Conversational Marketing 101: Everything You Need to Know

As personalisation remains the gold standard in customer service, digital devices are ideal for conversationalists.

Brands always prioritise personalising customer interactions. Whether it’s a review site or a social media platform, individuals expect influential personal connections and prompt feedback from brands.

Naturally, consumers want to feel heard and understood, and conversational marketing can deliver that experience.

Initiating a Marketing Conversation

Businesses aim to seize the moment when people are ‘on goal’ but only have partial attention. Capturing these moments allows brands to provide personalisation, convenience, and quality customer support to consumers.

It’s undisputable that a business with deep and comprehensive insights into its marketing and sales efforts can foster growth and facilitate the conversion of leads into customers. Insights-driven companies experience over 30% revenue growth year over year.

Capturing first-party data, attracting a high volume of qualified leads, and employing a conversational approach across various marketing channels enable businesses to guide prospective clients through the sales funnel and close deals.

However, before conversions can occur, brands must understand how to initiate marketing conversations and target specific audiences.

Utilise Customer Information

By making use of the data you’ve collected, you can learn which campaigns, channels, or keywords are generating the most leads and sales. For instance, you can gather vital information about your target audience and illustrate how your product can help them achieve their objectives by implementing conversational marketing software and call tracking solutions.

Demonstrate Your Understanding of Your Audience

Grasping your customers’ challenges, needs, and strengths is essential for successful campaigns and personalised marketing efforts.

Optimising your sales lead management process with Phonexa’s LMS Sync can assist you in creating content that resonates with your audience, boosts brand awareness, improves lead capture, and drives high-quality traffic.

Book a demo or take a product tour to learn more about Phonexa’s single operating solution for partner and performance marketing.

Establish an Information Loop

Businesses often use email marketing to ensure successful conversational marketing outcomes.

If you want to leverage email marketing, consider creating an information loop starting with the subject line. This approach can intrigue your audience enough to open and consistently read your emails.

Identify Trends

With call analytics and conversational marketing software, businesses can contextualise customer data, compare various datasets, and identify trends or blind spots. If you’re looking to streamline the creation of more effective campaigns and access data-analysis resources, these marketing tools are ideal for your brand.

Ultimately, the right technological setup and the introduction of automated conversations are just the starting points for brands to grasp conversational marketing. A successful strategy hinges on prompt and reliable access to customer data, including communication history and detailed customer profiles. For companies aiming to implement conversational strategies, capturing, storing, and organising data effectively is crucial.

Defining Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing involves having real-time conversations with your customers about your product. However, it’s much more than that. Think of it as speaking with your customer rather than at them.

As an engagement tactic, it helps you construct intelligent response flows, trigger dialogue-driven activities, and determine the best communication methods with consumers to achieve desired results.

Let’s delve into how using a conversational marketing platform and developing a strategy can help you achieve your sales and marketing goals.

What Is a Conversational Marketing Platform?

In this consumer-centric method, customers wield the power. It leverages technology, primarily artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots. Conversational marketing platforms allow businesses to adopt a personalised approach tailored to customers’ needs and preferences, facilitating one-to-one interactions.

Crafting a Successful Conversational Marketing Strategy

A well-executed conversational strategy can help businesses forge long-term customer relationships and create authentic experiences through chatbots, messaging apps, live chat, and more. This innovative approach guides consumers through the sales funnel, ensuring they feel supported and understood.

Integrating live chat is one way to attract prospects and customers, ensuring your business remains accessible. Studies show that people are 53% more likely to purchase from companies that use live chat.

When developing products and strategies, brands must prioritise the customer experience. Consider the following factors when formulating your strategy:

• Engage visitors across multiple channels when mapping out the user journey.
• Implement solutions to better understand your audience, identify trends, and create response flows.
• Use IVR and other tools to direct interested website visitors and callers to specific representatives.
• Refine the customer journey by tracking, customising, optimising, and improving lead flow and customer engagement.

A successful strategy relies on quick and reliable access to customer data, including communication history and detailed customer information. To implement effective conversational strategies, it’s essential to capture, store, and organise data effectively.

