“Marketing? Same gig, different tune,” said my typically to-the-point CEO friend. Really? What with the rise of mobile marketing, the iPhone, social media , behavioural data-based marketing – the whole ‘gig’ seems sometimes to be in total flux! But let’s review the fundamentals of marketing.

The primary goal of marketing is indeed much the same as ever isn’t it? We seek to cost effectively acquire new customers and grow their spend whilst retaining their long term loyalty. What’s changed is how we must engage with customers to achieve these objectives.

Customers have been emancipated with easy, cheap and almost immediate access to unlimited information about brands and products ; all available within a couple of clicks of your own. Empowered too by social media, customers can quickly spread the word; as advocates or adversaries. This customer empowering landscape has combined with the fragmentation of marketing channels to present brands with a real opportunity; if they can manage the complexity.

Marketing channel fragmentation

As communications channels expanded from the traditional (direct mail, phone) to online, marketers quickly added new channels to their arsenal, coining the phrase ‘multi-channel marketing.’ Early attempts were often basic;  little more than mass, often channel disparate campaigns. Even segmented campaigns were often batches of tens of thousands. Lacking authenticity and cross-channel message harmony, customers soon suffered marketing fatigue. Response rates fell with one to two percent being typical.

In the last couple years, cross-channel marketing automation software has enabled the integration of opt-in customers’ behavioural data from across channels and presented opportunities for one-to-one personalised content and cohesive, cross-channel interplay. The response rates generated by such relevancy way exceed old-fashioned siloed multi-channel activity. I can cite many examples delivering double figures.

And now we’ve the added popularity of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. Also devices such as the iPhone and Android phones. With their huge uptake and ability to deliver ever richer digital experiences,  marketers naturally desire to add these innovations to their campaign tool sets. But again the challenge presents itself. How to harness these channels, indeed an ever faster ‘splintering’ communications array, within a coherent cross-channel and one-to-one approach? How to ensure not just the success of a couple campaigns in an exciting new channel, but win customer relationships that support a positive long-term return on enterprise marketing investment?

Conversational marketing

Today, as marketers reach the top of the cross-channel maturity curve, they must transition into the next phase of customer engagement: conversational marketing.

Conversational marketing is about building and sustaining one-to-one personalised lifetime dialogues across all marketing channels, traditional, new and emerging to drive revenue and marketing effectiveness. Whilst marketing software platforms have traditionally focused on outbound communications, conversational marketing technology allows the unification of both inbound and outbound channel strategies. It enables marketers to generate automated, yet targeted messages conveying the best, most relevant offers for each individual at every appropriate contact opportunity, regardless of channel. It works by tracking and managing all marketing activity and opt-in customer behavioural data in a single, real-time marketing view of the customer. In addition there must be the capability to develop a centralised offer catalogue and use a real-time recommendation engine. Attractive, relevant communications can be presented during both inbound and outbound contact as well as in other opportunities such as service messages, steering and guiding individuals at every opportunity of contact.

Outbound-inbound fusion

Outbound dialogues may be initiated by marketers, or triggered automatically by lifetime events, such as an individual passing a loyalty score threshold or approaching a birthday.  Typically using direct mail, email, SMS and also direct tweets, social media and mobile apps, conversational marketing technology can present one-to-one, direct communications based on the most recent information available on the customer. First, these help opt-in individuals to discover your offering. When the prospect becomes a customer, these then encourage them to buy more, and also more often as they become loyal. Such communications can even help to retain customers with compelling incentives as they show signs of parting with your brand.

Inbound channels offer a set of often unexploited opportunities of contact. Your corporate website, stores, branches, call centre, brand pages within social media or mobile apps and even online avatars. Conversational marketing technology can present inbound visitors with relevant marketing messages (offers, promotion, product information), in real-time at the very moment they present themselves unannounced.  Because individuals come to you with intent, the flickering moment of intimacy may be leveraged when appropriate, provided visitors are presented with information that is appealing and perhaps linked to very recently updated data. For example, if a customer of a bank gives his new address to the call centre and then logs onto the bank's website one hour later, the company can offer a personalised banner to promote a home insurance policy. It’s well known that response rates to laser-targeted offers presented during inbound enquiries are significantly higher than those for outbound approaches, however relevant they might be.

Other contact opportunities, often left untapped, are ‘service or ‘transactional’ messages. With looming brand erosion, product commoditisation, and fleeting customer loyalty, differentiating your products via value added services is more important than ever. Conversational marketing technology provides unique support for corralling these messages into a single strategy that is fused with inbound and outbound marketing efforts. For one thing, this approach lets marketers take advantage of these messages to dynamically insert relevant offers. With those messages being highly read, the propensity of a response is heightened.  Secondly, this approach also allows service messages to be automatically personalised, their improved relevancy supporting customer satisfaction objectives.

In summary, as customers become more information savvy, and as ever more communications channels emerge, conversational marketing technology offers marketers control over all customer marketing communications, while ensuring every individual’s life time journey is accompanied with a personalised dialogue spanning all opportunities of contact.

Yes, marketing’s objective is still the same. Perhaps the tune remains the same? But what is changing is how we play that tune and the instruments we must use to convert our audiences into fans . I’d love to hear your views.

By François Laxalt, manager of marketing intelligence at Neolane.

(You can follow this topic at: http://conversationalmarketing.com/ )