The overall goal of conversational marketing is to understand your customers and communicate with them in the manner they desire. It’s not about you in this type of marketing, but about the customer.
Creating a successful strategy for your company consists of three basic elements:
Start Your Conversation with an Engagement Tool:
Your first message must entice your website visitors to click the link. This is the only one of the elements you have control over—and your most important element.
If your prospective customers aren’t interested in clicking your link, you have to find some way to drive the action quickly.
Your goal must be that click, and to get that, you must craft the perfect opening message. For your conversational marketing strategy to be a success, you’ll need something beyond just a simple chatbot, though.
Ideally, you’ll want a more complete tool with chatbot, broadcast, and live chat features. The tool should be embedded in your website and offer chat or call—or even video—conversation starters.
These are those little messages that invite you to click and engage!
Discover Searcher Intent:
Once your visitors start a conversation with you, your goal is to understand, qualify, and ultimately meet their needs.
You’ll need to enter the conversation and find out a few things about your prospective customers:
Are they looking for customer support?
Are they looking for sales assistance?
Are they interested in making a purchase?
But you can’t just come right out and ask a bunch of blunt questions. You want your visitors to feel like they’re taking part in a real-time conversation, and you want them to feel confident enough to continue that conversation with a member of your sales team—or even to make a purchase from you.
“Look at the traffic to the site,” says Whisbi, “the pages they are on, their engagement level, and decide what is appropriate for each audience.”
Traffic coming from one of your “Buy Now” ads will need different chat conversation starters than those from an educational blog. Depending on which of the above pathways your visitor is traveling on, your conversation will veer off in a different direction to satisfy their needs.
Some examples of things you need to consider include whether the visitor is:
On a product page—maybe they’d like a live-streamed demo
A new visitor who has completed several stages of the buyer’s journey
Arriving via a special product advertisement or campaign.
You also should consider how long the user has been active on that page.
Give Sales the Wheel:
Although your priority should be helping your visitors resolve their problems and issues, you should have clear conversation pathways through your conversational marketing strategy.
You need to keep in mind where each visitor is headed and what they need to get there. If they’re not ready to purchase, maybe they can download an informational PDF, subscribe to your newsletter, or be put into contact with a member of your sales team.
One conversation will lead to another naturally. In your best-case scenario, your visitor will be interested in a continued conversation with you.
Once you’ve gotten a clear idea about what groups of people you’re engaging with, you’ll need to qualify them. It would be great to send every visitor directly to a staff member, but that’s simply not possible in real-time, so you need to think about the following three elements for each audience type:
The Trigger:
What action is going to start your conversation?
The Conversation Starter:
Which message or video will invite your visitors to engage?
The Script:
Which questions should the lead capture tool ask to qualify the visitors correctly?
“On the backend of your content management system or conversational marketing tool,” says Hubspot marketing coordinator Eric Izazaga, “your sales team will document the visitor’s questions, qualifications, and needs for a quick follow-up.”
The team’s job is to try to convert those visitors into customers, and the more information you can give them, the easier their job.
Conversational marketing gives them essential information about these prospective customers—and gives you a more interconnected view of your customers.
Conversational marketing is one of your most powerful tools. “Thoughtspot.” Reports Izazga, “saw 10 times more sales conversations, 70% more marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and 64% more meetings booked by using conversational marketing.”
Zero Motorcycles gained 30% more leads with conversational marketing. These statistics might not be enough to totally convert you to the conversational marketing bandwagon, but they ought to convince you to keep reading.
To get started, you need to figure out how to improve your visitor’s experience with your company. There are also three basic elements in this step:
Engage with Your Visitor:
Your first step is to let the visitor start a conversation in order “to create a more personalized experience” for themselves.
Filling out forms might still end up with leads for you, but every website under the sun uses that approach so your visitors won’t see anything unique if you go that route.
Understand Your Visitor’s Problem:
Comprehending what we call the “pain points” of your visitor is essential. You need to know what has driven them to seek out your company.
What problem do they have that you can solve?
When your visitors engage with your website, you should ask common questions pertaining to your product or service and learn what their needs are.
One great place to start is with questions typically asked during kick-off or qualifying calls.
Recommend Their Solution:
The closing stage in your marketing approach is where you guide and suggest solutions to your visitor.
With all the new information from your previous steps, you can now engage in person-to-person interaction with the ultimate goal of guiding them to the right resources.