With marketing automation solutions and CRM systems, brands can create more seamless interactions with their audience, elevate the customer experience, and provide high-level customer support.

Missed our 10-minute guide on call tracking and conversation intelligence? Download it here to learn how businesses utilise these technologies to launch and manage successful call campaigns for your organisation.

Leveraging Automation as Part of Your Conversational Marketing Strategy

Innovative conversational marketing technologies, coupled with automation and artificial intelligence (AI), can enhance the timeliness and relevance of marketing conversations. Consequently, more businesses are embracing these technologies.

The primary outcome highlights the importance of digital interfaces in customer communication. Here, a digital interface is simply a medium for interaction between people and brands.

Another key outcome emphasises the increasing need to invest in automation technologies, as its become an essesntial component in virtual consumer communications. These technologies are not limited to chatbots and messaging apps but also include user behaviour recording, call tracking software, and email marketing.

Popular Solutions and Technologies in Conversational Strategies

Chatbots

Business operations now span multiple time zones and locations, happening every minute around the globe. Companies are increasingly using chatbots to manage the volume of online conversations and provide 24/7 customer support.

Here’s how chatbots can assist businesses in communicating with their target audience:

• Promote specific products and content
• Offer answers to frequently asked questions
• Obtain customer feedback

Social Media

Every day, conversations take place on platforms like Instagram, Facebook Messenger, TikTok, and others. Establishing business profiles on these platforms gives customers a place to express themselves and ask questions about your products or services.

To boost engagement, businesses often ask their audience to share content, run contests, and pose questions. These tactics help build trust and foster connections with customers.

Call Marketing

A phone call remains one of the most reliable sources of data and a crucial part of the conversion journey. Approximately 65% of consumers prefer contacting a business by phone. This preference is natural as people are very accustomed to auditory interactions.

Companies often employ call intelligence solutions like Phonexa’s Call Logic to track call campaigns using dedicated phone numbers, gain detailed attribution on call traffic, and adjust their conversational strategies accordingly.

Moreover, brands can use IVR tools and conversational marketing analytics to refine their sales funnels, create customised journeys, and gather essential information from clients.

Examples of Conversational Marketing

Let’s look at a couple of examples showcasing well-known conversational campaigns.

Sephora

Sephora, a globally recognised beauty retailer, runs several effective conversational campaigns. The company utilised two Facebook Messenger bots for booking appointments, makeovers, shade matching, and other services.

Later, Sephora introduced another chatbot that provided makeup tips, collected customer information, and redirected users to the company website. Here’s what it looks like:

Levi’s

Levi’s is renowned for making “clothes built to endure anything.” The company is dedicated to offering round-the-clock customer service and providing access to product information.

Initially, Levi’s used a Virtual Assistant chatbot, then transitioned to a web-based bot that supports online customer chats and answers frequently asked questions. Today, Levi’s conversational strategy primarily involves social media and email marketing to guide customers towards purchases with tailored recommendations.

Conversational Marketing Benefits

The main objective of a successful conversational strategy is to provide personalised digital experiences throughout the user journey and across marketing channels. Each interaction with a brand is significant, and conversational marketing helps businesses realise and leverage this.

Here are some major advantages of an effective conversational marketing strategy:

• Customer satisfaction through tailored digital experiences and conversations
• Enhanced customer engagement, loyalty, and trust
• Increased brand awareness and differentiation
• Access to key customer data and insights from active marketing campaigns
• Campaign scalability and higher conversion rates
• Optimised customer journey

The Future of Conversational Marketing

While the exact details of what the future holds for brands remain uncertain, the focus on customer-centricity is unwavering. Personalised interactions and conversational marketing are currently at the forefront of customer retention, acquisition, and engagement.

Going forward, conversational marketing is likely to involve the integration of conversational AI and new automated messaging environments. These developments will help businesses stay competitive and use brand-specific conversational tools to create unmatched customer experiences.

Book a demo to discover how Phonexa’s call and conversation intelligence solutions can help you leverage customer insights and achieve maximum profitability.