What is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing is a customer-centric marketing approach that involves having real-time one-to-one conversations to connect with current and potential customers, converting them to clients and gaining insights. It’s a hybrid alternative to the currently popular one-to-many approach that companies use for campaigns, such as social marketing and the dreaded form/email/phone tree system consumers must navigate and wait through before receiving answers.

Why Use It?

The yell-to-sell approach of big marketing campaigns, especially on social media, doesn’t cut it anymore. According to a 2014 survey conducted by The McCarthy Group, 84% of millennials dislike advertisements, and 64% of millennials don’t trust ads. With younger generations distrusting traditional advertisements, a company’s brand is becoming more important than ever. These consumers also expect more from companies and brands. They want companies to be authentic, interact with them, and provide all the information they need about a product before deciding whether to purchase it.

Conversational marketing addresses these issues head-on by engaging with the consumer directly and taking control of the personal message and persona presented to them.

Conversational marketing can be done either through human-to-human interaction or human-to-chatbot interaction.

Real-Human Conversations vs. Chatbots and Scalability

It makes sense that consumers would rather talk with a real human than with a computer. For small businesses and startups, it’s entirely possible to give consumers the level of personal attention they want, thanks to the limited number of customers demanding their attention at one time. Talking to a real person allows consumers to get their questions answered in the quickest and most effective way possible. Unfortunately, this is tough to scale as a company grows. While most companies wish they could dedicate the resources to maintain this level of interaction at scale, it’s just not viable. That’s where chatbots come in.

Chatbots are computer programs designed to have simple conversations, with varying levels of natural language processing. While not (currently) as ideal as a real person, chatbots allow the practice of conversational marketing to scale, as a company doesn’t need one employee for every simultaneous consumer interaction. Additionally, there are advantages to using chatbots in conjunction with—or instead of—humans. For one, chatbots respond instantaneously, so there’s no waiting for someone to type out a response or search for an answer. Chatbots are also available 24/7, giving consumers an image of an “always-active” company, ready to assist them at any time. Without chatbots, consumers would be stuck with a traditional “contact us” page and a waiting period for a response.

The Future

With the rise of artificial intelligence, chatbots are becoming smarter and more prevalent, not just in marketing but in everyday life. Gartner predicts that by 2020, the average person will have more conversations with chatbots than with their spouse. The level of human-like conversation and personalization enabled by AI-driven insights will foster wider adoption of conversational marketing, making it more appealing to both businesses and consumers. While the current medium of choice for conversational marketing is messaging, the channel is adapting to include voice conversations with virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Gartner predicts that by 2020, virtual agents will participate in a majority of commercial interactions between people and businesses.