Conversational marketing is becoming a more modern and personalized digital marketing strategy that a lot of businesses have begun to embrace in order to have personalized conversations with their clients or potential customers.In the previous article on conversational marketing, we wrote about How Conversational Marketing Is Changing the Way Your Customers Buy. Today we list down a step by step guide in how conversational marketing takes place in the digital marketing space today.

Step 1: Engage Your Potential Lead.

The whole point of digital marketing is not just to increase your business visibility and online presence, digital marketing also focuses a lot more on engaging your audience of potential customers and clients.  Through constantly engaging with your audience is when your business starts to generate more leads, and if the leads are nurtured emphatically, your business gets to increase its clientele base. Advertising has shifted from building brand awareness with the masses on television screens, radios, newspapers, graphical designs, and billboards.

Conversational Marketing should be a current trend in which businesses constantly engage their potential customers on digital media.

Businesses now more than ever before need to understand the current trends in marketing to build better and more effective promotion strategies. Using conversational marketing tools to engage with customers is an important personalized marketing experience you are giving to your business's audience. Typically websites have been using lead capture forms and pop up subscription forms to get some insights from the viewers of their websites. This has been one of the ways to gain valuable visitor insights but it is also an irritating one for customers who are navigating through your website for information and do not have time to fill forms. 

Being able to instantly chat with your business team in real-time after accessing its corresponding website would be a wonderful customer experience. If a pop-up chatbot or live chat sections can easily be seen on your website that is a mega bonus for your business when it comes to customer engagement. With current trends in technology today,  automated chatbots are becoming utilized in conversational marketing because chances are high that it is virtually impossible for your business support and sales teams to be online 24/7 to answer your visitor’s inquiries. The intelligent chatbots do the job of being an intermediary between your customers and your business when your business goes to sleep, Another added advantage of using chatbots is that your customers and business get to engage with your business anytime that they want to, or even immediately they are on your business digital platforms.

Targeted messages can also be sent to visitors who are navigating your digital platforms. If a hey message pops up on your menu and Your visitor is a serious potential client looking for a service from your business then he will not hesitate to respond to the chat. This makes your business sales cycle much faster since the customer does not have to physically come to your business premises for answers, or even contact your live chat sales team that is asleep in the late-night hours.

Step 2: Understand The lead.

Typically email marketing has always been the formal method in which businesses get to contact leads. A business website usually displays capture and subscription forms on their website to capture client details, relevant information, and their email. The website visitors who fill in these forms are then contacted by the sales support team through email. This, unfortunately, could take days, weeks, months until a client response is received. Well, with website chatbots and social media chatbots like facebook messenger this has all changed and client responses can be made in real-time within that second of the client accessing your digital channels. After contact, engagement, and communication have been established with a lead, nurturing the lead becomes the next step with the digital marketing needs of your business. With pre-programmed chatbot questions, your business can inquire about the services that your client needs immediately and what kind of service they would like to be offered. This saves a lot of time in the business sales and inquiry cycle.

Chatbots are bots that act as a representation of your companies marketing team and they ask questions on your companies behalf. Your chatbot must be preprogrammed to ask relevant questions that will enable your business to understand your website visitor's needs more. This eventually reduces the amount of time that your business will take to complete a sales cycle. 

Step 3: Recommend and redirect the conversation to relevant company representatives or online resources.

Automated Bots are awesome intelligent tools for your business to use in conversational marketing but nothing ever truly beats human-to-human interaction when it comes to completing a sale, since customers would trust a human voice or chat more thus enabling them to purchase your business products. This does not entirely chatbots useless, since the chatbots are an intermediary between your business team and your potential customer. Chatbots are used to intelligently redirect a conversation to different departments of your organization that will provide your potential client with information well suited for their needs, based on their inquiries. Visitors and leads that have a high interest in the products that your business is offering are directed to the sales team for further sales and transaction support to enable a customer to choose and buy the right product from your business. Some leads may not be so sure of the service they would like from your business, and could just be making inquiries. These can be directed to your business's support or inquiries team. They can also be sent relevant reliable online content with more details of the requirements that the customer could need. This helps shorten the sales cycle of your business.

Step 4:  Redirect Conversation to the sales team.

Only qualified leads are routed and redirected to your sales representative to ensure a faster sales cycle. Leads that do not seem interested in your company’s goods and services are disqualified and redirected to other departments of your business, in order for the sales representative to concentrate on only qualified leads.

Step 5: Set up a Meeting, Booking /Order

When proper communication has been established with your business and potential client, it is the job for the company’s sales representative to convince your lead to purchase a product from your business. The conversational marketing strategy is incomplete until a booking, meeting or transaction is made.

With conversational marketing both automated chat and human live chat are used to speed up your business sales cycle and in turn generate more revenue for your business. Leads are quickly nurtured and attended to in a more personalized live chat approach which makes it easier for them to be converted into revenue-generating clients for your business.

Aditional Resources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_marketing/

What is Conversational Marketing? Definition, Examples and Best Practices For Developing A Winning Conversational Marketing Strategy