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Co-Founder and President of OptinMonster. Expert software architect with a deep knowledge of building products for the mass market.
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Even with the evolution of technology, people are still having conversations. We just do it over text or instant messaging now. Marketers have caught on to this and have started to integrate it into their strategies. Conversational marketing is the latest trend to evolve from it.
As a tech business, you’re all about the features, numbers and metrics. And that’s OK, since buyers do need to know that information. They also want to have a regular conversation with you about the benefits of your technology and get answers to specific questions. And they want it without having to scroll through multiple pages on your website.
Implementing a conversational marketing strategy can be a powerful tool for your tech business today. It has the potential to help you boost sales, reduce support timelines and decrease churn, all while offering a personalized experience to your customers.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can have helpful and personal conversations with tech buyers at scale.
What Is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is a modern, personalized approach for communication between brands, prospects and customers. It’s a way of engaging people online in marketing and sales funnels with clear and straightforward language as if they were having a conversation one-on-one. Some marketers describe it as a way to build relationships and create authentic experiences for customers and prospects.
Formal conversational marketing programs combine targeted messaging with intelligent chatbots to engage with people on your website. Companies use them to engage customers with simple, clear and natural-sounding language without selling to them. In the words of expert web copywriter and founder of Conversational Copywriting, Nick Usborne, it’s a way of being helpful and useful, even if your audience has no intention of buying anything from you right now.
While it’s called conversational marketing, it can influence more than just the initial discussions your tech company has with prospects or leads. Conversations occur across your entire business, including sales, support and customer success. Your initial point of contact may be the chatbot on your website, but the conversation is just the start of the journey.
People find it easier to engage with your tech business when you use conversational marketing because you’re offering value to them at every turn faster than the traditional funnels. People today don’t have time to move through the typical funnel, especially B2B buyers. It requires too many touchpoints and too much intervention that it prolongs the experience.
Conversational marketing helps you move people faster through their journey. You’ll increase conversion rates, boost customer satisfaction and lower churn rates. It helps make your tech business feel personal again.
Why Conversational Marketing Is Perfect For Tech
Conversational marketing is a way for tech companies to build better relationships, reduce the length of customer journeys and create authentic experiences for everyone who interacts with you. People will feel as if the journey was personalized just for them, saving them time and effort to get the information they need.
There are four main reasons why it works in tech, namely, that the conversations:
1. Happen On Customer Time: Conversational marketing enables asynchronous conversations because it lets tech companies have that conversation on customer time. It should be designed around the needs of the customer, not the needs of your tech business.
2. Are Scalable: Customers don’t care how many customers you’re talking to right now. They only care about your conversation with them. Tech businesses don’t need to sacrifice human interaction for scale anymore. Let bots handle those early conversations and leave the more in-depth ones to your people.
3. Have Context: Customers expect all conversations with you to have context. To do that, you’ve got to gather, store and make customer data accessible to your chatbot and anyone else speaking to customers. The more you know about your customers and the more you can demonstrate it in your conversations, the more helpful you’ll be.
4. Give You New Insights: Hearing directly from customers is precisely why sales teams schedule calls and software demonstrations with prospects and customers. They know how critical it is to hear directly from people in their own words. Just listen to what they say in their conversations with you.
Eight Ways To Implement Conversational Marketing
You can integrate conversational marketing into your next marketing campaign in a few easy steps.
• Start by writing content and copy that’s natural and engaging. Read the words out loud to see how it sounds. Not everything needs to be a sales pitch.
• Make every piece of content helpful and useful to readers. It should add value to your readers’ lives and workdays.
• Don’t hide behind technobabble or corporate-speak.
• Answer customer-specific questions wherever and whenever you can, such as in your FAQ page, blog posts and chatbot responses.
• Use a chatbot to reduce the load on support and sales teams. Ask lots of open-ended questions to encourage responses.
• Use customer responses to your chatbot as inspiration for new content.
• Integrate your tech stack to surface better insights about website visitors, prospects and leads.
• Recommend the best next step to move leads through your sales funnel. Your chatbot and email marketing apps can help with this.
Conversational marketing is not just a fad. It’s the evolution of the customer conversation into a more customer-centric philosophy. A philosophy that combines thoughtful, helpful and friendly communication with technology to offer customers a personalized experience and help you grow a successful tech business.