Conversational marketing in 2020
By Liniar’s Simone Sangha.
Conversational marketing can best be described as the use of direct channels of communication and feedback to enhance an already existing strategy and customer journey (if done correctly, of course).
Consumers now have so much choice regarding the ways they can communicate and oftentimes receive instant responses from anywhere in the world – sometimes not even from humans.
Although conversational marketing is new, and we’re still adapting, listening to customer feedback has never been so important. Examples of this type of marketing can range from email, with the ability to segment your audiences and tailor your messages, to live chat, as customer service advisors are essentially brand ambassadors for your business.
However you decide to communicate, your message is crucial. Here are a few key factors to help you incorporate conversational marketing in your strategies for the future:
Personalisation. I’ve briefly spoken about personalisation during my trends article for 2020. Personalisation is such a diverse topic and can be the perfect way to get the right message across to the right people. It can be used on a chat bot, in email campaigns, social media, and so much more. A well-worded welcome message from a bot can be just as interactive as an email subject line.
Experiment. Testing is key to getting the best out of any campaign and there are a variety of ways to do this using conversational marketing. For example, try setting up various segments or opening messages within your chat bot flow to test what people respond to most often. This may be affected by the words in you use, the tone/appearance, or the images and videos that engage individuals more than others. Use this information to truly tailor your customer journey and keep getting that feedback to improve.
Surveys. There’s always room for improvement and the best way to see if what you’re doing is targeting your potential customer correctly is to use to platforms to collect feedback directly from your target audience. At Liniar, we use Survey Monkey but there are other free survey platforms available online.
Although a relatively new strategy in the world of marketing, I do believe AI chat bots and live messaging is here to stay, and conversational marketing will inevitably grow online. Conversational interactions can massively increase engagement due to its immediate, personalised and relevant response, and should be considered regardless of which industry you’re in.
Bonus tip. One rule doesn’t always fit all, especially not in this case. I’d recommend starting by trying to eradicate one problem while experimenting to find a very good fix rather than many temporary, ill-fitting fixes.
The key to conversational marketing is tailoring your message to your specific target audience and slowly expanding it. In other words, don’t add a multi-purpose bot to every page of your website right from the get-go and make sure you experiment first.
