Step 3: Build your team

For your inbound marketing to be successful, you’ll need to plan how all of this gets done. This means building processes and creating a clear meeting cadence. Explain how much your products and services conversation marketing definition cost, especially what causes fluctuation in pricing. Explain to prospects why our offerings are either a good fit for their needs, or not a good fit (to weed out bad-fit leads from the start).

Automation helps power human agents and streamline the customer service experience. When simple, repetitive tasks are offloaded to a bot, human agents are provided the required information and given more time to resolve complex issues. Spend time making sure that all conversations fully satisfy customer needs.

Build Out All Conversation Trees

Conversational marketing isn’t new — we have conversations every day, and as you saw from the timeline above, it’s been that way for a while. So why wouldn’t we use tools that optimize conversations for business? Conversational marketing is effective because it provides fast and personalized customer interaction while saving agent time and energy. Many contact center providers, like Zendesk and Intercom, offer outbound marketing campaign flow tools, where you can outline and visualize all possible customer journeys through your lead nurturing sequence. Today’s consumers intuitively engage with automated and live messaging interfaces, because they use these channels all the time socially and because NLU has become lifelike. To outpace your competitors and improve team morale, rely on conversational marketing to meet customer expectations for efficient query resolution.

Inbound is far and away the most effective B2B marketing strategy. Simply put, it’s built to attract, engage, and delight customers with meaningful content that provides sought-after solutions and connections. Word-of-mouth marketing is when a consumer’s interest in a company’s product or service is reflected in their daily dialogues. Essentially, it is free advertising triggered by customer experiences—and usually, something that goes beyond what they expected. Sprout’s Bot Builder enables brands to streamline the conversation and map out these experiences based on simple, rules-based logic.

All Your Tools Together

And what’s really great about conversational marketing is that it’s not an all-or-nothing kind of marketing strategy. And your conversational marketing strategy will look a little different in each area of your business. Check out how Databox has a sidebar Chatbot on their homepage to get qualified leads. And they also start building the relationship with the user right away in the chat. Live Chat is software or an app you can add to your business website.

Word of mouth referrals, press mentions, backlinks, social shares, by-lined articles you contributed to a trade publication, etc., are all examples of earned media in action. Each is an effective way to increase brand awareness, web traffic and conversions, but there’s more. While there is a common misperception that it’s a stand-alone approach, on-page and off-page SEO leverages many marketing tactics to build a solid foundation for effective inbound marketing. However, unlike inbound, the approach does not integrate other marketing methodologies to create experiences that build and strengthen business-buyer relationships. Tailored content can take the form of infographics, pillar pages, podcasts, blogs, white papers, webinars, eBooks.

Content marketing is good for your bottom line — and your customers

These resources will help your business make its inbound marketing strategy far more effective and actually worth all the time and effort you’re putting into it. Sophisticated chatbots used natural language processing and machine learning to engage with prospects and clients. They can qualify a prospect, address client concerns, and make product recommendations. Instead of removing all forms from your site, you might start adding live chat and chatbots as a secondary feature.

Your thoughtful email lay forgotten under a pile of spam and promotional messages. Increased consumer spending with lower operating costs means greater sales revenue. Traditional marketing approaches are all about making a sale–any sale, to anyone, at any time, and as quickly as possible. Visit my mainSmart Insights Digital Marketing Strategy site to download planning templates, strategy guides and daily updates on the latest developments.

For example, depending on your market, you might want to limit your social listening efforts by geography. If you run a local business in Iowa, you might not be concerned about the conversation in Greece. Good social listening is all about choosing the most relevant keywords for your brand. You’ll be able to monitor conversations around your brand while analyzing the engagement, reach, comments, and sentiment behind them. Talkwalker offers robust social listening features that analyze blogs, forums, videos, news sites, review sites, and social networks all in one dashboard. Hootsuite also allows you to keep an ear to the ground in your industry by monitoring the competition and building relationships with social media creators (a.k.a. influencers) and potential brand advocates.

Know the audience and the questions they are likely to ask when building branches to lead users down, depending on their inputs. Learn more about that visitor by organically placing questions about who they are and what they are interested in. This could enrich their record in a database, but also allow the answers displayed to connect people with a brand. With a live representative, there is an added benefit of having real-time communication with someone on the other end. This lends itself well to customer support issues or helping prospects who are at various stages of their customer journey get real-time answers from a person. Human-to-human connection is important for establishing trust and longevity in those relationships.

This can cover customer interactions such as telephone or chat conversations with your call center, social conversations, third-party reviews, and more. By analyzing phone calls, chat logs, and more, you can see the full scope of customer feedback, both from what they give you directly and what they’re saying indirectly in conversations. You can analyze conversations for intent, effort, and emotion, meaning you’re able to get a deeper understanding of what drives your customers and take action to overcome objections in the future.