Define: Conversation Marketing

WOM (word of mouth), people-powered, social media ... these are all words we use to talk about internet marketing strategies for talking to our customers.

The word of the day is now Conversation Marketing.

Conversation Marketing builds on the idea that we, as businesses, need to talk to our customers in a human voice. We need to move away from the corporate PR voice and adopt a friendly, more transparent approach to the sales and marketing of our products and services.

Conversation is a natural human behaviour. We talk. We talk to each other about the things we like, don’t like, the services that were good, the ones that were bad. We act as a filter for each other, and we build up or tear down the reputation of companies through our daily comments.

As an internet marketers, we have to be conversationalists. We build relationships through conversation. And in order to market products and services, we need to be good at constructing conversations. It’s like being good at small talk. Are you able to listen and create something interesting and engaging out of what’s going on around you?

And for marketers, the small talk is important because the big brand messages aren’t sinking in the way they were in those wonder days that are glorified by MadMen. Plus the small talk is the marketing glue. Blog posts, customer reviews, feedback emails, these are all larger conversations happening about companies, products and services. In addition, we also live in a world of text messages, StumbleUpon thumbs up or down, TinyURL and Twitter. A world of small talk: 140 characters.

Your marketing messages are still important. But the storytelling that happens around those messages is much more interesting: the small talk, the glue, the conversation.