Power of Conversational Marketing In Lead Generation

Over the years, the technology landscape has drastically evolved, but the core elements of communication have stayed the same. Conversations need to be powerful, personal and empathetic. The only difference now is that we now have technology to have those conversations at scale, and that’s exactly the power of conversational marketing.

Forbes Council Member Andy Peart says that the undeniable rise of conversational marketing will inspire a shift in the marketing landscape that will "be as big as the internet 20 years ago or the app economy a decade ago."

And how do we define conversational marketing? A marketing strategy that relies on real-time conversations with customers that helps build a relationship that inspires trust, improves customer experience resulting in more sales.

To drive this strategy, most businesses integrate chatbots on their websites or mobile apps.

Why Conversational Marketing?

Successful businesses commit to conversational marketing to engage with customers or prospects, enhance loyalty and improve ROI, rather than relying on less effective, one-way communication modes like email. It provides quality services and recommendations that build trust and confidence in a business, opens conversations, and plays a vital role in understanding customer needs.

Conversations must happen across all points of your business. In the future, it will be even more important to tap into the power of conversational marketing to deliver the highest level of experiences through the entire customer journey.

Conversational sales will also play a huge role in helping team reps connect with their prospects in a more helpful manner.

According to a 2019 HubSpot Survey, 28% of the people using AI tools did not even realize they were using them and weren’t sure how they would be using them in their daily routines.

Best practices of Conversational Marketing:

Timely Communication: Prompt and timely conversations lead to good conversational marketing. Businesses need to get to the bottom of the issues as and when the customer or prospect raises one as they expect real time responses.

Personalized Experience: Customers prefer to know how the product helps their business needs. And every time they interact with the business they expect a relevant and personalized experience.

Analysis: To deliver relevant communication, a complete picture of the customer helps. To achieve this, there are many leading analytics tools available in the market. These tools help collect and interpret customer data. Integrating these tools helps analyse all internal and external data sources as well as sources like social media.

What are chatbots?

Conversational marketing powers tools like chatbots mimic the conversational tone of human messaging. In a simple and prompt manner, it provides immediate answers to a person's questions as they navigate your site, improving lead generation and your on-site sales funnel.

By doing so, it gives prospects and clients a positive, straightforward experience on your site, helping to move them along in the buyer journey as you've designed it.

Understandably, marketing-focused advice, articles and blogs about conversational marketing tend to focus on chatbots.

Five ways to Use AI Chatbots:

Lead Generation: Chatbots can collect and store customer data, like email address or phone number, of customers or prospects who chat with them. AI analytical tools can use this data to learn more about the customer or prospect. Also, businesses can use this data to reach out to the customers for further communication.

Customer Service: Unlike a live agent, chatbots are available 24/7 and can provide timely responses to the customers or prospects resulting in seamless live chat experience.

Social Media: Customers or prospects no longer wait to get solutions for their queries when AI chatbots are integrated with Social Media channels as the chatbots respond in real-time.

Product Marketing: Messages or notifications with latest product updates and offering can be sent out as and when customers or prospects initiate a chat with the chatbot on the website or app or social media channel.

ROI: Implementation of chatbots is cheaper compared to the high-costs incurred in employing a large customer support team. Chatbots are more efficient and accurate than humans while responding instantly.

AI Chatbot in Sales

Sales teams can reap huge benefits from the smart deployment of a chatbot, especially in regard to saving time and qualifying leads. Here are a few of the main advantages to be gained.

It provides efficient and quality services to Customers or prospects, apart from valuable marketing data.

Chatbots are capable of qualifying the prospects, based on interests, demographics, and other various other factors. The questions asked by customers while chatting with chatbot, can help determine customer behaviour and interests. You can also get appropriate information in the desired context.

These chatbots lead to an increase in the turnover, and provide higher ROI. According to research, CQL (Conversational Qualified Lead) cycle takes 60% less time than traditional sales cycle, and provides additional information about leads.

The bottom line

The user experience has become a key component in the sales funnel, and effective, high-impact, advanced chatbots that site visitors actually like to engage with can be fundamental to providing real-time support. There's a clear market demand for this level of advanced, on-site service: 82% of consumers consider an 'immediate' response as very important when they have a question, while 79% have no problem using messaging apps for customer service. Yet, only 36% of companies are currently utilizing these bots for marketing, sales or customer service inquiries. (Source: marketing.toolbox.com)

Conversational marketing is critical when it comes to converting visitors to leads, leads to opportunities, increasing customer engagement and improving customer satisfaction, making it a significant tool for marketers. Technologies that power conversational marketing, undoubtedly will be among the most significant tools to go mainstream going forward.