Conversational advertising is a powerful tool in modern marketing that enhances the user experience and helps brands get more sales conversions online.
Learn how to incorporate conversational marketing online by using the tools and techniques of the most advanced technological enterprises. And how to plan into a better conversational marketing approach.
Below, we’re covering things conversational marketing does so you can take advantage of this advanced strategy and increase your profits.
Conversational advertising refers to the use of chatbots to advertise and share information about a product. It means utilizing all the communications leading up to sales to have meaningful conversations advertising a product or service.
Key Takeaways
- Conversational advertising leverages real-time interactions and engagement through chatbots and live chat tools on websites to enhance the customer journey, making the buying process more personal and efficient by providing value and respect for the consumer’s time.
- This marketing strategy employs both automated chatbots and live sales agents to facilitate personalized and meaningful conversations, aiming to improve customer relationships, reduce the sales cycle, and increase conversions by making interactions more natural and less disruptive.
- Implementing conversational marketing can significantly benefit brands by building trust, reducing friction in the buying process, improving customer satisfaction, allowing for ethical data collection, saving time, and enabling effortless scaling of business operations through 24/7 automated customer interactions.
What is Conversational Advertising?
Conversational advertising describes the way buyers navigate a brand’s marketing and sales funnels along their customer journey using real-time interactions and consumer engagement.
More commonly conversational marketing refers to both live and automated chat tools embedded into a website that website visitors can use to ask questions and learn more about the brand and their products or services to enhance the customer experience.
Quality, helpful conversations within the sales qualification process tick all of the following boxes:
- They provide real value to the consumer
- They are not disruptive of the consumer’s daily life or routines
- They are respectful of both the consumer’s attention and their time
This is the basic framework by which conversational advertising functions. It provides value within a short amount of time in an engaging way that doesn’t disrupt the equilibrium of the consumer’s life.
Over time, both live sales reps and automated chatbots build relationships to create genuine experiences with consumers and buyers, making the buying process a whole lot easier.
Chatbots use targeted messaging and meaningful conversation to encourage qualified leads to connect with you when they arrive at your site. Kissing goodbye to endless waiting days and capturing forms customers used to fill.
Making it easier for your customers to engage with your business will improve your customer relationship and cause more leads quickly.
Its Types
Typically, a conversational marketing strategy in a business setting has two methods to choose from. The most common types of conversational marketing examples you’ll see employed by brands today include:
- Live sales agents – A sales team may spend time on the website having unique conversations with website visitors using conversation marketing over messaging apps to enhance customer engagement as well as boost conversions with targeted messages.
- Automated conversations – Automated chatbots can send conversational display ads to website visitors through a messaging tool like Facebook messenger, a chat plugin on the website, or a mobile app using natural language processing and artificial intelligence to create hyper-personalized customer interactions.
Together, or separate, these marketing tools enable customers to make decisions based on personalized sales conversations that most users won’t even realize are ads.
How Conversational Advertising Can Support Your Brand – And How It’s Changing Consumer Behavior
Before you implement it in your own strategy, it’s critical to fully understand the impact of conversational marketing.
Brands measure advertising in several ways: impact on brand awareness, click-through rate, cost-per-click, and an endless chain of other marketing KPIs and benchmarks. However, those measures don’t tie directly to the interactions consumers have with their brands.
Conversational marketing helps develop a solid, firm foundation for more accurate metrics that show what impression a brand is truly capable of leaving with its brand messaging.
The process takes the guesswork out of measuring the individual performance of different campaigns and sets the stage for brands to continue these significant conversations throughout the company’s entire customer experience.
The entire concept of conversational marketing has its roots in the idea of giving a unique B2B experience to each site visitor from the first step of your sales. Whether through a sales team or automated chatbots, each person is getting a one-of-a-kind conversation.
Traditional mass media messaging is typically one-way. Even inbound requires the setting up of the forms and the hassle of tracking down leads.
