Why you'll need conversational marketing once Facebook changes forever

On May 25^th, GDPR hits. Whilst everyone thinks this will simply mean less emails for those organisations that are employing paid media, there will be a more significant impact. Read on to discover how conversational marketing could prove to be your saving grace.

How Facebook is changing

If your ad set uses behavioural data to layer audiences, you may have seen this warning sign pop up:

Facebook is removing any third party data providers from its inventory. This move is necessary but very blunt, and essentially takes away the option of layering demographics, interests and data sets over behaviours to provide you with refined audiences. For those who have not been using behavioural targeting options, this may not bother you, but for those who are you will know this is going to take away a valuable targeting option.

The knock-on effect of this will be a movement back to lookalike audiences and interest targeting. However, with GDPR coming in, obtaining the base data for your lookalike audience is going to be much harder, as you will need opt in for your brand rather than just third party interests.

These people will still exist on Facebook, which will remain a highly effective channel as anyone who has used in in the past five years will know. However, for brands with a smaller data collection or brand following, this change is going to increase the time it takes to refine and find suitable audiences, thereby increasing costs.

If you go back to old school interest targeting, basing selections on relevance using the audience insights tool, you can build a great audience se. However, you need to spend a lot of time (and money!) getting the combinations right.

So, what's the solution? 

Currently there is no solution to this that can be garnered from Facebook, and arguably there shouldn't be. Facebook is taking responsible steps to prevent data misuse, and whilst as a paid media practitioner this is annoying, it's the right thing to do.

What companies need to do is not focus on the base lead generation, that will develop in time. What sensible companies are doing instead is switching their focus to conversion wastage reduction. If your lead generation capacity reduces by 10% but conversion increases by 10%, you can easily improve your revenue margins.

How to increase conversion and reduce wastage

To increase your conversions, you can't miss any opportunities. You need to ensure that you are engaging with hand raisers, nurturing potential buyers and even keeping the tyre kickers in the loop.

Now this requires 24 hr attention from your sales team interacting and keeping leads warm. If you are a smaller firm or even an enterprise level organisation having a fully co-ordinated sales team is costly and co-ordinating them resource heavy. That's where conversational marketing come in...

What is conversational marketing?

Conversational marketing, or conversation marketing, is the process of having real-time, one-to-one conversations to capture, qualify, and connect with your best leads. 

Unlike traditional marketing, conversational marketing uses targeted messaging and intelligent ChatBots to start having conversations which answer the customers' needs instead of pitching to them - this way, leads never have to wait for follow-ups and can engage with your business when it's convenient for them (like when they're browsing your website).

Of course, conversations with potential customers don't just happen on your website, which is why conversational marketing is bigger than any single channel or platform. Combining inbound and outbound tactics, conversational marketing is all about opening dialogue with the people who can benefit from what you're offering, whether that's via a face-to-face meeting, a phone call or an email exchange.

By setting up a conversational marketing campaign, and pairing natural language with a ChatBot that can be on hand to answer queries and provide snippets at any time of the day, your sales team can arrive in the office to warm, qualified leads who have relevant information and just need closing.

What's the right mix?

To maximise your lead generation and conversion when GDPR comes into full force, you will need the following:

• A clean opted in data set
• A campaign built on traditional interest/relevance targeting
• Strong engagement from your audience
• A ChatBot optimised conversion process to maximise leads

If you get these right, you will be in a position to maximise revenues after GDPR, rather than struggling in the confusion.