So much marketing in the modern world feels incredibly impersonal. It feels like all of these companies are throwing ads and emails and chatbots and everything else they have at people, with the sole purpose of trying to get you to buy something. 

It’s overwhelming, and most people block out everything that the companies are trying to communicate. When companies stop seeing consumers as people, marketing loses its effectiveness and ability to convey messages. 

So how are companies supposed to cut through the clutter of all the meaningless advertising? The best way to stand out is to do the simple thing: Create relationships and genuine interactions. 

Creating genuine relationships and interactions should be the foundation of marketing, right? But so many companies are caught up in working through statistics and numbers that simply don’t matter if you aren’t making a difference in people’s lives. 

Conversational marketing is one of the most effective ways of creating engagement. It removes a lot of the more mundane parts of repetitive marketing and breaks down communication to its simplest form: two people interacting and relating with one another. 

This is how conversational marketing changes the way that you market for the better. 

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What is Marketing?

Fundamentally, marketing is the process of acquiring more customers and retaining existing ones. It does that through promoting products and services and delivering those products to the end consumer. 

Marketing’s goal is reaching out to the people looking for a solution and then offering them a service as that solution. It’s all about matching customer needs or wants with solutions that lie within the company. 

Marketing is about meeting potential customers in the spaces where they already live. Many companies will try to bombard their target markets with information and advertisements about why they should purchase from them. While the exposure is helpful, it’s an inefficient way to market. 

That inefficiency is why marketers should focus on making themselves stand out. If you want to get someone’s attention within the noise, try being intentional. Instead of going after quantity, invest in better marketing. 

Often, if you’re clever enough, the cost of marketing is very low. You simply need to do something that’s either highly creative or incredibly personal. 

That’s why conversational marketing is so important; it stimulates the creative and interactive side of people’s brains and helps them feel valued and unique to the company. 

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What is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing is an important and effective strategy that companies use when they’re trying to increase the viability of their marketing efforts. It’s based on direct relationships and natural language conversations with customers and is one of the most viable strategies for boosting customer engagement and revenue. 

Conversational marketing is based on real-time, one-to-one interactions. It is a natural conversation about the products and services that your company provides. 

Whereas typical advertisements can feel alienating and depersonalizing, conversational marketing is all about appealing to the most human parts of the customer by interacting with them in a completely normal way. 

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What Are the Benefits of Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing is incredibly powerful in the field of marketing as a whole. It offers several benefits that other types of marketing don’t. These benefits help to grow website visitors, increase lead generation, develop qualified leads, and generally strengthen your sales funnels and customers' journeys.

Here are three specific ways conversational marketing can benefit your company and your customers. 

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Fosters Unique Interaction

One of the most valuable parts of genuine conversational marketing is a real interaction between two people. Computers and advertisements can only relate to people in the ways that they have been programmed to. 

But conversational marketing with an actual person creates a system where they can truly interact with someone and have their specific needs filled by an actual thinking mind. 

One of the biggest downsides of traditional advertising is that it only speaks to the target audience. With new forms of marketing, people can read and learn about each other to learn how best to reach one another. 

That’s an incredibly valuable benefit of conversational marketing: People answer questions and offer solutions that programmed and pre-made advertisements simply cannot. 

Creating unique interactions is exactly why Community offers various tools to categorize its Members as humans. Demographic filters and Community Keywords allow Community Leaders to interact with people in very specific ways, which creates a sense of value and personality. 

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Creates Customer Loyalty

When people feel valued, they develop loyalty. 

One of the best ways to help customers feel valued is by providing them with good quality customer service and high-quality conversational marketing. 

Good quality customer service is especially important; when loyalty is created with customers, it means that customers often come back to the product regularly. One of the major goals behind marketing is creating member relationships that incentivize customers to come back again and again. 

Conversational marketing helps people to feel as though their needs and wants are truly heard and understood by their Leaders, which is essential. The best way to create Members that care about their Communities and Leaders is by showing them that you care about them, too. Enter into real-time conversations, provide feedback, even give a little bit of customer support during your customer interactions.Building a conversational marketing strategy is open and versatile. 

Community focuses on this aspect in several ways and seeks to take conversational marketing to the next level. The ability to have scalable interactivity with Members completely changes how they will perceive the interactions and can turn the whole interaction from a marketing strategy into a way to truly create relationships with your Members. 

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Communicates Priority

When people reach out to a company and receive assistance from an actual person, it makes more of an impact than you might think. This interaction lets the Member know they are a priority to your company and that their needs actually mean something to you. 

A lot of companies set up automated responses or have low-quality customer service, which creates bad customer experiences, which can deter a customer from returning, even if the products themselves are good. Good conversational marketing dispels issues and creates actual solutions to your Member’s problems. 

In addition to good customer service, good conversational marketing says even more about the company, and, thusly, the product. When someone takes time out of their day to talk to you about a product or service, it generally means a lot more and is much more memorable than just a simple advertisement. 

The goal of conversational marketing is to pursue and seek to help out your Members personally, and that has massive effects on sales, retention, and customer satisfaction. 

Using personalized interaction with your Community helps customers understand they are a priority to the Leader and makes a huge difference in Member satisfaction and response rates. 

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How can Businesses Create Genuine Connections With Consumers?

There are many ways that conversational marketing can either fail or succeed. 

Of course, one of the most important parts of conversational marketing is finding ways to relate to people directly. That often means interacting with consumers in places that they already are — and going to them first. 

Trying to pull them into a new place so that you can talk to them is noteffective way. And customers hate talking to a bot or an obvious sales rep who treats them as nothing more than a prospect or qualified lead.

But when you meet customers where they already are, it can be much easier to create conversational marketing that is effective and beneficial. 

Community’s Clustering feature provides a way to develop personalized interactions in a scalable way and cater to individuals’ preferences and unique parts.

Creating genuine interactions on a large scale can be very difficult, but the Clustering feature is designed to reach people uniquely — helping to start an authentic and genuine conversation when it matters most. 

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How Community Helps

Very few people aren’t texting, or at the very least familiar with the medium. 

Five billion people on Earth can send and receive SMS messages, and around 80% of North America uses texting as a primary method of communication. The odds are good that if they’re not texting, they’re probably not in your target market anyway. 

Community provides a platform where you can reach massive amounts of people in a personal, direct, and genuine way. Unlike other mass texting services, Community puts a high value on direct content and genuine interaction. 

The Community platform places a high value on conversational marketing and can turn regular SMS marketing into a way to develop relationships. This is a much more effective way to develop a Community and means much more to people personally. 

The reality is your Members want to hear from you. It’s easy to pass off the job of marketing and engaging to agencies. But the best way to create actual loyalty and gain members is by cultivating relationships and genuine interaction. That’s why Community uses conversational marketing to reach followers, fans, and consumers in a way that creates direct communication. 

The best way to relate to your audience is here, and you can find it at Community. Check it out, and get your number today! 

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Sources: 

Marketing Definition - Business Essentials | Investopedia

11 Simple Ways To Make Customers Feel Valued | Forbes

44 Mind-Blowing SMS Marketing and Texting Statistics [UPDATED] | SlickText.

Conversational Marketing - What is Conversational Marketing? | Drift