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 place 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 mere 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?
Much. Technologies based on machine learning can, in fact, make us benefit from "everything human but humanity", to paraphrase Stanislav Lem. The speed of understanding, first of all: interesting (and Italian, in this case) startups like Laila® are able, today, to offer conversational marketing of the highest level. Conversational marketing based on Artificial Intelligence able to interpret the user's natural language (NLU) of the user who converses 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 meet all their needs, however, and without limits of space and time, there will be conversational marketing based on AI.
I said "satisfy": in reality, systems of this type can also better understand these needs. More: even anticipate them.
And I didn't tell you about scalability, but you can imagine it: an AI can talk to millions of customers at the same time without any loss in quality and understanding.
Not bad, if you think that in the early 2000s we were still bogged down with telephone answering machines that made us spend hours pressing keys to listen to recorded voices. The future is the future: and it does not simply speak “to” us. With conversational marketing, in fact, he speaks “with” us.
