Marketing < 5 Minutes
Conversational Marketing

The Essence of Conversational Marketing

This less than 5-minute video was created to get you started thinking about a conversational marketing strategy. It is what it sounds like it is. This is how things used to get done before the Internet. We used to go into stores, and we were greeted by real people. They asked us questions, like “what brought you in today?” or “can I help you find something?”. It was a personal experience. We finally have the technology that allows us to ask website visitors compelling, relevant questions, and respond in a conversational way.

Conversations Develop More Qualified Leads

Conversational marketing and sales are facilitated by robots, a.k.a. chatbots. These bots are very different from live chat. Live Chat often is limited by your ability to staff, and when nobody is available – the experience is poor. A chatbot asks qualifying questions in real time, 24/7. And today, everything is 100% about immediacy. It’s about having an ever-present, intelligent and engaging customer experience. It may seem nuanced, but for web visitors, there is a drastic difference between filling out a form and having a chatbot attend to you with purposeful questions, instant answers, and action.

From a business owner’s perspective, a chatbot can enable a more efficient sales team. Chatbots are really good at collecting customer data, better than most humans. They are consistently methodical, so the right questions get asked every time. They can also provide value in ways that are more difficult for sales representatives. For example, if the visitor needs a link to a resource or a particular PDF, the chatbot will present it within the chat at that exact moment. At some point, most visitors are going to need to talk to sales reps or customer support personnel. And when that time comes, the chatbot will have gathered enough information to make the customer support person’s job easier or improve the sales person’s conversion rate.

The biggest advantage of a chatbot is they can record all of the things a visitor requests or mentions. Often times, that’s where you discover pain points you wouldn’t have otherwise known existed.

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Conversational Marketing Video Script

Hey this is John-Scott and this is marketing in 2 minutes or less and I’ll try to keep it at that, okay?

So today I’m sitting here, it’s a Sunday morning and I’m thinking about all of you that have websites and that probably 95% of you are still what I would classify brochureware.
And it’s not a bad thing, that’s where most of us are at this point and what that means is you’ve got a store; you love the color scheme, you love the layout, you’ve taken great care to put your products and services in a place that it’s not your product and service but the information about it, that your visitors can come in and jump into a room and learn about those things but it’s a very sterile experience because there’s nobody there to greet them.

We’ve tried things like live chat, right?

But the live chat experience falls flat because it’s typically, ‘somebody will get back to you within 3 hours or 1 business day’ or ‘sorry we’ve closed for today, but we’ll be back tomorrow in these business hours,’ and that’s generally the experience unless you can afford to have staff at 24/7, right?

So, what’s the alternative? Well, that’s where conversation marketing starts to happen. And what that means is using artificial intelligence, they call them a ton of different things, but it’s a bot. It’s designed to be helpful and so when somebody comes in, regardless of who they are as a persona, right? So you’ve got all sorts of different types of people that want your products and services and they’re all at different stages of their customer life cycle, so you wouldn’t necessarily know- if you build a website it’s really hard to build it so that it knows, ‘oh it’s this persona at this part of their journey stage, so I want to give them this kind of information.’
You don’t have that, so you really need to rely on their input to say and answer your questions in a way that says, ‘oh, it’s probably this persona and they’re probably at this stage and here are some things I can do to make their life easier in grappling with our library of products and services.’

The other big part of it is immediacy, so I’ll give you a quick example. Generally what happens when you come to a website [or a landing page], if you want to make an appointment to get a demonstration or talk to somebody about the product or service, you’re going to find a form, you’re going to fill it out, and if it’s a Friday because you just got to your stuff, nobody’s going to read this until maybe probably Monday or Tuesday of next week and by the time they get back with me and arrange an appointment it might be a week from now versus in a more conversational environment when it reaches the point where the AI doesn’t think it can help you but it has a good idea of what you want and recommends that a human intervene, it might either immediately hook you up with a chat, right? So, you can have somebody, a live human come in at that point but if they’re not available it might recommend setting up an appointment, meaning rather than fill out a form it’ll say would you like to see the availability of our reps and choose a date and time that would be convenient for you. So, rather than wondering if someone’s going to get back to me, it might pull up a calendar that says ‘here’s availability on Monday at 10:30 am’ and you can book that slot. Book it, right? Chatbots will do things like that.

They’ll also throughout the conversation look for opportunities to say, ‘by the way, what’s your name?’ or ‘hey, what’s a good email address to reach you at?’ So we can start to capture leads in a more effective manner and really, that’s how marketing gets measured. And just wanted to point that out to you, introduce you to conversational marketing, if you haven’t thought about it and as always, you can reach out to me and we can go into more detail. Hope your day’s going great, take care!