Digital advertising allows for more personalization, but neither offers the relevance to the user that conversational advertising can provide. They still feel forced, unnatural, and “salesy,” if you will. On the other hand, conversational marketing examples are hard to notice when you’re one of the qualified leads the marketing intends to reach.
With a little help from AI and automation, brands can achieve this natural, conversational marketing tactic at scale allowing meaningful, one-to-one connections with customers and exceeding traditional outcome measures to stand out by creating new metrics of greater value and relevance.
How Conversational Marketing is Changing Consumer Behavior
Both new and existing customers alike have quickly gotten hooked on automated chat platforms. They are more flexible and faster than call queues, offer more direct answers than browsing the website alone, and can help customers help themselves through self-service.
Some people also love messaging because it helps to maintain their pace, whether at work or in life, and helps them feel like they’re having a conversation, not answering an email, or performing research.
In a survey from Twilio, 66% of respondents said they prefer using instead of the brands reaching out through messaging apps.
Having your sales team use a chat platform to talk with web visitors online, utilizing Facebook messenger to answer questions from potential customers, or integrating mobile apps are all easy ways to implement a conversational strategy into your marketing plan.
Its Benefits to B2B
Right now, the buying process for B2B businesses is especially cold and impersonal, making it harder for buyers to get the ball rolling. Conversational marketing is helping build relationships and create authentic experiences with customers and buyers, even B2B ones.
Benefits of Conversational Advertising
A sophisticated and thoughtful conversational marketing approach can help your business create personalized customer experiences through real-time reactive responses, engaging conversations, and ethical data collection.
As you develop a conversational marketing strategy for your brand, try to design it with these benefits in mind:
Build Trust
When you use conversational marketing, you create memorable personalized experiences that can help to build trust between the consumer and brand more quickly. Without as much lead-up time in the sales cycle, you’ll shorten the total length and ultimately improve sales.
Yet, even with these company-facing benefits, conversational marketing also shifts the focus to fulfilling customer needs and makes them feel more considered.
Reduce Friction
Conversational marketing can also help consumers engage directly with the brand to reduce friction during the buying process. Instant responses to questions when they arise keeps frustration at a minimum. No forms to fill out or waiting for an answer.
Digital solutions like AI chatbots keep customers off of call queues, helping them find the answers and the information they need almost instantaneously, a benefit that’s worth a lot in a world of increasing self-service tools.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
Personalized conversations improve user satisfaction by delivering a thoughtful and consistent experience at every point of interaction within the buying process. Empowering them to interact directly with your AI chatbot also increases their brand confidence and loyalty.
First-Party Data Collection Opportunity
In a world where data and privacy have become ever so important, being able to extract valuable insights without the use of third-party data gives any business a major advantage.
Personalized conversation through conversational AI allows a business to ask customers questions directly, extracting valuable data and storing it for later use to develop future marketing strategies.
Conversational marketing is one of the easiest ways to gather this data, as it allows the customers to come to you, rather than having to chase them down through forms or emails.
Save Time
Marketing activities require a lot of time and energy put forth by the sales team, but conversational marketing can both reduce time requirements while increasing capabilities.
Conversational marketing speed up pipeline velocity by helping consumers make more educated, empowered, and informed decisions. This shortens the time it takes for them to make that decision, thus reducing the average time to make a profit.
It also saves time for the business, allowing them to focus on more pressing matters like social media, email strategy, and large campaigns.
Effortless Business Scaling
One of the biggest benefits of conversational marketing is the fact that all of these incredible, personalized conversational experiences can happen in the background 24/7 without the need for an actual sales agent present.
Many businesses have used this benefit to scale their brands with minimal effort, in a way that wasn’t possible previously. Conversational marketing exists beyond office hours, beyond human labor, and yet adds a personal touch to any marketing strategy.
Creating Your Conversational Marketing Strategy
Rather than create an entirely new conversational marketing strategy full of new digital initiatives, it’s pretty easy to find ways to incorporate conversational marketing within your existing framework.
Like many brands, you can use conversational marketing by adding an automated chatbox option on your website. This is usually the first thing companies think of. however, a conversational marketing strategy exists to support and amplify the systems and strategies you already have in place.
