Conversational marketing is a type of inbound marketing that aims to convert leads through conversation-driven activities.
The first phase of the development of conversational marketing obviously had its driving force in the human being: our ability to interpret language, to position ourselves as intermediaries of meanings and signifiers. Our empathy. And in the world of advertising (the one I belong to, so to speak) it was a revolution.
AI technology and its transformative factor
Thanks to conversational marketing, the classic dynamic between business and consumer, made up of one-way communication, has been overturned. Customers pay more and more attention to companies' ability to listen and respond, and reward those perceived as more reactive.
Of course, the human factor is still fundamental: but there are many cases in which a quick response and useful information can outperform the simple presence of a real person. With the advent of artificial intelligence and in general of AI technologythen, everything is about to change dramatically.
What changes now in conversational marketing?
Very. Machine learning-based technologies can, in fact, make us benefit from “everything human except humanity,” to paraphrase Stanislav Lem. The speed of understanding, first of all: interesting (and Italian, in this case) startups like Laila® I am able, today, to offer conversational marketing of the highest level. Conversational marketing based on Artificial Intelligence capable of interpreting the natural user language (NLU) of the user who communicates with them.
This is essential, because it allows companies to use humans only as “sentimental backups”, to give an extra touch and enrich the customer experience. To satisfy all their needs, however, and without limits of space and time, there will be AI-based conversational marketing.
I said "satisfy": in reality, systems of this type can also better understand these needs. What's more: even anticipating them.
And I didn't tell you about scalability, but you can imagine: an AI can communicate with millions of customers simultaneously without any loss in quality and understanding.
Not bad, if you think that at the beginning of the 2000s we were still stuck with telephone answering machines that made us spend hours pressing buttons to listen to recorded voices. The future is the future: and it does not simply speak “to” us. With conversational marketing, in fact, it speaks "with" us.
