as time passed, such techniques turned into a failure and often lack the ability to solve the problems of customers at hand. 

Conversational AI in that respect can help businesses improve their overall engagement process and collect basic data to assist in future interactions. For instance, a chatbot for an airline can help customers find hotels and transportation while traveling and even provide suggestions for future travel. 

Growing Demand for Voice-Driven Interfaces

Alexa and Siri have taken the world by storm over the last couple of years. What many perceived as a thing of the future, now exists in almost every household and apartment. The demand for voice-driven interfaces is experiencing an ever-increasing trend with no signs of slowing down.  

While traditional text-based chatbots continue to work for many businesses out there but voice-enabled chatbots will soon become the trend. Instead of typing your question, you will simply ask the same question verbally. 

Benefits of Chatbot and Conversational Marketing

Engage, Qualify, and Generate More Leads

Perhaps the biggest advantage of using chatbots is that it allows businesses to convert leads, close sales, and generate more leads without increasing the headcount. Otherwise, businesses relied on hiring experts to reach out to customers in an attempt to close more deals. This increases operational costs along with cost per lead. 

Understanding and Profiling Customers

Devising new marketing strategies alone is not enough. Businesses have to focus on ROI as well. If the marketing strategies of a business are not offering any returns, there is no point in sticking to them. With chatbots, businesses can easily collect vast amounts of data to create customer profiles without human intervention. 

Once the customer profiles have been created, brands can effectively segment their audience and create marketing strategies accordingly. As a result, the Return on Investment and overall conversion rates can be improved.

Provide Personalized and Improved Customer Experiences

As mentioned earlier, each customer wants a unique experience. Without the use of conversational marketing and chatbots, it seems fairly impossible since businesses cannot hire enough personnel to cater to each individual. Therefore, chatbots can assist customers in making a buying decision just as humans do when customers walk inside a store. 

Providing Insights and Feedback on Customer Interactions

Chatbots possess the ability to intelligently profile the customers and gather both qualitative and quantitative insights from them. This enables the businesses to view their products and website designs from the customer’s perspective. 

The feedback received will allow businesses to tweak their products and services accordingly since they are aware of the fact that covering the gaps will lead to more customers. In addition to that, chatbots can also inform the customers about upcoming products, upgrades, policies, or anything else that interests them. 

Final Word

Looking beyond 2021, it is important that businesses incorporate conversational marketing systems to provide an unparalleled personalized experience to every customer. Considering the competition and the pace at which new marketing strategies are being introduced, it is high time that the businesses offer what the customers expect and demand. 

With that said, Chatbots combined with Artificial Intelligence will surely pave the way for human-like machine interactions attending to millions of customers worldwide.