For example, you could start utilizing Facebook chat more to help customers with questions. You can provide canned answers that the chat will provide based on the questions asked.
You could also use a tool like Drift, a popular automated chat tool, to connect real, human sales agents with customers online to provide an enhanced experience when possible.
Even still, conversational marketing is a broad term that refers to much more than just chat boxes, machine learning, and bots.
You can incorporate more conversational marketing by creating CTAs on your blog posts that encourage readers to reach out, or by opening your social media DMs to customer service inquiries.
Questions to Ask To Get Started
Need help kicking things off with your conversational marketing strategy? Start by asking yourself these questions about your business and your existing customers:
- Who is showing interest in our product or service?
- How are these people engaging with our company? Online? Social media? Email?
- Where did these potential buyers come from?
- What are they looking to get out of your conversation?
- How can we better engage people, meet their needs, build trust, and improve the customer experience?
Understanding your target buyer’s full-picture situation will help you target the best way to meet their needs.
Incorporating Conversational Advertising Into Marketing and Sales Funnels
Conversational marketing effortlessly fits into any marketing and sales funnel because it moves them through these stages step by step, one question at a time. It works just the same as a real conversation would.
At first, a customer may be wary and may have many objections. After qualifying the customer and addressing their unique objections, eventually, the customer will come to trust the person they’re speaking with and may move closer to saying “yes” and buying.
Chatbots do this flawlessly by storing information acquired from every question asked and answered and using this data to inform future responses and replies, creating a perfectly tailored conversation that can understand leads faster and more deeply.
Measuring Your Conversational Marketing Initiative
Conversational marketing success is best measured with a specific set of metrics. While other metrics may have worked well in other scenarios with different digital tools, you’ll want to incorporate the following metrics to best understand the impact of conversational marketing.
Length of Sales Cycle
The duration of the sales process is usually shorter when live chat or chatbots are on it. To measure this difference, calculate the average time spent using the conversational platform and how many of those conversations ended in a sale. If you’re getting more hourly sales through the bot than through other marketing tactics, you can realize sales efficiency.
NPS
NPS stands for net promoter score, which measures customer feelings and loyalty. The data for this metric usually comes from a follow-up question posed after conversations, like “How likely are you to recommend this product/service/company to a friend?”
Businesses with high scores are promoters for their own brands, while passives don’t add much and detractors actively take away from their sales success.
GCR
Goal completion rate measures the percentage of visitors that reached a certain goal, or conversion, during a live chat or while speaking with a chatbot. The conversion, goal, or action may be answering a question, booking a demo, or making a sale.
Final Thoughts
Conversational marketing has gone from a new kid on the marketing block to an integral part of any modern marketing strategy.
In a general sense, it brings the focus of advertising and marketing back to the consumer, directly engaging with them and extracting information about what they need and what they expect from brands used to better serve them.
When implementing your own conversational approach, try to find gaps in your strategy that you can substitute through genuine conversation. Take advantage of advanced tools such as AI and automation to take the responsibility off your sales agents, allowing them to focus on more pressing matters while bots work 24/7 through conversations.
But remember – the core here is the connection and trust created in every communication touchpoint.
FAQ
Here, we’re answering some of the most common questions about conversational marketing to clear up any questions that may linger.
Sephora’s Virtual Artist tool within their FB messenger chat is an example of Conversational Marketing. Using the phone camera, users can try a product on their face. Thus replicating an authentic makeup application, then prompting the user with an easy way to buy the product directly from the chat.
Conversational B2B digital marketing uses a conversational approach to create genuine customer experiences throughout the sales funnel.
It typically refers to the use of live chat agents or AI chatbots to converse with users or site visitors, though more broadly it refers to all of the conversational touchpoints that take place within the buying cycle.
Now, many social media platforms allow business accounts and their sales teams to create conversational ads directly on the platform. Twitter, for example, makes it easy to create something in display ad format that encourages users to interact and engage. They provide simple instructions on their site to make it as easy as possible.
