With the growth of ecommerce, brands are increasingly seeking to make their online conversations more engaging and relevant. This has led to the use of chatbots, agents, and other artificial intelligence tools for consumer interaction.
Conversational marketing is a methodology for capturing, qualifying, and converting leads based on a two-way dialogue. Using marketing automation tools like emails, text messages, agents, and chatbots, brands can start conversations with users, map pain points and interests, prompt them to take action, and make the customer experience simpler and more seamless.
If you recognized the essence of inbound marketing in this description, know that conversational marketing does indeed fit into these strategies. However, this method updates inbound marketing by emphasizing the customer's role and thus overcoming some challenges. More on this below:
Content delivery is quite frequent in inbound marketing. At key points in the purchasing journey, materials, products, and services are offered even if the user hasn't requested them.
Marketers know, however, that promoting in the wrong tone or at the wrong time can ruin months of work. Insisting can be even worse — the lead may feel pressured to buy or even feel deceived by previous conversations, leading to a cold shoulder.
In conversational marketing, the goal is to speak to customers when it’s best for them. Instead of promoting products, the priority is to generate engagement, establishing a presence, and putting the company on the same level of communication with the customer. And of course: the faster and more intuitive this exchange is, the better.
To effectively interact with leads, you need to manage their time, speak their language, and access their preferred channels. Even today, many brands define the purpose of each platform without taking into account user habits, which leads to frustration. More and more customers prefer to ask questions via WhatsApp, for example, rather than calling the customer service center.
In conversational marketing, the idea is to create interactions in a highly personalized way, allowing them to drive the conversation and the sale itself. This creates connection and a sense of exclusivity, delivering value in practice even before product marketing.
Marketing campaigns are designed for a mass audience. For large companies, each campaign can reach hundreds of thousands of leads — and even small businesses often reach more users than they can handle.
Consumers, however, expect a fast and personalized experience with the brand. After all, each person focuses solely on their own issues, even if the company is speaking to a thousand people at once.
In this sense, conversational marketing has come to enable large-scale, real-time marketing and customer service. Regardless of the tool used, companies no longer need to choose between expanding their operations and maintaining effective communication with their audience. It's increasingly possible to promote far-reaching campaigns, ensuring user feedback, improving the quality of interactions, and increasing the chances of conversion..
To continue the conversation with a lead on any channel, you need to have control over all their previous interactions with the brand. Therefore, conversational marketing technology meets a fundamental omnichannel need: building the customer truth, or a 360 view that unifies their data and facilitates access across any device.
In addition to allowing your teams to "take ownership" of the lead at any point in the buying journey, the 360 view familiarizes the brand with the lead and points out ways to personalize interactions. In other words, not only are channels truly integrated, but the conversation history anticipates relevant solutions for the user, creating a more satisfying experience.
Conversational Marketing puts a brand and its leads in dialogue on digital channels and often leads to a strategic action (registration, purchase, joining a community, etc).
Customer and prospects can interact with companies on a 1:1 level at any time. With social media and instant messaging apps, our relationship with brands is now similar to that with friends, family, and coworkers. With just a few taps on our phones, we can catch up, share impressions, ask questions, and do business.
This is due to:
The website form used to be the only resource connecting users and brands. Today there’s a growing range of platforms: WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok are some of the most popular.
The reach of the mobile internet has created the phygital environment (physical , physical + digital), in which all platforms must communicate with each other to keep up with the customer.
Until recently, consumers used mobile devices for research and desktops for purchases. This is rapidly changing with the development of mobile-first e-commerce and the ability to purchase via social media and WhatsApp.
In addition to researching more before purchasing, consumers have little patience for waiting for responses and browsing online stores. That’s why real-time customer service has become the best alternative.
Brands still struggle to reconcile audience desires (what leads want to see, hear and know) with the need to promote themselves, offering products and services and calling consumers to action.
Conversational marketing emerged to overcome this challenge, accompanying the rise of customer-centric strategies. This technique creates communication that's less "marketing-oriented" and more focused on engagement, prioritizing insight generation and customer input to guide commercial strategy.
We've already introduced some advantages of conversational marketing for your strategy. Let’s dive a little deeper into how this method improves your business:
By unifying interaction with leads across multiple channels, tracking the timing and flow of the conversation, conversational marketing avoids opening multiple tickets and creates a continuous line of communication with the brand, generating a more organic experience.
This allows consumers to meet their demands quickly and without bureaucracy, using their preferred platforms and with the feeling of always speaking to the same “person”.
Furthermore, you can add channels like WhatsApp to journeys and build a more effective communication and marketing strategy. An example of this — and an excellent best practice — is to build a journey in which you deliver a message through traditional channels like email, push, and SMS (which are cheaper), and then with engagement segmentation, send a WhatsApp message to those who haven't interacted on those channels.
Continuous interaction requires a strong brand that can amplify the company across any channel. Therefore, conversational marketing is also a great technique for solidifying your brand persona with emojis, stickers and other tactics. Besides expressing the brand's essence, these elements make the conversation light and enjoyable, encouraging greater engagement.
Another element that facilitates interaction is automatic responses, very common in live chat and WhatsApp conversations. Instead of discussing a question or issue, users choose pre-determined options that simplify the service and, if necessary, brief the support agent on the case.
This technology is powered by real-time data about your audience. In conversational marketing, leads provide firsthand information about their needs, challenges, and desires, and the brand can act directly on these insights. Each conversation provides valuable input for strategic zero- and first-party data actions ; it simply needs to be systematized and converted into intelligence.
