Conversational Marketing

Listening is an art form and skill not regularly taught in marketing seminars.
Good listening is based in empathy: Listening to someone's position with the intent of fully understanding the other person's positions and interests. Businesses need to suppress their instinct to answer immediately and steer the conversation towards their goals and needs. Instead, in many cases, they may not even need or want to respond to statements. Businesses should just sit quietly and wait to hear more.

While listening, businesses should stay away from formulating answers in their heads. That's a sure sign that nobody is listening. Businesses need to listen with the intent to understand and being able to reiterate back what they just learned. The goal is not plain listening. It's listening in meaningful ways.

In order to become good listeners, companies need to take a look at their listening infrastructure. Are you utilizing your customer service to be efficient and save money? Or is your customer service focused on solving problems? Can people get in touch with you through various channels? Or do you funnel them to a dead end? Are the executives listening to their employees? Is there more than a dust-collecting suggestion box?

Advance Marketers have to unlearn everything they know about marketing, because we are moving away from the age of employees as badgeholders and consumers as statistics and into participatory value creation.
And all this starts with listening. Because businesses can learn more from people than marketing books.

In the beginning there were markets. Buyers, sellers, window shoppers. Markets are filled with smells, loud voices, even louder voices, people, life. At one point markets become marketing: A communal experience became a lonely, one-way experience.
Instead of solving problems, answering desires or needs, marketers focus on their own problems and stopped being part of the community.

Technology and Web 2.0 tools changed the marketing game and businesses have to go back to the roots of markets: Businesses have to become participants in the market conversation. Warning: If you decide to participate just to sell something to people, stay away from the conversation. Not only will you not be successful, you will damage your overall brand perception. However, you will be very successful if you want to participate because you want to be part of the community and consider conversational marketing not as an experiment, rather a long-term strategy with long-term goals.

Genuine participation is done by real people. Businesses have to forget about press releases, PR talk, goals and objectives. Think about the people that participate in conversations you're about to join: What are their dreams and desires? How can your product make their life better? How can your expertise enhance the communal experience?

Forget everything you learned about marketing in business school. And go back to markets filled with life and conversations: Participate to help the market. Participate to help people. Participate to transform your business.

You are not an advanced marketer if you don't participate in the conversation.