There’s quite some buzz in business circles about shifting from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach. It essentially means a business strategy designed not around technology and innovation, but the customer. It’s about understanding their concerns, pain points, and expectations and designing products and services to address those needs.
A standout aspect of the customer-centric approach is its focus on two-way interactions with the customer. Here, conversations flow naturally, relationships are valued and nurtured, and marketing efforts change from a monologue to a warm, inviting conversation.
Welcome to the World of Conversational Marketing!
What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is a dialogue-driven approach that uses real-time interactions to engage customers and move them quickly down the sales funnel. It is a means of forging genuine and mutually-profitable connections between a brand and its customers.
Unlike traditional marketing which is mostly one-sided communication, conversational marketing flips the script by bringing the customer to centerstage and giving him a chance to respond. We’re talking about chatbots, messaging apps, live chats, telephone calls, and other interfaces that bridge the gap between a business and its customers.
The beauty of conversational marketing lies in its ability to meet customers at a place or platform of their choosing. Whether you’re browsing social media, using messaging apps, or exploring a website, conversational marketing enables seamless and instant communication with a brand. It’s somewhat like having a personal concierge addressing your queries, guiding you through the purchase journey, and making your experience memorable.
At its core, conversational marketing is about building relationships. It’s about knowing the customer, understanding their needs, and providing personalized solutions. This empathetic and customer-centric approach makes marketing feel less like a sales pitch and more like a friendly chat.
What are the Advantages of Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing offers many benefits that can transform your business’s customer engagement approach.
Let’s take a closer look at the chief advantages:
1. Improves Customer Experience
Say goodbye to frustrating customer support experiences! Conversational marketing allows for real-time, fruitful, and personalized interactions. It enables businesses to respond to customer queries and concerns instantly, leading to a more satisfying and interactive customer experience.
2. Boosts Lead Generation and Qualification
Conversational marketing makes it easier for businesses to capture and qualify leads. You can gather essential data about prospective customers by asking relevant questions during a conversation, understanding their needs better, and tailoring your offerings accordingly.
3. Increases Sales
Conversational marketing can significantly improve conversion rates by offering immediate responses and personalized solutions. It helps reduce the time taken to move a lead through the sales funnel, thereby increasing the likelihood of making a sale.
4. Enhances Customer Insights
Conversations aren’t just for chit-chat; they offer valuable insights too! When you engage with customers through chatbots or live chats, you gather valuable data about their preferences, pain points, and expectations. Analyzing these conversations lets you fine-tune your business strategies, enhance products or services, and tailor experiences to meet specific customer needs.
Differentiating between UI & UX
Unless you’re a newbie to digital marketing, you will have heard the terms UI and UX being used heavily. Site owners often use the two interchangeably, leading to a muddled up understanding of two very different aspects of experience design. Clarify any confusion you might have about these two concepts with our simple definitions below:
User Interface (UI)
User Interface or UI encompasses all elements that facilitate interaction between users and softwares or systems. It includes the general aesthetic, page design, sounds, responsiveness, buttons, etc. The interface of any system or website can be considered as a subset of the larger experience of a user. UI can be made up of screens, pages, buttons, icons, and so on.
User Experience (UX)
On the other hand, User Experience relates to a more comprehensive design system that dictates the emotional and cognitive experience of using your website. UX relates to how a user will feel while interacting with your website. For e.g., Duolingo gamifies a user’s experience of learning a language by creating leaderboards and tasks, while relying on UI to create a design system that embodies this gamified experience.
How User Experience impacts SEO
User Experience impacts your site’s performance by directly affecting session duration, average pages visited per session, and ratio of new to returning users. A confusing site with outdated content and design is bound to leave the visitor with an unsatisfactory experience; deterring a repeat visit to your web page.
Investing in building a seamless user experience facilitates movement of visitors between pages, allowing them to find the information they need or in completion of a task, finally leading to a satisfying experience on your website. This leads to improved performance across SEO metrics, reduced page abandonment, and increased conversions.
If you’re unsure about where to start, a handy tool to spot issues in your website is Google’s Search Console. It can help pinpoint areas of improvement and possible hurdles in your webflows.
The Final Word
Once you realize the importance of UX in site performance, it becomes hard to overlook. Setting ground rules and following UX hygiene practices can leave your website in a much better place than when you just started. A good rule of thumb to follow while thinking about UX is reducing cognitive load.
Remember your users are often using the web to finish tasks and whoever helps them best, will win their trust.
UX design is often an iterative process that is rehashed and refreshed frequently with the help of recent site data and metrics. Use what you currently know and refine every user’s experience on your site starting today!
