In today’s episode,  Beerud and Srini discuss how marketing evolved with the infusion of technology. Together, they talk about the evolution of marketing from offline to digital, and now, conversational. Find out why conversational marketing is the best for your brand.

Conversational Marketing Appeals To Intimacy

What makes conversational marketing better than offline and digital marketing is its ability to appeal to consumers’ intimacy and relationship with the brand. Conversational marketing can make the consumers’ experience highly personalized as they are talking to someone who knows them by their names, styles, preferences, and dislikes. The best thing about it is it doesn’t cost that much to invest in, as it can be tied to the brand’s existing marketing campaigns.

“In conversational marketing, you know the person, so that changes a lot of things. It can be a highly personalized and very textual interaction.” - Beerud Sheth

Conversational Marketing Personalizes Consumers’ Experience

For most brands, having personal “shopping assistants” is only available for VIPs and premium-type of consumers who shop. However, with conversational marketing, it becomes possible for everyone to get their own shopping assistant/concierge/partner/helper that would be helpful in making valuable decisions for each purchase, only with the use of their smartphones. Beerud compares this level of experience with notable brands like Nordstrom and Zappos, which are both known for their top-tier customer service.

“There's the offline analogies of that. With conversational marketing, you can replicate that same dynamic. That's an extremely powerful thing.” - Beerud Sheth

Conversational Marketing’s Powerful Entry Point

Beerud says that the first step towards shifting to conversational messaging is to have a platform (i.e. WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, etc.) where your brand and your consumers can have a conversation. Once that has been set up, the next step is to find natural entry points like SMS campaigns, billboards, QR codes, or any existing campaign of the brand. Beerud shares that finding a powerful entry point provides richer experiences for the consumers and more opportunities for the brand to upsell and cross-sell.

“SMS is a very powerful entry point into their search. Social media, print, TV ads, advertising as well. Linking into these and building these rich experiences offer innumerable possibilities.” - Beerud Sheth

To know more about Conversational Marketing and why

Bio:

Beerud Sheth

Beerud is the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, the world's leading platform for cloud messaging and conversational experiences. It is used by over 100K+ customers and developers and handles over 6 billion messages per month. He previously founded and led Elance (now Upwork, a publicly listed company), the pioneer of online freelancing and the gig economy.

Prior to founding Elance, he worked in the financial services industry – modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and Citicorp Securities. His graduate research, at the MIT Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning agents for personalized news filtering. Beerud earned an M.S. in Computer Science from MIT & a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal.

Srinivas B Vijayaraghavan

Srinivas has over 2 decades of experience in running marketing for high-growth technology companies and managing corporate marketing, product marketing and demand generation. Prior to Gupshup, he held marketing leadership positions with Qubole, Pluralsight, Mobileum and Tejas Networks.

Resources:

Gupshup.io