All marketing is conversation

If you’ve been in business for a long time, you are probably used to a marketing model that revolves around pushing your sales message to as wide an audience as possible – one-to-many communication. The television commercial, magazine advertisement and billboard are all about a single voice engaged in a one-way communication with a large audience.

Yet if you’ve been in business even longer, you may remember it wasn’t always like that. Before TV, before massive supermarkets and soulless shopping centres and big budget campaigns targeted to carefully selected demographics and slick brand advertisements in magazines that don’t seem to sell anything and focus groups and surveys - before all of that there were shopkeepers and customers having conversations.

Now we have the internet, the art of conversation marketing is returning. Consumers no longer want the one-way marketing messages from faceless corporations telling us how to behave and what to buy. They want a two-way conversation; to be able to interact with a brand, give feedback and be treated as an equal participant in the marketing relationship. No longer can a brand preach from on high and expect to be unquestioningly followed, demanding respect and consumer loyalty simply because of who they are.

Presenting a human face

For online consumers, one of the key deciders when making a purchase is trust. But trust isn’t easy to create - it has to be earned. One way to do this is by being open in conversations with the customer base. Blogs and social media activities such as Twitter allow a free exchange of information and feedback. This allows consumers to see you as approachable and listening to their opinions and comments. The days of dismissing customer feedback and arrogantly pushing forward a marketing message are gone.

For many businesses, especially large ones, it is hard to build a warm feeling to the brand in the customer. We don’t view utilities – to take one example – with a warm and fuzzy glow of friendly interactions. Most people pay their utility bill, ignore the letters promoting new services and get annoyed when their telemarketer calls up at dinner time. The company becomes no more than a corporate machine in our minds; processing our payments and dispensing our products and services with mechanical efficiency. In fact, if you are like me, the only time you really engage with a human being in one of these companies is when something goes wrong. The efficient business machine has made an error – how could this be? We call up and complain. This means we only get human interaction when we’re already in a negative frame of mind.

With the arrival of social media and the rapid uptake of online business, the retail marketing environment is reverting to the older village community model – only this time it is the global village and the social media community. When I was a boy, I knew the couple that ran the corner shop and they knew me, knew my parents, even knew what I liked to spend my pocket money on (a few fruit salad chewy sweets, Bazooka Joe bubble gum and a comic). Back then, a shopkeeper would develop relationships, converse with you, swap stories and treat you as an equal. The butcher not only served meat but knew everyone who came in his store personally, knew their stories, knew who needed off-cuts for the dog or who liked the fat left on the ham and served them accordingly.

Online, businesses are beginning to take advantage of building these same relationships. I frequently engage with customers on Twitter and hopefully solve their issues. Other businesses have used social media platforms to canvas feedback, conduct surveys or provide an open forum of ideas. So the changes in marketing brought about by the internet are not knew, they merely take us back to the best aspects of being part of a community, aspects almost forgotten in the change from local stores to impersonal and large supermarkets a few decades ago.

Take the time to chat

Many business owners still see conversation and relationship-building as time-wasting activity. Instead of talking to a customer, the shop assistant is told to clean the back room. Instead of taking the extra time to provide some personal service for someone who needs a bit more help, the business sticks to procedure and efficiency. What is often misunderstood is that extra time building relationships with customers can return ten-fold, even if the instant sale or bottom line benefit is not apparent. People always go back to a store they trust. People will recommend businesses that made them feel comfortable and answered their queries.

More big online businesses are now realising the value of starting up these conversations again. They have begun to realise that blogs and Twitter and all the other online social spaces aren’t about return on investment or tracking click-through stats or all the other tangible metrics managers like to dissect in board meetings. They are about appearing human again, just like that friendly guy in the corner store who had the smile and the funny stories and the helpful advice whenever it was needed.

By the way, you can chat with me by enrolling on Twitter and following @kimota, subscribing to this blog or reading and commenting on our newsletter articles. I’ll even be smiling.

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Tags: Facebook, marketing, Social media, Twitter