Conversational Content: Engaging Customers Through Words

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A lot of businesses struggle to connect with their target audience. You can have the best communication tools at your disposal, but if you pair them with a weak content strategy, you won’t be able to create brand equity. The customer experience depends on how interested and engaged consumers are with your brand. This engagement can only take place if you’ve created a two-way channel of communication with your consumer base.

Here’s where a conversational content strategy comes in. You need to write compelling copy that speaks to your consumer and makes them feel heard. It’s easy to start categorizing your audience with quantitative data because analytics are important to improve your brand. Don’t forget, though, that your consumers are people and have needs, wants and emotions. It’s when you target these elements that you truly create a difference.

Conversational content makes your customer feel like they’re in direct conversation with your brand. Humans are social creatures, and they love being part of different conversations. The key to conversational content is writing in the same way you’d want to speak. A Salesforce report shows that around 71% of customers want brands to have a mechanism that allows them to communicate with them in real-time.

Here’s how a conversational content strategy plan can benefit your brand:

A conversational content strategy allows you to create a customer-friendly ecosystem that builds brand equity. Consumers will enjoy having meaningful interactions with your brand, either by written content or interactive voice messaging, instead of having to learn things through a top-down communication model. They’ll be eager to ask questions, inquire about products/services, and eventually become loyalists as they feel heard and taken care of.

Companies that listen to their consumers are generally loved. Companies that incorporate customer feedback can continually expand their loyal customer base because people love being heard. If you use a conversational content strategy and incorporate tools like live chat, you’ll be able to get a deeper understanding of what customers want. You can also useconversation analytics software to determine tone and other elements for complete accuracy.

A conversational content strategy plays upon multiple touchpoints to get the customer’s attention. This means your consumers have more ways of reaching out to you and your effective and engaging content. Having numerous touchpoints isn’t enough; you need to ensure that consumers find something within your content that they can engage with. A conversational content strategy uses live chats, polls, loyalty programs, and more to increase engagement.

Consumers like brands that offer transparency and can be reached with no delays. For example, a customer who has queries or would like to return a product will be frustrated if they don’t get a response from the brand. Businesses with high response rates, i.e., a successful conversational content strategy, increase credibility with their consumers.

Conversational marketing gives you access to better leads as compared to a top-down content strategy. This means your consumers enjoy an improved customer journey, resulting in increased retention rates. Ultimately, it boosts your conversions as your landing pages will have higher rates of engagement and interaction.

Here’s what you need to do when crafting the perfect conversational content strategy:

Your role as a brand is to solve common consumer problems. Consumers will feel heard when you ask them what issues they’re facing and provide smart solutions with your product/service. For example, if your target audience is remote workers who need a way to sign and send documents by email, you can suggest your email finder or free electronic signature software. You can ask enticing questions with your content that bring consumers to the answer you want them to have.

You need to publish content that your consumers can’t scroll past. Clutter-breaking content is difficult to think of but easy to replicate once you get the hang of it. Consider creating posts that offer incentives, make your consumers think, or both. They’ll want to pause their endless scrolling to engage and interact. Don’t forget you can manage and update all social media in one place using a social media toolbox.

Every brand should have a persuasive and meaningful story that calls to customers. Think about it this way: why should your audience care about your brand? They’ll only become emotionally invested if you give them a story they can relate to, something that speaks to their humanity.

Address your consumers directly by using the second-person perspective. Call them ‘you’ and use ‘your’ instead of a third-person point of view. This will grab their attention and persuade them to interact with the relevant content piece.

Make sure customers are seeing the best version of your brand by constantly updating your website design. Consumers won’t want to interact with a brand that looks or feels outdated because they prefer quick communication and real-time solutions.

Your priority should always be the consumer and making them feel welcome. Use a warm and inviting tone for your brand voice in your communications to ensure that consumers want to spend longer browsing through your digital platforms. This will result in increased conversions and retention rates.

It can take a poor micro-interaction with a business to turn a consumer away for life. Make sure your copy is checked for grammar and linguistic errors so that you can create a sense of credibility with your customer base.

Your content marketing efforts will be in vain and you won’t hit your content marketing KPIs, if you don’t add a definitive call to action at the end of your content. You’ve created conversational content to perk consumers’ interest, and the call to action is where you rack up conversions. Give your consumers an action plan to follow for better results.

A successful conversational content strategy implementation includes ‌automation. You can incorporate automatic chatbots on your social media pages and website to take full advantage of two-way communication. Tools like Meta’s Messenger allow brands to reach out to and follow up with consumers all on their own. Keep the possibility of automation in mind when you craft your conversational strategy plan.

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