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Conversational Marketing

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR SMALL BUSINESS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Ultimate Guide to Conversational Marketing

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. 

guide to conversational marketing

Crafting your conversational marketing strategy

Every business requires good quality sales leads that convert prospects into customers. Conversational marketing allows you to both widen your sales funnel to capture more leads, and then qualify those leads so you can focus on those prospects most likely to become customers. 
 
Breaking the strategy down into steps allows you to measure each aspect of your conversational marketing strategy and measure the results. Learn how to plan the first three steps of your strategy here.
 

Conversational Marketing: what it is and why you need it

Conversational marketing isn’t just an online strategy and requires more than digital tools. Regardless of whether you’re connecting with customers online, over the phone or in person, the conversational approach should permeate everything you do.

Customer-driven marketing is the way to deliver sustainable results, and that starts with a conversation that involves the customer throughout the sales process.

Learn more about what that means for your business.

Why conversational marketing matters for small businesses

Small businesses thrive because they offer customers the personal touch.  Conversational marketing allows everyone in the team to maximise their time and that’s particularly important in a small business where everyone’s time is valuable.

Discover how this marketing approach could benefit your bottom line.

Picking the right tools for your conversational marketing strategy

When you’re looking for the best software for conversational marketing – sometimes called messenger marketing software – it pays to start by thinking about what you want to achieve. From there you can consider which tactics will be most effective and can research the best tools for your business.
 
 
In this chapter learn more about how to pick the right tools for your business.
 

Getting started with conversational marketing

The first step is to think about all the opportunities you currently have to engage with customers. Then think about all the opportunities you’re currently missing. The aim is to plug those gaps.

Before you invest in any software or start speaking to providers, think about your strategy and the tactics that will best deliver against those plans. This will ensure that when you’re ready to invest, you aren’t sold a solution that isn’t fit for purpose.

 More on how to start your conversational marketing strategy here.
 
The best way to think about how to begin a conversation online is to consider how you present yourself and your business in the real world. 
 
For some businesses, it might be appropriate to start with a friendly hello. In other cases, a more formal opening may be more effective to appeal to the audience you want to reach.
 
 Learn why it’s worth taking the time with the copy to personalise as much as possible.
 
Keep a close eye on the performance of all your marketing channels – conversational marketing can deliver rapid and dramatic results but that doesn’t mean you should abandon all avenues for business development. 
 
The initial aim of introducing conversational marketing may be improved interaction with customers, but that only matters if it’s delivering sales.
 
This chapter walks you through the hows and whys of keeping on top of your numbers.
 

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.

Discover some examples of current conversational marketing success.
 
Inbound marketing has immense value in getting customers to your site, but conversational marketing can help to inform the tactics. 
 
Conversational marketing also makes companies more accessible, and this is something that social media can achieve.
 
Learn more about the differences between these two types of marketing and how they work together.
 

Get more leads and sales from your conversational 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.

 The best marketing strategies are scaleable. This means as your business grows, your marketing strategies flex to meet the wider market.  Learn the tactics for optimising your marketing strategy.
 
getting started with conversational marketing