Using PX in Conversational Marketing with Mark Kilens

By Mary Matton on February 8, 2021

In this episode, MK learns from Mark Kilen about ways to optimize your website for PX.

Mark Kiens is the VP of Content and Community at Drift, helping the market understand conversational marketing and revenue acceleration.

The concept of conversational marketing makes a lot of sense: If you owned a brick and mortar store, you would greet potential customers as they entered your store, it’s a no brainer.

So why don’t we, as marketers, strive to provide that same experience on our websites?

Well if you ask Mark, and honestly MK and I both agree, that the sheer amount of marketing tools out there cause this dissonance between marketers, the sales people, and the customer.

Marketers spend too much time focusing on the tools and technology, optimizing their automation and not enough time having sit down conversations with customers and other members of their team.

So when you start to think about conversational marketing and how it fits in as just another tool in your marketing stack, instead keep this framework in mind:

The Conversational Marketing Framework is divided into three phases:

• Engage: The Engagement step can also be about the identification of the user – who are they, do you know them, have they been to the site before, are they a customer.You can find out more information about how you use intent data into conversational marketing tools so that you can get the full picture of how someone came onto your site and use that information to start a relevant conversation with them.This will ensure that everyone who comes to your site can be greeted in such a manner that’s pertinent to them, not a one-size-fits-all greeting but a real, personal greeting when they “walk into your store” – come onto your site.
• Understand: This isn’t a one way street of your business trying to understand if a person is the right fit for you, the customer on the other side needs to understand if and why you’re the best fit for them.This is done through the introduction of your company’s value proposition, explanation of why your customers have chosen you as a vendor, and then asking the customer questions that give you more information about their business, their needs, and the problem they’re trying to solve.
• Recommend: Once the customer knows more about you, and you them it’s time to recommend a next step. Now, that’s not always speaking to someone from your team. That can be consuming content to help with intent, that can be admitting you’re not the right fit for what they’re looking for and saving yourself and that person time.You’ve created the building blocks for a personal relationship, and you want to recommend the next step to keep that relationship moving and respectful – no matter the outcome.

This entire process can happen without the intervention of a human. That’s the beauty of automation, humans do not need to be involved every single time.

However, there are some interactions you want to keep one-to-many, some that can be one-to-few, and some that you want to be one-to-one.

Nailing the “Engage” and “Understand” steps in the conversational marketing framework will help you bucket each interaction into one of those three buckets.

This is super important when you’re incorporating a conversational marketing strategy with a personal experience strategy.

You WANT each interaction to feel as one-to-one as possible, without making every interaction manual for your team.

This doesn’t just come from Marketing having all the answers. You need to make sure you’re closely aligned with your sales team to make sure you’re gathering the right data in your conversations so that when you do facilitate those one-on-one conversations, they’re at the quality your sales team is expecting.