You may have heard of conversational marketing, and perhaps you’ve dismissed it as nothing more than the latest buzzword but if that’s the case, you may be missing out on sales. Conversational marketing is the latest evolution in marketing, one that responds to customer needs, and can be used to produce more leads and more sales. If you’re a business owner or a pro-marketer, you need to know about conversational marketing and the potential it has to transform your business.

If you’re tired of filling your information into lead generation forms just to wait for a reply, then you’ll understand why conversational marketing is so effective. It uses targeted, real-time scheduling and intelligent chatbots to replace sometimes impersonal processes. This means that you’re responding to customers when they want a response, not just when your business is open. This approach puts the customer right at the heart of your communications and that can yield powerful results.

Conversational marketing isn’t just about speeding up the sales process – although that’s a great benefit. It’s bigger than any single channel or platform. It’s all about creating a dialogue with your customers, listening and responding to their requirements. Whether that’s via your website or in a face-to-face meeting, it’s an approach that can yield better results because it allows you to tailor your marketing messages to each customer.

Tailoring your marketing doesn’t mean creating thousands of different products and solutions or re-inventing the wheel each time. It just means that if a customer tells you that they’re interested in a specific aspect of your offering, you start there rather than plodding through the same steps each time, which may risk losing their interest.

The great advantage is that rather than blasting out a marketing message and demanding the customer takes action, you can be more proactive. Instead of waiting for people to respond to your latest creative campaign, you can take the lead and guide customers through the process.

People are wary of sales calls, and weary of the same old online tactics. Conversational marketing adds a new layer of sophistication to your marketing strategy as well as the personal touch to all your communications and can yield great results.

If you’ve seen a decline in the click rate of your emails and the response rate to your sales calls, then conversational marketing can be the way to revitalise your existing channels. Even if you’re not seeing a decline in your sales pipeline, conversational marketing can be a means to develop more quality leads, improve your conversion rates and exponentially grow your business.

Small business owners face so many challenges; the business environment is changing rapidly and new start-ups and disruptors are adding more competition every day. Conversational marketing is a great way to stay close to your customers so that you can align your business to their changing needs. The personal touch goes a long way when retaining existing customers as well as gaining new ones.

In this guide, I’ll be taking you through what conversational marketing is, how to develop a strategy to suit your objectives, why it matters for small businesses and discuss some of the tools for deploying the strategy for your business. In addition, I’ll take you through some effective tactics, how to develop the right content for your marketing strategy and how to measure the success of your approach. I’ll also compare conversational marketing to traditional inbound marketing and discuss ways to optimise your approach. 

Each chapter of this guide to conversational marketing offers a specific insight into how to understand and start implementing this marketing strategy for your business. 

Crafting your conversational marketing strategy

Crafting copy for conversational marketing

Conversational Marketing Analytics

Amazing conversational marketing examples that you can swipe for yourself

The key to successful conversational marketing is to ask first how the solution benefits your customer and second, how it helps to fulfill organisational goals.

Some large organisations can provide inspiration for your own marketing strategy.

Conversational marketing vs. inbound marketing

The best part about conversational marketing is that the more you do it, the better you get. 

The more you learn, the more personalised the service you can deliver.