Conversational Marketing & Why You Should Try It

Conversational marketing is, by definition, a dialogue-centric form of marketing where you as a business are in direct contact with potential customers & you guide them through the process of sales.

To make it simpler, it is the form of marketing where you guide customers from when they are leads, up until they turn into conversions, all through conversation.

So how can you achieve this?

There are several tools that enable conversational marketing & while we can write pages on end on that topic, it might be more useful for you to understand how to get started. So today, we will look at how to start with the same & a few tools that can help you.

Identify your start point

Your start point in conversational marketing is where you begin conversing with your customers. This could be your website, a landing page, an external referral site or anything else. Deciding your start point is step on & the most important step.

To give you a basic overview, yoru startpoint should be the place where the customers from the top of your funnel, arrive.

FAQs to Conversations

You know your customers more than anyone else. Identify the most commonly asked questions, figure out how to address these questions adequately & create a document that entails the flow of this conversation.

Flow From Lead To Conversion

This goes along with our previous point. Once you’ve identified the commonly asked questions and the possible queries people may have at different stages in the sales funnel, the next thing you need to do is create full fledged conversation flows. This means, you need to be creating conversation trees & addressing everything important in each stage.

Personalise Conversations

The entire purpose of conversational marketing is that your business is personally in touch with every customer that comes in contact with your business. This means that while the flows we created in the previous step are great to guide conversations, you still need to make sure that you personalise conversations to the customer you are speaking to.

If your customer is from a certain niche, pick up points in the category & add it to your conversation. Ask about the weather, comment on the news… basically any kind of small talk.

To Bot Or Not To Bot

Bots are an extremely popular choice when it comes to conversational marketing. That being said, it only works with certain kinds of businesses. It is very often seen that customers are bothered by & experience less value from a chat-bot. If yours is a business that comes across scores of customers that have similar queries & flows, a chat bot would be a great way to eliminate the need for a full-fledged support & conversation team. If your business is of the type where queries rarely overlap, you should look into a direct chat interface.

Choose The Right Tool

Like I said in the start of this blog, there are several options out there for you to choose from. Let’s talk about our top picks

Drift — Drift allows you to create bots based on your conversational flows. You can also employ a human to human interface through drift. You can download the Drift app on your mobile & always be available to your customers.

LimeCall — Limecall is one-of-a-kind in the sense that it allows your customers to initiate voice & video chats with you, right from the website. Replacing text based conversations with voice & video could add a layer of personalisation.

Monitor Leads

Maintain a CRM and ensure that you follow leads from their first interaction till they convert & you never lose them. As soon as a lead enters your flow through the chat box on your site, put them in your CRM & route them to the appropriate employees within your company so that your customer is always receiving input from the best in their field.

Forms

Last but not the least, ensure that your chat interface contains a form. This can be employed outside of your working hours. When you or your team are not available, your chatbot can request the lead to fill in a quick & simple lead form that is fed into the CRM, allowing your team the opportunity to follow up on the lead easily the following day.