“A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want.”
David Whyte
As a brand, when was the last time you had this kind of a conversation with your consumer?
Marketing and Advertising today are monologues. One-way interactions, where the content is driven by a team that believes that they are saying what their consumer base wants to hear. But the feedback mechanism here is binary – People either buy your product or they don’t. This is more likely driven by the quality of the product and the purpose it serves, or the value of the discounts offered. A huge boost in sales as a result of a fancy ad campaign doesn’t necessarily imply that the content was highly engaging.
At BanterX, we believe that this needs to evolve. Brand communication should be more about dialogue and engagement. Conversations are the first step towards building a long and fruitful relationship with your consumers. Conversations build engagement, and engagement builds relationships. Brands should focus at least a part of their marketing efforts towards creating a base of evangelists, and not just customers.
It is probably this thought that drove the rise of several conversational marketing platforms. Chatbots are the in-thing, and every brand wants one. However, these chatbots so far are just extensions of the customer support mechanism – available 24/7 to answer user queries that it was trained to answer, or an automated inside-sales person – available 24/7 to handle inbound user queries, profile them, and populate a lead list that could then be followed up on by a human.
While these advancements are great, and automation has drastically improved productivity, there is one glaring issue: All of these solutions are reactive. The brands are only responding to conversations that are user-driven. There’s no way for a brand to initiate a dialogue with the user.
A lot of times, brands have so much more to offer than can be contained in traditional marketing messaging. What we really need to see are proactive conversations that are brand-led; that allow them to showcase their offering to consumers, ask them the right questions, and surface the information that is most relevant to them.
BanterX is helping brands do exactly this. Conversational experiences built on our platform have seen engagement rates of around 55%. This is significantly higher than any traditional form of marketing communication. Almost 40% of the consumers who engaged with these conversations continued on to convert.
This is because the inherently interactive nature of the conversational format enables brands to make the product discovery process less of a chore and more of a fun experience. The result is that with just one conversation, consumers can find exactly what they need, much faster than a traditional keyword search. By engaging in dialogue, consumers also get the feeling that the brand is listening to what they want. This helps brands build a stronger connect with their consumers – you are helping them find the information they need rather than pushing information about what you want to sell them.
To know how BanterX can help your brand converse with, engage and convert consumers, visit www.banterx.com and have a conversation with us at hello@banterx.com