Why Conversational Marketing is Important for Academia?

The basis of Conversational marketing is personalization. Due to its direct approach, Conversational marketing tends to offer more value to your prospects. Conversational form of communication is an essential element in today’s world of digital marketing. So, it is important for academic institutions to understand its crucial role and develop their digital marketing strategy accordingly.

Conversational marketing is a great tool to nurture leads and drive campaigns for conversion. It is crucial to create constant brand recall and initiate the desired call to action. Initiating a conversation with your target audience helps you to know them better. Likewise, they also get to understand your value proposition better. This is a key element for building relationship with your existing and potential customers.

When we are communicating with our target market, it is really crucial that we communicate in a language which is simple and easily understood. And what better way to achieve this than conversing in a manner that is open and direct?

Conversational marketing is the easiest way to attract prospects through your leads funnel.  Through the power of real-time conversations, you can build relationships and create authentic engagement with your prospective buyers i.e. students.

Conversational marketing is the best way to start real-time engagement with millennials. This form of marketing communication is helpful since it does not force people to go through the drudgery of reading monotonous messaging. It is quicker in driving user responses.

The basis of conversational marketing is targeted messaging. Today chatbot technology is intelligently using conversational marketing techniques to engage with people when they are on your website. This is making it easier for people to engage with your brand thereby helping you convert leads into final numbers quickly.

Conversational Marketing has Evolved with Time

Due to the digital revolution and advent of things like smartphones and social media, the ways we used to communicate with our near and dear ones have changed. And so has the marketing of our products and services for connecting with our potential buyers.

Over the years, integrated channels of marketing communication have also proliferated. Internet has completely changed the way customers look for information about a particular product or service they wish to buy. Although conversational marketing existed before as well. But there were less or virtually no medium to expand its scope of engagement and make it an interactive communication strategy. At the same time, its efficacy could also not be measured. In the absence of a suitable tool or matrix of measurement, it was difficult to assess the performance of such campaigns.

Since then, conversational marketing has come a long way. It has extended itself to different modes of communication between brands and their buyers. It has changed considerably and rightfully so over the years of its course.

In recent times, Chatbots and SMS text-style messaging are redefining conversational style of marketing messages. Through a scripted software that interacts in the way you converse in your daily life, chatbots are becoming a popular digital marketing tool to engage prospects. They have been very successful in connecting with your target audience and driving sales  conversions.

Chatbots are built to deliver information to users in an interactive way thereby providing 24*7 counselling support services to prospective students. Chatbots are just one of the many things academic institutions can do and achieve with conversational marketing. Although nothing can beat human interaction but there is no harm in simulating the same experience for your prospects through innovative usages of conversational marketing techniques.

Today, conversational commerce is driving all kinds of businesses. Development of virtual assistants based on conversational marketing techniques have increased several folds in recent times. Consumers also prefer conversational tone of communication over traditional ways which were usually lopsided. These messages were designed keeping in view push strategy rather than pull strategy.

Conversational messaging drives more recommendations for your academic brand. With the rapid growth of technology and the constantly changing consumer behaviour especially of millennials, academic marketers need to evolve their marketing strategies to keep pace with the changing world. Their approach should reflect a fresh marketing appeal to entice their target group. Conversational marketing too has therefore evolved to the changing times and is now paying off big time to brands.

The Vital Components of Conversational Marketing

What makes up a good conversation? A good conversation should always touch the emotional chord of the prospects. It has to be a need based content. It has to have a context. Your communication should be able to highlight the key attributes and value to the end user.

Value added information is of paramount importance to any conversation. Conversational marketing should be personalized to suit the aspirations and needs of the target audience. Personalization of content helps to create a greater connect with your audience.

The Framework of Conversational Marketing and its Benefits

Conversational Marketing should be based on principles of engagement. First attempt in conversational marketing should be to engage your leads through relevant information sharing. Thereafter you can include some call to action to drive the desired result.  During this process of engagement also try to understand what your leads want, the kind of information they are looking for.

Once your leads start responding to your content through conversational nurturing, offer them some value added information.

The biggest benefits of using conversations to capture and qualify leads is to create a long lasting relationship with your prospective buyer and also with existing ones. By implementing conversational bots, you can add life to your website. Your audience knows that there will always be someone to address their queries. IN the process you learn a lot about your prospective applicants.

Conversational marketing helps to shorten your sales cycle. Leads qualified through conversations are more likely to close faster than leads qualified through traditional methods. You grow your sales pipeline faster.

Closing Comments

The very concept of conversational marketing is to engage with people in real-time. This engagement can be with either a human or a bot. When the conversations happen in real-time, people feel more connected and valued. This enhances your conversion cycle. You are able to generate a constant engagement with your prospects.

The continuous workflow of Conversational Marketing allows colleges and universities to drive faster conversions. Academia needs to make its prospective students and other stakeholders actually feel valued and heard.

Conversational marketing helps to do just that. It allows educational institutes to build strong relationships with their audience and creates a more authentic brand experiences for them.