This data is fundamentally important for building zero- and first-party data strategies —which, according to the Marketing Intelligence Report , have had a significant impact on brand strategies. WhatsApp can be an ally in this future development of data capture in my database, even more so if it's on a Customer Data Platform.
Who doesn't want to talk to someone nice, attentive, and intelligent? If implemented correctly, this is the image your conversational marketing strategy projects. Naturally, this translates into better customer engagement and conversion rates (as well as MQLs and SQLs, in the case of the B2B market ) and lower churn rates, as well as new contacts attracted by the availability and resourcefulness of your agents (human or otherwise).
While every consumer seeks personalized and helpful service, few brands consistently deliver. Therefore, conversational marketing demonstrates the value your service brings to the customer, something that products and promotions can only promise.
Over time, good conversations build your brand as a trustworthy and accessible reference that understands your audience and deserves to remain among their purchasing options.
You've probably noticed how conversational marketing integrates marketing, sales, and customer service activities. Each of these areas can benefit from this technique and inform their performance based on the work of other teams—which strengthens team cohesion around user interests.
Live chat, for example, is a tool that can help with lead capture, qualifying leads for sales, or opening support tickets. In the B2C market, chatbots facilitate self-service and can suggest products of interest to users, speeding up purchases and leveraging strategies like cross-selling .
Therefore, in both cases, the progress of the matter is what reveals the consumer's real need, revealing more assertive marketing and sales opportunities.
Although it may seem a bit outdated, email is an indispensable tool for initiating and maintaining customer interactions. In addition to conversation threads, messages can contain QR codes and call-to-action buttons, redirecting users to the brand's website, social media, and messaging apps —boosting engagement and helping to track the user's origin.
Even with the popularity of instant messaging, simple text and multimedia messages are still important for reaching contacts outside of social media. The brevity of SMS messages — which often include a mini-tutorial — serves as virtual assistance, sending information in " drops " and guiding the user through a task.
Instant messaging apps are among the most organic features of conversational marketing. They allow for the creation of automatic responses and are primarily used in customer service, where they are preferred for their speed and easy access. WhatsApp Business, the corporate version of the app, has innovated in conversational marketing and sales, conducted entirely within the apps.
Conversational bots allow brands to be immediately available to customers, reducing response times and answering frequently asked questions in real time. Chatbot marketing also helps qualify leads by identifying requests that require the attention of a human agent and collecting relevant data for customer service.
Often combined with chatbots, this tool is automatically activated upon website access, in the form of a pop-up. It welcomes users and invites them to engage with the brand and its content, answering questions, requesting tips and reporting issues related to purchases and contracted services.
Launched through YouTube and features like Instagram Stories, this sales method is broadcast live to the brand's fans. Live commerce allows consumers to better evaluate products and ask questions live with the organizing team, simultaneously fostering engagement and conversion.
Conversational marketing can be applied to both B2C and B2B campaigns. In general, conversational dynamics make the strategy more intuitive when communicating with end customers (B2C), especially when WhatsApp and other messaging apps are the brand's preferred channels.
In the B2B space, conversational marketing helps promote products with long sales cycles, such as financial products, telecommunications products , and subscription services. This is because continued interaction with the lead leads leads to conversions in a less invasive way, positioning the brand as a partner along the journey.
As a rule, it's important to remember that no matter the market, platform or device, people want to be well-served. They want to be heard, their needs to understood, and their goals to be achieved.
A conversational marketing strategy should be tailored to the customer, not the brand itself. Also, consider your own experience as a connected consumer. We'd venture to say you know exactly what a differentiated campaign and service are!
Here are three basic factors your strategy should consider:
Answering these questions will allow you to begin developing the topics, formats, and processes that will integrate your strategy, including scripts for setting up chatbots, conversation topics for key moments (additional questions, purchase decision stage, drop-offs , etc.), and performance evaluation tools. The main result of this mapping is understanding your customer's journey and when it makes sense to engage with them through conversational marketing.
Conversations have been bringing people together and creating incredible businesses since the dawn of time. We hope we've helped you and your team innovate in this art using the latest technologies.
Conversational marketing is an engagement strategy that uses two-way communication to capture and convert leads. It uses tools like chatbots and live chat to start real-time conversations, understand customer needs, and guide them through the buying process.
Unlike traditional marketing, which often uses one-way broadcasts, conversational marketing is interactive and customer-led. It prioritizes dialogue and personalized engagement, allowing brands to respond to customer needs instantly rather than pushing content or promotions.
The main benefits include improved customer experience, faster lead qualification, and increased conversion rates. This approach helps build customer loyalty, provides valuable insights into customer behavior, and helps unify marketing, sales, and service teams.
Common tools include chatbots and live chat for website interactions, instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and email and SMS for outreach. These tools enable real-time, personalized conversations at scale.
Yes, conversational marketing is effective in both B2B and B2C environments. In B2C, it often streamlines customer service and sales. In B2B, it helps nurture leads with longer sales cycles by providing personalized, ongoing interaction.
It enhances the customer journey by providing immediate, personalized support across multiple channels. This eliminates wait times, allows customers to use their preferred communication method, and creates a more seamless, integrated experience from initial inquiry to post-purchase support.
Yes, conversational marketing is considered an evolution of inbound marketing. It updates the traditional inbound model by placing a strong emphasis on real-time dialogue and customer-driven interactions, making the process more efficient and engaging.
