Is conversational marketing a trend or a tried and true must-have? While the final verdict may still be out, there’s mounting evidence that using this real-time, feedback-oriented approach to nurturing leads is well worth exploration. For all companies? Maybe not all. But...if your customer is a human who asks questions on her own terms and timelines and she first approaches your business through a website or digital content, then take a few minutes to read on.
The basics: What is conversational marketing?
Conversational Marketing is a feedback-oriented approach that utilizes real-time, chat-based conversation (“chatbots”) to engage potential buyers while they are interacting with your website landing pages or interactive digital content.
This approach can be used to discover where your buyers are in the sales funnel and determine the best recommendation to move them along the customer journey. Chatbot interactions can be a productive way to help audiences get what they need from their site visits, identify and qualify prospects, and create brand-consistent experiences.
At scale, this tech-enabled mechanism for sorting leads and moving qualified prospects deeper into the sales funnel can be a game changer. This isn’t just a B2B thing. If you sell a product B2C that isn’t 100% impulse-driven or that has some underlying science/substance (much of the RevUp e-commerce portfolio falls into this camp), getting a customer engaged and comfortable quickly can be the difference in capturing a sale or not.
How Can Conversational Marketing Help?
With the evolution of programmatic advertising and AI, chatbots allow website conversation to take place 24/7 without requiring people as frontline customer support. Chatbot messaging can be fast, familiar, and personal. Or, it can be frustrating, unfamiliar and off-putting when done poorly. Which experience you give/get depends a lot on YOU, and a little on the tools you use to implement.
Here’s the deal: chatbots are only as good as the insights and programming that drives them. If your understanding of your customer and the journey she’s on is shoddy, don’t expect a chatbot to fix that. Chatbots work best when the bot and the customer journey are in sync. This is challenging work that for most companies is part of an ongoing and iterative process.
The upside of mastering conversational marketing tools can be well worth the effort: The real-time functionality of chatbots allows businesses to segment their website traffic quickly and work on converting leads that are most likely to buy. Integrations with major CRMs allow these leads to be tracked and pursued with additional nurture methods as well. While not every lead will close via chatbot alone, programmatic segmentation can trigger non-programmatic touchpoints to better advance customers through the funnel.
Even if your customer journey map is a work in progress, there’s value here to be mined. Companies still refining their customer insights can use chatbots to gather real world data on what customers are thinking, doing and feeling. If you can engage a prospect in a conversation—even a short one—you can use bots in different ways to answer open questions that are harder to answer with static tracking tools and site analytics.
Recently, we’ve seen chatbot technology integrated directly into digital content—think white paper or blog post with an on-the-ready bot that can direct you to the information you want or (best case!) move you seamlessly from the content into the sales funnel. This is now being called conversational content and we think there’s a huge amount of untapped potential here to make content MUCH more effective at driving conversion.
If that use case feels a bit too ambitious for your company, these are the most common ways we see companies getting their feet wet with chatbots:
Schedule meetings with prospects into your calendar
Route traffic to appropriate website content based on need
Generate a handoff to human support where/if appropriate
Create a customer support ticket
Identify repeat visitors to the page and send a customized message
Clarify information to browsers as they are on page
Assist in understanding gated content alongside an active chat
Conversational marketing is not a set it and forget it activity. Like most marketing tools, you need to practice and refine your approach before you get it right. Some of the best chatbot providers know this and have support “guardrails” built into their customer on-boarding strategy. If you are part of the RevUp portfolio, you know that data-driven experimentation is a powerful and necessary step in putting any new approach to work. Integrating conversational marketing into your growth plan is no exception to the rule: execution without experimentation is a fool’s errand.
Conversational marketing is not a set it and forget it activity. Like most marketing tools, you need to practice and refine your approach before you get it right. Some of the best chatbot providers know this and have support “guardrails” built into their customer on-boarding strategy. If you are part of the RevUp portfolio, you know that data-driven experimentation is a powerful and necessary step in putting any new approach to work. Integrating conversational marketing into your growth plan is no exception to the rule: execution without experimentation is a fool’s errand.
Chatbot technology can be used at different stages of company development and for different purposes. If you’d asked us a few years ago if chatbots were effective tools for customer discovery-related activities, we’d have said no. But in the right hands and with the right experimental protocol, chatbots are a powerful, data gathering tool for deepening your connection with target customers.
Start small. Using conversational marketing is not an all-or-nothing endeavor. If you want to take the plunge, pick a discrete part of your customer journey and limit your initial experimentation to that. This way, you’ll be controlling for variables and narrowing your scope, thereby increasing the chances you can make sense of what you learn to ultimately boosts sales!
On the topic of conversation content...If content is a central part of your strategy, new chatbot tools can bring static content to life in new ways. Check out this post from Drift to learn more. https://www.drift.com/blog/conversational-content/
There’s a growing group of providers to look at. Here are just a few.
Learn More About Conversational MarketingAbout RevUp Capital
RevUp Capital is non-equity investment for companies moving fast up a revenue-driven growth curve. We pair cash investment with support from the RevUp Growth Platform, a science-based and battle-tested approach to accelerating growth. Companies also receive active support from RevUp leadership, an experienced team with more than 130 investments under management.
For more information, please visit www.revupfund.com or via email at info@revupfund.com.
About RevUp Capital
RevUp Capital is non-equity investment for companies moving fast up a revenue-driven growth curve. We pair cash investment with support from the RevUp Growth Platform, a science-based and battle-tested approach to accelerating growth. Companies also receive active support from RevUp leadership, an experienced team with more than 130 investments under management.