#8: Conversational Marketing: Engaging with the public in real-time
Thanks to technology ranging from Twitter and Facebook posts to instant messaging conversations launched using QR codes, communicating with your audiences can turn into a two-way street. Communication often amounts to a one-way flow of information, from the source to the audience, and online is rarely conversational. But if you make the switch from one-way communication to conversational marketing, you will be using the tools you already know to turn one-way communication into a feedback loop that engages your audience and solicits input. This communication pivot can turn a QR code, chat, even e-mail to a two-way flow that will get your audiences interested and involved, and will keep your team knowledgeable about how public opinion is perceiving your project.
What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is a way of collecting information and opinions from an audience and responding in kind. The channels for conversational marketing include phone calls, emails, live chat and social media, and can leverage communication efforts for all project types and scales. These kinds of connections are crucial for the success of an engagement campaign, creating a lasting bond with a community and building confidence in both a project and the people running it. Conversational marketing efforts also offer surveys, polls, and other data-gathering tools that will help clarify progress to date and improve efforts toward the future.
Here are a few valuable methods for conversational marketing:
Social media monitoring: Using social listening platforms, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, to name a few, in monitoring Facebook, Twitter, and other social media pages for messages and posts, is a great way to find out what community members consider necessary and respond to them quickly.
Live chat: Building a live chat option into a website, like Facebook Messenger or ChatBot, encourages visitors to say hello to officials, ask questions and discover more about a project, all with immediate responses from those keeping an eye on the website or page. An automated chatbot can fill in during non-work hours for basic questions or ask that they come back during the day.
QR codes: Placing Quick-Response codes, which are essentially stickers or images that mobile devices can translate into a website, or in this case, direct audiences to a live chat window, allows for instantaneous and contactless conversation methods for projects.
Here are a few ways conversational marketing can improve your next public engagement project:
Immediacy. People can get questions answered and concerns addressed right away by the people running the campaign, speaking in a casual language that only works in a real-time conversation.
Trust. The best way to earn a community’s trust is to be present and prove you’re not dipping in and out by being available to interact with the community as and when they reach out.
Feedback. The fact that conversational marketing is interactive means the community can share its thoughts and opinions, shaping the campaign for the better.
How can conversational marketing improve public engagement?
Speak on the community member’s schedule. Instant, personal connections are a great way to build a relationship with community members. No hold times or waiting for an email, just a greeting or question, and the response from someone on the engagement campaign is much more meaningful than a robocall or form letter and can save a lot of time and effort in the long run.
Trusting what people say to your digital face. Though a text or even voice chat is not the same as face-to-face interaction, it still fosters a bond more than a broadcast announcement or static ad on a website. The community member can put a voice or a personality to the campaign and see it as an operation with real people who genuinely care about the project and want it to improve the lives of the people affected. By just talking human-to-human, the natural suspicion of significant changes in a neighborhood can be assuaged.
Trading opinions and insight. The conversational marketing tools don’t have to be limited to text, either. Opinion polls and surveys can be filled out during the chat, and it’s a lot easier to persuade an individual to sign up for a newsletter by talking to them than by an unsolicited email blast.
Talk Time
The days of one-way public engagement are over. Listening, understanding, and engaging with a community as they reach out is the bedrock of a successful modern campaign. Regardless of how you engage, it has to have some element of conversational marketing to make it meaningful and impactful to the audience and, in turn, has to generate a natural response from the campaign. That may mean making a change or just explaining how a decision is reached. The important thing is to foster the intimate, personal information trade that lets the audience know they are being listened to and their ideas are being considered.
Be sure to come back next week as we explore the future of conversational marketing using artificial intelligence to build chatbots and voice assistants capable of conversing just like a human on their specific topics. According to Gartner, “by 2022, 70% of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies such as machine learning (ML) applications, chatbots and mobile messaging, up from 15% in 2018.” We will talk about that more next week.
Interested in seeing these trends in your outreach? Let’s get to work, give us a call and schedule a meeting today.
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