If you’ve been doing marketing long enough, digital or not, you’re probably very familiar with Conversational Marketing and never once felt its presence fade regardless of how the world has quickly gone digital. But if you started marketing using Google’s tools from the get-go such as Adwords and the Display Network, then you might have never gotten the chance at Conversational Marketing.
What exactly is conversational marketing?
In short, Conversational Marketing is about talking with your customer not, talking at them. It is in fact a very simple and core concept of any sort of marketing that became an untapped realm as we see a shift of interest towards digital ad buying and big data. Remember good ol’ girl scouts knocking on your doors to sell home-baked cookies? That’s a perfect example of what it’s about; reaching out and building a relationship with customers by conversing.
Why refer to it as being ‘resurrected’?
For the past few years, digital marketing has been heavily focused on mass ad buying, it’s been primarily about PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns and display advertising. Even today, there’s still a lot of interest in data technologies such as video ads, retargeting, DMPs (Data Management Platform) and DSPs (Demand Side Platform). Which is an amazing thing really, how we could now process huge amounts of data into meaningful information so fast.
When we talk about digital marketing, the first two terms that we think of are SEO and SEM, both of which it’s easy to see that Conversational Marketing is non-existent. These past couple of years we saw a shift in the search landscape with search engines switching to semantics and conversational search. With it, we see a decline in the importance of technical SEO and amplification in the importance of content and social marketing.
Now if you take a close look at content marketing and social marketing, you’ll quickly see what I mean by the ‘resurrection’ of conversational marketing. While Content Marketing sustains conversational marketing, Social Media Marketing is a huge enforcer of the discipline. Comments and interactions on a Facebook post, for example is an important signal for search engines to determine how to rank that page and its related pages.
A Social Media Manager would understand the importance of conversations very well and the aspects of creating engaging content to prompt conversations and interest. Engaging content is in the realm of Content Marketing. Good content gets shared. Great content could go viral. And when it does, people will be talking about it. This is when it becomes a great opportunity for brand owners and representatives to jump in and join in the conversation to build relationship with the community.
And let’s not forget Email Marketing. Depending on your business and how you design your content strategy, email marketing should in fact be more than just a broadcast. A personalized message from another human being is always better than an email with no name attached to it.
Conversational Marketing is more than just selling your products and services. It’s about building a relationship with your customers and learning more about their needs.
“Conversational Marketing: It’s a two-way thing. Not a broadcast.”