Beating Ad Fatigue and Converting Customers With Conversational Marketing
The key to maximizing your return on ad spend while limiting your customer’s ad fatigue lies in striking the proper balance between the two. Luckily, conversational marketing provides an avenue to accomplish both.
A Marketing Conundrum: When, Where, and How Often to Put Your Brand in Front of Customers
The core of avoiding ad fatigue lies in understanding just how often you should put your brand in front of potential customers. It doesn’t matter how you divide your funnel or your efforts, and it doesn’t matter the size of your marketing team. Whether you are the CMO for a global corporation with a team of marketing professionals working under you, or you are a small startup with a marketing department of just one person, you have the same goal: to move potential customers through your funnel and into the purchasing stage with as little marketing cost as possible.
Therefore, it is up to you to figure out the frequency of how often to put your marketing efforts in front of potential clients. Where and when is easy; they are based on the channels you intend to use for your marketing campaign. “How often” is a harder question to answer. No matter what channel you use, whether print, video, email, or social media, there is no one size fits all answer. To figure it out, there are a few things you need to take into account first.
High Ad Frequency Leads to Ad Fatigue and Diminishing Returns on Ad Spend
Conventional marketing wisdom used to state that the more ad visibility your brand had the better. That advice has changed given the present-day marketing environment. Bombarding customers with your brand does nothing to move them down the funnel. If anything, it stops business relationships before they’ve even started. So many more marketing avenues exist now that didn’t exist back in the day. Consumers can be left feeling shell shocked, or worse, annoyed if you over-utilize all of them.
Even worse, throwing too many ads at your customers will increase your marketing costs. Modern-day ad platforms monitor ad frequency in order to optimize user experience. Too much ad saturation on any platform can cause your company to incur penalties.
Too many ads on platforms like Facebook have negative consequences. Key metrics may be adversely affected. You risk having your click-through rate (CTR) decrease severely while your cost per click (CPC) skyrockets. In turn, if your CPC goes up, that means your CPA, or cost per acquisition, goes up as well, resulting in angry customers and less return on your ad spend. Take a look at this AdEspresso chart. It shows just how severe the increase is:
Here’s the catch: legacy channels, as well as many digital marketing channels, are used to high ad frequency as part of their normal operations. In fact, they demand it. It’s a situation where it’s hard to avoid advertising saturation. It doesn’t matter the channel, be it social media like Facebook and Twitter, or a print, TV, or email campaign. Customers dislike impersonal messages that feel broadly targeted no matter how it gets to them. They’ve become blind to online banners.
The challenge for marketing professionals is creating discrete and differentiated advertising messages aimed at different channels while working to keep ad saturation low. No matter the scale you’re working on, it is a problem for marketers from every industry. Luckily, there is an alternative: conversational marketing.
Streamlining Your Marketing Funnel and Minimizing Ad Fatigue Through Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing takes your marketing efforts and streamlines them into a highly personalized conversation. Conversational marketing enables a 1-on-1 customer relationship to be established immediately. It also gives you access to a treasure trove of declared data, providing you a comprehensive picture of the customer’s preferences.
With conversational marketing, you no longer have to fret about creating discrete ad campaigns across every possible customer demographic. By utilizing highly personalized conversations, you are ready with the right message every time. Conversational marketing easily adapts to the situation.
With conversational marketing, ad fatigue can be greatly reduced by accelerating your customer journey with a highly personal and relevant experience from the first touchpoint. You connect to the customer at their point of highest intent by default. A conversation transforms customers from merely aggregated data points into people with individual preferences. You can pinpoint how far down the sales funnel they’ve traveled, and the exact items they’re shopping for.
Convert Customers Quickly by Collapsing Ad Touchpoints and Personalizing Experiences Through Conversational Marketing
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to differentiate your shopper’s intentions, to be able to tell the difference between a customer shopping for themselves and someone buying a gift? To have actionable data points about their preferences and price points? Wouldn’t it be great to eliminate needless, ineffective follow-up marketing after the point of sale?
Traditional digital marketing solves this problem with a complex set of analytics tools that require a lot of engineering lift. Setting up pre-purchase event tracking and wishlists on site. Heatmap analysis tools. A/B landing page tests. Mobile optimized versions of your eCommerce site. The list goes on and on.
Each of these systems depends on meticulous set-up and coordination across departments to get it right. And you still need someone to review all the data to get a holistic picture and take actions that might cause extremely small percentage point lifts in your overall conversion rate.
A conversational marketing platform can solve the issue and help you reach customers directly on social media using apps like Facebook Messenger, or even right within conversational display ads. Conversational marketing engages customers in a fun, friendly format, and helps to identify preferences, data, shopping intent, and how far down the funnel they are. It even gives you a chance to recapture lost sales through personalized re-engagement messages in chat that leverage the declared data gathered in conversation.
Now imagine you run a campaign that triggers a guided selling conversation like the one shown in this video.
The best news is that conversational marketing helps to collapse ad touchpoints, resulting in faster conversions. It can accelerate the journey from discovery to consideration to purchase by guiding every customer individually along your funnel. You can even offer highly-personalized product suggestions tailored to your customers’ tastes. Watch conversational marketing in action here:
While conversational marketing may work in theory, does it work in practice too? Absolutely.
The right conversation with the right customers matters immensely. The key is how you engage with them. A conversational tool helps you to track every step of the conversation and turn it into a meaningful interaction. With the right conversational marketing tool, your marketing returns will only grow over time. Rather than a diminishing return on ad spend of your typical campaign, you have the opportunity to increase your returns over time as you leverage more and more declared data. All in a format that continues to increase in popularity.
B2C Messaging’s Continued Growth
People love text-based messaging. For more than 50 percent of all internet and mobile users in the US, messaging was their preferred method of communication. Messaging is only expected to continue its rapid growth with an expected increase to 2.48 billion worldwide users by 2021. Messaging is so widely used that more than 20 billion business-related messages are sent per month on Facebook Messenger alone.
This is a critical point for conversational marketing and the business segments that use it. Conversational marketing may not be totally immune to ad fatigue as it grows in popularity. Marketers need to be sensitive to context and create great conversational experiences that their customers love. Irrelevant ad placement and poor conversational design still runs the risk of frustrating customers and reducing your return on ad spend while damaging potential customer relationships.
Done right, conversational marketing is the optimal advertising channel. Done wrong, you risk adding it to the long list of channels where your customers feel you don’t add value to them in an instant, personal, and effortless way. Paired with the right set of conversational intelligence tools, conversational marketing can be the most powerful channel in a marketer’s portfolio.
