Businesspeople in a business conference

As a function of B2B and B2C marketing, Conversational Marketing describes the discipline of engaging customers in one-to-one conversations through all forms of marketing communications channels with the ambition of engaging with new and prospective customers into a sales process.

If you wanted a textbook description, I’d suggest it’s about managing the interchange of opinions and ideas between an individual with a job to be done and a company or professional able to offer a product or service that will help them to get the job done better. Like any conversation between two or more individuals or entities, it’s themed around a topic of interest to both parties and predicated on the ability of both parties to listen and respond in a personalized way at appropriate times.

In the digital age, mastering the art of making conversation through all marketing mediums is potentially your most precious competitive advantage.

Making conversation is not solely about face-to-face dialogue, but every piece of content and messaging that happens through all the touch-points between you and your audience at every stage of your customer’s buying process. Most of this conversation will be virtual; between your prospective customers and your website, blog-post, video stream, webinar chat, live chat etc.

It all starts with understanding your audience persona – what makes your audience tick, the events in their lives that cause them to become a prospect for you, how they think, how they frame a solution, where they go to find answers, how they prefer to learn and what sort of media they like.

Think conversation and not content first

Marketing in today’s congested digital markets isn’t easy, and there’s no magic formula or perfect technology that guarantees success. It’s a case of trial and error. Marketers often become fixated with the challenge of producing content, or get distracted by the complexity of blending together different forms of marketing tech to create a workable marketing engine. It’s easily done.

Much of the time at Newton Day, we’re talking about conversational paths, i.e. how your customers will find value from their conversation with you, and what sort of journey they will take to find you. There are lots of potential content paved paths customers can take to journey to your door. So many in fact that you’ll probably get lost quickly if you try to take on too much. That’s why we always recommending having a big ideas session around content journeys and possible content choices… then taking a break and, in a new workshop, concentrate on building out ONE DREAM JOURNEY.

Focusing on ONE DREAM CONVERSATIONAL JOURNEY and building out a prototype can be a quick way of testing a business proposition to see if customers bite. At the ed of the day, unless you test new ideas, you never know whether they’re going to resonate with your audience. Failing fast has become one of the guiding principles of modern marketing.

Why wait until you’ve created a file full of content before you learn if ’something’ is working?

How many more leads can you generate by implementing a conversational marketing approach? That’s a question we often get asked but it’s a tough one to put metrics around. In truth, if there’s no gold in the mountain, it doesn’t matter how good your shovel is! You need to have a good, clear offer that resonates with your audience – and you need to deliver some real value through the content you’re offering – before the results start coming through. But it’s definitely the case that any process is only as strong as its weakest link.

Businesses rapidly increase their opportunity to succeed by curating coherent conversational journeys.

Making sure your conversational path is working before you scale your campaigns makes so much sense for the health of your marketing team. Quick wins are always important in business, as are measurable results. Get just one conversational path humming in your business and you have a recipe for success you can easily scale. And if it fails, well at least you knew early and you can avoid spending more on stories that don’t resonate.

Focus on conversation – not content in isolation – and see what happens!