What is conversational marketing?

Conversational marketing is a dialogue driven approach that focuses on the customer by engaging in real time conversations to help move visitors through the buyer journey. Conversational marketing is meant to be more authentic and allows for a stronger relationship between buyers and customers.

It involves using various tools and tactics, such as chatbots, messaging apps, and live chat, to create a more humanized buying experience. 

The concept is simple. When qualified prospects land on your site, we'll alert your reps are alerted in real-time and it allows both parties to start a conversation instantly via chat, voice calls, and screen sharing. 

And when your reps are too busy or the inbound leads don’t meet your qualification criteria, automated chat bots collect information and book meetings for your sales team. 

The 4 benefits of conversational marketing 

Conversational marketing came about because traditional B2B sales tactics were outdated. Marketers and sales teams alike ran into the same bottlenecks, and conversational marketing has emerged to solve these common problems and help marketers and sales teams improve their performance.  There are many stats to prove conversational marketings benefits, but these are a few benefits that stand out.

1. Conversational marketing focuses on the customer.

At its core, conversational marketing is all about putting the customer first. This means understanding their needs, pain points, and preferences and tailoring your conversations and marketing efforts accordingly. By doing so, you can create a more personalized and meaningful experience for your customers, which can lead to increased engagement, loyalty, and sales.

2. Conversational marketing can lead to higher engagement.

By engaging with customers in a more natural, conversational way, you can create a more engaging experience that encourages them to spend more time interacting with your brand. This can lead to increased brand awareness, loyalty, and ultimately, sales.

3. Conversational marketing can help automate sales processes.

Conversational marketing tools like chatbots can help automate certain parts of the sales process, such as answering common questions and qualifying leads. This can free up your sales team to focus on more complex tasks and lead to more efficient sales processes.

4. Conversational marketing can help you learn about your customers.

By engaging with customers in a natural, conversational way, you can learn more about their needs, preferences, and pain points. This information can help you tailor your marketing efforts and product offerings to better meet their needs.

On average, companies that deploy a conversational marketing strategy see a +34% increase in Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) capture, and an overall +62% increase in pipeline creation for sales.  

Using chatbots in Conversational Marketing 

Chatbots are computer programs that can simulate human conversations. They are often used in conversational marketing to provide quick, personalized responses to customer inquiries and help guide them through the buying process. With advancements in artificial intelligence, chatbots are becoming increasingly sophisticated and can even understand natural language.

While chatbots are a critical component of conversational marketing, they're not the only tool available. Other popular tools include messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, live chat on websites, and voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. The goal is to use whatever tool is most appropriate for engaging with your audience in a natural, conversational way.

What do you need in a Conversational Marketing Strategy?

Choosing the best conversational marketing strategy is different for every company, because they should align with your particular business goals. Here are some best practices to create a conversational marketing strategy that works for your business.

1. Identify Your Target Audience

Knowing your audience is of the utmost importance in order for the rest of your marketing strategy to make sense. Understanding who your audience is and what they are looking for is the first step in being able to communicate with them and qualify them as a lead.

2. Personalize Your Experience

Much of the success associated with conversational marketing comes from personalization. Meet your customer where they are at in their journey and be sure to show them the right content or resource for them at that time. 

3. Collect Feedback

Asking for feedback not only shows your customers that you care about their opinions and experience, it also provides invaluable information about ways to improve your experience. 

3 Examples of Conversational Marketing

Here are a few examples of a conversational marketing strategy come to life from popular brands. 

1. ThoughtSpot:

ThoughtSpot uses the Pipeline Cloud, which is a set of technologies and processes that help companies generate pipeline quicker. ThoughtSpot targeted a group of qualified visitors for real-time sales conversations based on criteria they created within their conversational marketing strategy.

Since going live with the Pipeline Cloud, ThoughtSpot has generated $13M in pipeline and $2M in revenue, while increasing online sales conversations by 10X what they were doing before. 

Hear from ThoughtSpot's CMO, Scott Holden, on how conversational marketing has changed how they use their website as their ultimate marketing asset.

2. Qualified: 

We had to put ourselves on this list! Qualified’s chatbot appears upon entering the website and aims to help you wherever you are in your journey. Not to mention, each response is personalized.

3. 1-800 Flowers

‍1-800 Flowers uses a chat bot to help visitors locate what they are looking for on their large website. From asking for pricing, finding locations or help searching for the right flower, this bot can help you through that experience 

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