Marketing strategies are undergoing a sea change now. Brands are getting bewildered about how they should better interact with customers and prospects. The latter have become more demanding, looking for consistence and more personalized treatment. Marketers, as a result, have realized that they need to engage in truly relevant conversations across a broader range of communication channels to ensure higher levels of brand loyalty and retention.

Unfortunately, for many brands, email is still considered as the only digital marketing channel, maybe with mobile and social media occasionally thrown in. Over and above, traditional channels like direct mail, point-of-sale, call center, etc have also become an essential part of marketing mix for many. To make matters worst, some brands continue to implement lone marketing tactics in communication silos, devastating consistency of messages, thus making a mess of their campaigns.

However, to better engage in consistent, integrated and personalized one-to-one conversations with customers across a developing spectrum of channels, today’s marketers need to go for a technology that can provide automation of key marketing processes. This obviously entails availability of all customer data in order to gain one-to-one personalization. The right solution, incidentally, requires a powerful technological platform, especially one that is capable of creating full range of marketing functions across traditional and emerging channels.

Conversational Marketing Tips

Those of you who feel less conversant with conversational marketing, here are few tips you may truly rely on.

• As a first step, find out if your company has a presence in most of the social media platforms that prove pertinent to your industry. If not, get it done right away, since customers now look for companies on Facebook, Twitter, etc so that they could communicate with you. Needless to say, such communication invariably results in an action.
• Blogs, no doubt, enhances the reputability of a company but also opens up a useful communication window for all. Any potential customer commenting on your blog leads to direct communication between you and the would-be buyer. So, post blogs regularly and check for comments.
• Provide visual content of your products or services across sites such as Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, etc as this can immediately attract customers to communicate with you for information about the graphics displayed on these catchy sites.
• Use social media channels for distributing posts and promotional messages in the form of ‘press releases’ and then find out if these have created adequate interest in viewers. If not, change the topics after hearing what the viewers have said. This will break the communication gap between you and your prospective buyer.
• Develop your influence in a slow but steady fashion, but always keep yourself open for comments. Customers often like to tease the vendors by asking unpleasant questions. Nevertheless, these are congenial for a communication network where others also tend to participate.
• Since these strategic issues, albeit looking quite simple are actually pretty sensitive matters and so never ever let these to be handled by junior members of your company. One wrong step can lead to serious disruption of your online reputation. So, either do it yourself or depute a responsible person to handler these matters. Also remember that a high level of familiarity with social media issues is necessary for tackling most of the tips mentioned above.

Conclusion:

Conversation marketing is highly iterative, internet-driven marketing where customer needs drive design, content and technology; analysis drives changes, and customers form long-term participants.