Are you facing a rut when it comes to personal communications with your customers?
Automated chatbots driven by artificial intelligence is a common feature you see on many websites today. But in 2022, conversational marketing does not just mean chatbots. In fact, you may often find chatbots to be quite limited in use when the help you require extends beyond its fixed library of automated responses. According to HubSpot, 66% of consumers will feel more confident about purchases when a brand is available and active on a messaging app, and 55% will feel more connected to the brand. For that reason, it is imperative that you go beyond automated chatbots and integrate Conversational Marketing into your Digital Marketing strategies in order to deliver customer-centric experiences.
Why you should integrate Conversational Marketing into your Digital Marketing Strategy
📌 Build trust and rapport with your customers
As we become more digitally connected where you can buy almost anything with just a click, customers today are increasingly driven by excellent customer experience. What is going to make you stand out from the crowd is through personalised interactions, because that is how you develop trust and rapport with your customers.
In a famous quote by Maya Angelou, she said, “people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”. If mistakes are made, it is crucial that you make it up to your customers and ensure that they feel satisfied with your products and services. Very often, the first point of complaint customers go to is through direct message either on messaging apps or on social media, in hopes of getting a quick response and solution to their problem. This is a pivotal moment that could either make or break the relationship you have with your customer, depending on your response and the speed of your reply. Take this opportunity to establish trust and build rapport. Bring your conversation to the next level by being personal and not simply relying based off a list of already written ‘recommended replies’. Doing so will make your customers feel closer to you, and as a result, develop a more trusting relationship.
📌 It’s convenient for both you and your customers
As you begin to get personal with your customers through conversations, you would realise that such direct messaging also encourages informal interactions that are more candid. Speed is also another key function of these messaging apps. What this essentially translates to is that you can provide personalised services for your customers in a quick, sincere and convenient way.
Particularly, these asynchronous types of messaging allows customers to pick up where they left off in your conversation with them, at any time to their convenience. You would also be able to understand the context of the conversation and avoid repeating information that has already been transmitted to your customers. Doing so would enable your customers to feel that they are truly talking to a real person behind your brand, adding that element of human touch. Coupled with the convenience, be assured that your customers will be receiving high-quality customer-centric experiences.
How can you implement Conversational Marketing?
1️⃣ Integrate it with your omni channel initiatives
A strong Conversational Marketing strategy starts with looking at your customer journey map. By highlighting how your customers are interacting with your brand at each stage would give you insights as to how you can tailor your conversations to each individual with more accuracy. Coming in at particular stages to strike a conversation with your customers and providing help specific to that buyer stage would showcase your willingness to take steps to make your customers’ lives easier, henceforth impressing your customers.
The omni channel integration also plays a huge role when looking at the customer journey map. Understanding where the conversations can overlap between your offline and online channels would open you up a multitude of opportunities for personalised customer experience. This is also a common practice in the Hotel industry where special arrangements are always made for guests, often which are enabled through online conversations.
2️⃣ Voice messaging for business
Another way you can look beyond chatbots in Conversational Marketing is through voice messaging. Oftentimes, it is easy to misunderstand the tone behind a typed-written message. However, for a fact that speaking is one of the most natural and easiest ways to communicate, voice messaging would be able to point out the subtle nuances of emotions that go behind the messages. Be it analysing how your customer feels through their tone, or how you want to verbally communicate to your customers to signal certain values, professionalism or even humanisation, voice messaging is one of the more novel Conversational Marketing tools that will sure make you stand out.
3️⃣ Personalisation is the way forward
As you might have noticed, a prominent term that keeps surfacing in this article is ‘personalised’. Personalisation is critical for engaging with your consumers in a more human way, and this is imperative to capture the attention of your customers. Due to the sheer amount of content that is available at our fingertips, consumers today are prone to ignoring messages that are not relevant to them. Therefore, you would have to earn their consciousness with exceptional experiences and rich mobile engagements.
What can you do to get started?
At VKT, customer journey map is a strategic tool that we use often to help our clients gain a better understanding of their customers. For a fact that personalisation is key in Conversational Marketing, crafting out a customer journey map and persona is one of the first steps you can take. If you are unsure how you should best approach this strategy, consider VKT’s Brand & Marketing Strategic Transformation Programme where we would take you on a step-by-step journey to transform your strategies to boost sales.
With our experienced EDG Certified Consultant, VKT boasts a proven track record in achieving a high EDG application success rate with up to 80% funding. This maximum support level of up to 80% for the Enterprise Development Grant is valid till 31 March 2022. Let’s start your Conversational Marketing journey today with a coffee chat !
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