Conversational marketing: the new frontier of customer engagement for brands
A new trend is currently unfolding and luckily for you, it’s still early enough for your brand to reap the benefits of early adoption.
Conversational marketing is here and if trends are to be believed, it’s here to stay.
Looking at the development of customer engagement, you first had the one-on-one personal interaction in shops. Eventually, phone-based customer service started gaining ground. This later gave way as the internet later opened up the world of e-commerce and websites. Following this was social media through social selling and ads.
Now, all of this is converging into something called conversational marketing. It has elements of personalised interaction enabled through the internet but powered through artificial intelligence.
Still not convinced that everything is heading towards a conversational strategy? Just take a hard look around you. Notice that more and more websites are starting to have chat pop ups on the lower right? Or how about more and more people calling out to their “Alexas” or “Siris” to help them with something?
It may not be everywhere yet, but the trend is unmistakable, and this just means that doing something about it now will allow you to benefit from the first mover advantage. This is why your brand should start thinking about how to incorporate conversational marketing to your customer engagement. Below are three customer engagement strategies you can implement.
The latest trend for brands and magazines? Voice search and voice apps.
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Chatbots
In the past, chatbots were ineffective. You could really tell that they were bots mostly because of their subpar understanding of human commands or queries. More often than not, it provided the wrong answers. This was further aggravated by the emotionless responses given.
However, developments in cognitive technology has improved the way chatbots interpret customers’ responses and now provides accurate, automated answers. At the same time software designed to program these chatbots let companies type in the response allowing you to infuse a bit of personality to your chatbots.
Magazine publishers and brands can use chatbots in their apps, social media channels or even in their website. It can be a way to make 24/7 live customer support more affordable and scalable. One practical way you can use chatbots is to engage potential subscribers by making your chatbot popup automatically in your website or subscription page when a visitor passes by.
Live chat
Gone are the days when live chat is reserved solely for tech companies or banks. People are more keen to get their questions or problems resolved as soon as possible, so having a live chat function can be a big plus for your brand.
Magazines, publications and various brands need to start thinking about how live chat can be incorporated: not just as a reactive customer support function, but it should play a more proactive role more akin to sales and marketing functions. To adopt this, you need to empower your live chat representatives to be able to lead your potential customers or subscribers through your sales funnel. This means they need content, scripts, sales training, and be empowered to provide promotions and ad-hoc subscription packages.
Voice apps
Lastly, something that’s really in its early stages is voice apps. These are apps developed for smart speakers as well as devices that have a voice assistant which have been growing in popularity exponentially. Having a voice app allows your digital magazine or brand content to be accessible through smart speakers.
A voice app for your brand puts you even closer to your customers. It would be highly beneficial for you to have one now to take advantage of the benefits of early indexing. Remember that only one search result is provided in voice search and getting indexed now puts you at an advantage to come up as the first result on voice searches.
