Conversational Marketing – Can It Really Make A Difference To Your Business?

These days, advertising may seem like a one-sided monologue. It can’t have escaped your notice that there has been a bombardment of Buy Now, or Sign Up Today style advertisements, not only online, but on the back of buses , at tube stations and various other touch points around the country. It’s no wonder therefore, that many consumers feel marketed out. This leaves a chink in the armour of large multi nationals for the SME who can effectively connect with their customer base via conversational marketing to revolutionise their customer engagement and interaction.

Why Conversation Marketing?

The definition of conversational marketing is having a dialogue with your customer that can help solve their pain points, and position you as the organisation to do so. The strategy will prioritise this dialogue through social media, phone, email, and even live chat. Then, you can leverage these conversations to influence every aspect of your business, from customer service to product development.

For example, imagine one of your customers has a suggestion about how to improve one of your products. You implement that feature, making your customer feel like a real part of your business, and also solve a pain point for many of your other customers while doing so. This can all come from an improvement you had never considered yourself.

Using customer feedback to directly inform product changes can significantly enhance the customer experience and promote your brand image.

Implementing Conversational Marketing Into Your SME

There are three main components of conversational marketing;listening, understanding, and engaging.

• Listening – The first part of your strategy should involve spending a significant amount of time assessing your customers’ needs and preferences.
• Understanding – There is no point in listening to what your customers say, only to agree with them and do nothing with that information. Grasping the nuances of your customer feedback and using it to shape future interactions can ensure that each customer interaction provides benefit to your customer and your business.  It is vital that when your customers speak you are listening. You need to carefully gather this information in a format within which you can analyse it – are a few people saying the same thing? Are there themes within the discourse that point to problems?
• Engagement -Engaging with the customers that provide you with feedback, breathes life into conversational marketing. Thank them for their feedback and let them know what you are doing about it. Having genuine value-added conversations that your customers resonate with, creates a dialogue between equals rather than a marketing pitch.

Where To Use Conversational Marketing?

Any touch point with your customer is a point at which you can create a conversation. However, email, social media, live chat, phone and face-to-face are the main stages of the strategy. To excel in conversational marketing, you need to meet your customers where they are, offering incentives for providing feedback, and listening more than you speak to gather insight that can truly boost your business and your relationship with your customers.