7 Conversational Marketing Trends Every Marketer Must Know
Conversational marketing is a new way of thinking about how you talk to your customers and prospects. It’s more human, less transactional — and more effective than traditional marketing channels at creating customer loyalty and driving sales.
Let’s dive deeper into conversational marketing strategies your business can implement to engage more prospects and convert leads better.
What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is interacting with website visitors and converting leads via dialogue-driven activities. This inbound marketing style focuses on consumer interactions, not simply one-way communication by the brand.
Sales and marketing professionals constantly strive to beat the algorithms and drive traffic and revenue. So it gets strenuous for them to provide leads and customers with a personalized experience among all the bustle.
Over the last few years, conversational marketing emerged as the perfect solution for sales and marketing worldwide.
Conversational marketing strategy orchestrates conversations with customers wherever they are in their buying cycle (or lack thereof). As a result, you don’t have to wait for long hours or days to get a response to a ticket you raised or a form you have filled out. With conversational marketing, the lines between human-to-human and human-to-computer conversations get blurred through chatbots, live chat, and targeted messaging.
Conversational Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing
Conversational marketing is a subset of inbound marketing. As the word “conversational” suggests, your message aims to engage people in conversation.
Inbound marketing brings leads to your website, and conversational marketing ensures they get value from it. Both strategies must align to achieve results.
7 Latest Conversational Marketing Trends You Need to Know
It is a good idea to see how chatbot technology has fared so far and the conversational marketing trends we can expect to see now and beyond.
1. Messaging Platforms
Interacting on messaging applications is as convenient and straightforward as communicating with a friend. According to a survey, 73 trillion messages have been sent by people via chat applications. As per Business Insider, Apple handles about 40 billion iMessage notifications daily.
Interactive messaging platforms like WhatsApp leverage chatbots because an interactive environment encourages continuous engagement with real-time interactions.
You can expect many conversational messaging applications to be launched to promote everyday advertising.
2. More Businesses Will Adopt Chatbots
Chatbots are very useful in squeezing the ROI from your marketing efforts. Chatbots are pretty helpful in turning anonymous traffic into a prospect by identifying potential leads, initiating their interest in products, and cultivating customer and brand relationships. As per the survey, companies that used chatbots have increased the visitor-to-lead conversion rate by 10%.
Chatbots will be responsible for converting more visitors into potential leads. Among the reasons businesses are betting high on bots — chatbots are available round the clock and provide instant responses to inquiries and answers to simple questions. Currently, we are seeing businesses deploying NLP-based chatbots that bring more human-like capabilities to the chatbot.
3. Customer Experience will be Highly Optimized
Earlier, companies used to train their sales representatives to convince customers to buy that company’s products. It is found that 46% of customers abandon a brand or product if they are not valued enough or are unhappy with the customer service experience.
We have come very far in marketing. Today, priorities for companies have moved towards providing the best customer experience.
4. Growing Demands for Voice-Driven Interfaces
Siri and Alexa have taken over the market over the last couple of years. Juniper’s research states that there will be an increase of 1000% in the usage of voice-driven interfaces in the next five years. Voice-enabled chatbots work similarly to traditional text-based chatbots. The only difference is instead of typing your question or entering your input, you speak directly to the chatbot.
5. Artificial Intelligence
As per Techgrabyte, Artificial Intelligence will be one of the sectors that will open up vast opportunities for companies over the next few decades. AI and machine learning can analyze the customer’s behavior and search patterns. An intelligent chatbot is one example of AI in practice. In the coming years, AI-backed conversational marketing will drive customer acquisition and retention for many businesses.
6. More Focus on Customer Data
A formulaic question-and-answer scenario has prevailed for a long time, but this approach does not provide customer satisfaction and often lacks in solving customers’ problems.
Conversational AI can assist businesses in reimagining the overall user engagement process, even in complete basic transactions, and collecting data to help in future interactions.
For example, a chatbot for an airline can help find hotels and transportation for a customer’s trip and provide suggestions for future travel.
7. Network of Knowledge
Knowledge is an inherent value of AI. It gives the ability for individual bots the to learn from experience. Marketers and customer success teams can deploy AI to harness knowledge repositories to provide absolute personalization for the end user. With bots being interconnected and having access to vast data pools, businesses can deliver personalized engagement in real-time that connects with the user to provide real value.
Also Read: What are the Benefits of Chatbot and Conversational Marketing?
