What's A Conversational Strategy & Why You Need One

In the ever-evolving world of business communication, small businesses need to stay ahead by adopting effective conversational strategies. Building strong relationships with customers and providing seamless interactions is crucial for success. With the rise of messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, businesses now have a powerful tool at their disposal, so let’s explore the significance of conversational strategy for businesses of all sizes, and the role WhatsApp Business can play in enhancing customer engagement.

What is a conversational strategy?

A conversational strategy refers to a deliberate and planned approach businesses take to engage in meaningful conversations with their customers. It goes beyond simple marketing-style mass communication and focuses on building relationships, understanding customer needs, and providing personalised interactions with more of a one-to-one approach.

A well-crafted conversational strategy takes into account the specific goals and values of a business, as well as the preferences and expectations of its target audience. It involves employing various communication channels, such as social media, messaging apps, or chatbots, and tailoring messages to create a seamless and engaging experience for customers. By building out and using an effective conversational strategy, businesses can foster trust, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive better growth of their bottom line.

Why do you need a conversational strategy?

Having a conversational strategy for your business is more essential these days than you might think. Developing those one-on-one style and more personalised relationships is absolutely crucial for everything from good day to day operations to wider brand perception.

Build Strong Customer Relationships: A conversational strategy allows businesses to connect with their customers on a deeper level. By engaging in meaningful conversations, you can better understand customer needs, address concerns, and provide personalised experiences. This builds trust, loyalty, and long-term relationships.

Enhance Customer Satisfaction: Effective communication is key to ensuring customer satisfaction. A well-executed conversational strategy lets you more promptly respond to inquiries, provide relevant information, and offer solutions. This leads to improved customer experiences and higher satisfaction levels.

Drive Customer Engagement: Engaging customers in conversations creates opportunities for you to better capture their attention and keep them actively involved. By leveraging different communication channels, such as social media or messaging apps, you can initiate quality discussions, share relevant content, and encourage feedback, fostering increased engagement with your target audience.

Differentiate from Competitors: In a crowded marketplace, a strong conversational strategy can set a business apart from its competitors. By offering personalised interactions and attentive customer service, you can fully demonstrate your commitment to meeting customer needs. This unique approach helps you to stand out and build a reputation for exceptional customer experience, which is hard to beat as a selling point.

Improve Brand Perception: A well-planned conversational strategy can positively impact your wider brand perception. When customers feel heard, valued, and supported, they are more likely to view the business in a positive light. Word-of-mouth referrals and online reviews enhance this further, leading to a fantastic snowball effect.

Drive Business Growth: Effective customer communication can directly impact your business growth. By employing a conversational strategy, you can increase customer retention rates, attract new customers through positive recommendations, and maximise all of your possible revenue opportunities. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat buyers and advocates for the business, which gets in more customers… and so on.

How to create a conversational strategy

Creating an effective conversational strategy needs a bit of thought put in up front, but is well worth it in the long run.

Define your goals

Begin by identifying the specific objectives you want to achieve through conversational interactions. Whether it's improving customer satisfaction, increasing immediate sales, or enhancing brand loyalty, clearly defining your goals will help you to shape your thinking.

Know your audience (and customers)

Gain as deep an understanding of your target audience and their preferences as you can. In an ideal world you might conduct market research, analyse customer data, and gather all of this together to tailor your messaging and communication channels accordingly. In a more realistic scenario, especially for smaller businesses, you can probably compile a lot of useful insight together just by thinking about your own interactions with customers and getting ideas from the rest of your team, if you have one!

Choose the right channels

Next, choose which communication channels best suit your current customers and your desired audience. Whether it's social media platforms, messaging apps, chatbots, or a combination, select channels that align with your target customers' preferences and provide seamless experiences. WhatsApp Business is a great place to start if you’re not sure where to begin (but we’ll admit we’re a teensy bit biased there)!

Create engaging content

Develop compelling and relevant content that resonates with your audience. Use a conversational tone, address pain points that your business can address, and provide valuable information to capture attention and encourage meaningful interactions. You can use tools like broadcasts as well as tailoring your profile page on WhatsApp Business as a great starting point.

Train your team

Equip your team with the necessary skills to engage in effective conversations. Provide training on active listening, empathy, and problem-solving techniques to ensure that everyone knows how to have great interactions with customers. Make sure you also have a plan for handling problem situations, as sooner or later they are bound to arise.

Monitor, adapt, and evolve

Keep a weather eye on metrics like response times, customer feedback, and engagement metrics so you can see how well your strategy is working. Change and amend your approaches as you need to - a good strategy never stays static! - and be aware of new technology and channels as they become popular, so you don’t get left behind.

Integrating WhatsApp Business into your conversational strategy

Admittedly we aren’t exactly impartial judges here, but we think WhatsApp for Business is a great tool to integrate into a conversational strategy for your business. It offers a wide range of benefits and is dead easy to get started with.

• Instant and convenient communication on an already widely-used platform
• Highly personalised interactions with the ability to streamline using auto replies and templates for greater efficiency
• Supports rich media sharing, from images and videos to PDFs and location information
• Automated messaging capabilities to send pre-designed communications depending on certain customer interactions or other triggers
• Invaluable for appointment reminders and similar notifications which are so critical to many businesses

Incorporating WhatsApp for Business into your conversational strategy can hugely improve customer communication for businesses of all sizes. By leveraging its instantly available but highly personalisable features, you can build stronger connections with your customers, enhance engagement with your audience, and ultimately drive better overall growth.

Even better, you don’t need to get extra phones or tablets to make use of WhatsApp Business - easily manage two WhatsApp accounts on a single device with our easy virtual number solution and start reaping the benefits for your business in just a few clicks.