The Conversational Marketing Revolution

How conversational marketing is transforming the sales automation process – one customer at a time

As franchise sites increase information density to previously unimaginable levels, it’s now more important than ever to help potential leads to find the information they need quickly. Enter Conversational Marketing, that helpful little chat window that pops up to offer assistance to visitors.

conversational marketing graphic

Whether it’s a live chat agent or an AI-driven chatbot on the other side of that pop-up, this interaction marks the first “real time” experience your customer will have with your brand. It’s also a moment that can make or break their experience.

To understand why conversational marketing is so important to both the sales automation process and to franchise lead generation, you have to first think about the sales process and how technology is changing the way buyers make decisions.

Traditional sales funnels are still important, but so is how customers find information

Sometimes, it’s hard for me to avoid falling into an “old way/new way” mode of thinking. The old way of franchise sales was finding a prospect through a web form, sending them a barrage of information, and then scheduling a phone call to walk them through the information you just sent them.

That information – the sales funnel – provided them with an overview of the franchise concept, a breakdown of basic costs, what resources the franchisor made available to franchisees, franchise support options, and so on. During that initial phone call, it was easy for a good salesperson to hone in on the prospect’s most pertinent questions and to craft answers that overcame any objections.

To be clear, all of the information included in a typical sales funnel is still vital to the sales automation process. However, as any seasoned sales pro will tell you, not every lead has the same questions. What’s important to one individual may well be irrelevant to the next.

Unfortunately, too many franchise concepts still rely on a rigid sales funnel with very little interaction other than to lead a potential buyer through every step, whether that step is relevant or not. Ask yourself how many irrelevant steps you’re willing to go through to get to the information you need to decide you want to pursue a purchase. Two? Three? Five?

Conversational marketing is changing the traditional sales funnel by blowing it up completely. Here’s how it works.

Conversational Marketing can transform the sales funnel into a sales driver

In the traditional franchise sales process, it was the sales associate’s job to divine a potential lead’s questions and then provide answers. This interaction took place on trade show floors and over the phone. Today, that initial job falls almost wholly to the brand’s web site through sales automation.

conversational marketing

But franchise sites are information-dense, and not all potential buyers want to wade through every detail. They want immediate access to the answers they need to assess their decision.

For some sites, a simple search suffices. However, the cold, impersonal search box doesn’t necessarily provide your visitor with the personal touch they are looking for. Conversational marketing tools like live chat can deliver precisely the information they want when they want it.

Think of conversational marketing like a well-organized card catalog of answers to questions, and your friendly chat representative is the knowledgeable reference librarian, ready to pluck the answer out of the ether. Here’s an example of a conversational marketing exchange on a franchise web site:

Chat Agent: Hello! Welcome to our web site. How can I help you find what you’re looking for?

User: I am wondering how much it costs to open a franchise.

Chat Agent: Great. Happy to help. Here is a breakdown of franchise costs. (LINK)

When the user clicks the link, they’re taken to the appropriate page in the research funnel. Here is where the process gets very interesting: they’re not visiting that page alone. The moment it loads, their friendly chat agent is still there to answer any questions.

Chat Agent: Is this the information you’re looking for?

User: Could you tell me the franchise fee?

Chat Agent: Yes. As you can see, the franchise fee is $49,995

Now that your visitor has the specific answer they’re looking for, they’ll move on to their next question. And then the next, and the next. They’re navigating the research funnel, but they’re doing so on their own terms, with a handy guide down there in the bottom of their browser window.

Conversational marketing means constant access, but it doesn’t mean constant staffing

Few franchises (if any!) could afford to staff a chat function on a web site 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fortunately, they don’t have to do so thanks to incredible advancements in artificial intelligence systems.

conversational marketing

When you hear “chat bot,” you probably think of an anthropomorphized paperclip harping at you to “Click if this is what you’re looking for.” That’s hardly what I’m speaking of today when I say conversational marketing.

With recent technological developments, “chat bots” are almost indistinguishable from an actual person sitting on the other side of the computer. From the user’s perspective, they’re interacting with a person and personality. The best systems even have senses of humor and empathy and can respond to users’ jokes or comments appropriately.

User: I’m having a really hard time finding out how many franchise locations you have.

Chat Agent: I’m so sorry. Let me help you out.

Chat Agent: Here is a list of current locations from our FDD. (LINK)

User: Thanks!

An interaction as simple as offering an apology and then assistance can transform the potential lead’s experience. Even better, if the chat agent cannot adequately address their question, the agent is prepared to convert them into a sales lead on the spot.

Chat Agent: You know, it might be better if I have one of my sales team reach out to you. Can you give me an email address or phone number where you can be reached?

User: Sure. dsparks@brandj.com

Chat Agent: Great! I’ll have someone get in touch with you soon. Is there anything else I can do to help?

And just like that, you’re on the phone or emailing with a new lead for your franchise company, all thanks to conversational marketing.

Transform your sales into a buying process

Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of conversational marketing and sales automation is that it transforms your company’s marketing experience from a sales process into a buying process. By shifting focus from your franchise opportunity and to your buyer, you’re meeting them where they are, placing them in the driver’s seat of the process, and guiding them to the information they need.

For something as transformative as this technology can be, it’s remarkably affordable, as well. There is a conversational marketing and sales automation process suitable for franchise concepts of any size.

At Brand Journalists, we’ve employed conversational marketing tools for international franchise brands and new startups alike. In each case, these systems have produced remarkable results.

So whether you’re a small, scrappy upstart with a core team bootstrapping the next big thing in franchising or a household name, transform your sales process into a buying process with conversational marketing. You’ll be surprised at the results.

Want to talk about how to incorporate conversational marketing into your franchise development strategy?

If your franchise opportunity is ready to employ conversational marketing tactics on your development site, Brand Journalists can help. Contact us today to see how we can help you employ quality video production to tell your brand story.

Why Franchise Salespeople Miss the Mark with Younger Buyers

As the number of younger franchise buyers surges, franchise salespeople still don’t know how to connect with them

Younger franchise buyers are flooding the market these days, and the franchising conferences – from Franchise Leadership and Development Conference (FLDC) to FranTech — spent some focused time exploring that reality. Smart franchisors see the benefits of recruiting millennial entrepreneurs. They appreciate the statistics — ubiquitous at the FLDC — which say that buyers in their 20s and 30s are on a steep increase and will bring creativity, energy and enthusiasm to their franchise systems.

Franchisors’ efforts to recruit millennials, however, are all wrong. As evidenced by companies’ (like BuzzFeed, Facebook, Google and Amazon) investment into video, we millennials have a preference on how to communicate, and we gobble up video. Even though video on franchise development websites has risen 20% — up to 60% this year — that’s still an extremely low percentage (it’s 2016 people; what are the rest of you doing out there?). Sadly, the way presenters described the video on their sites reeked of corporate misunderstanding.

Authenticity is the key

tony-romasAuthenticity has not only been the catchy phrase of the election cycle; it also represents an idea and skill that we millennials have been prepped to sniff out in an instance. Your corporate videos of half-enthused franchisees make us feel entirely disconnected from your brand. We simply won’t watch those videos and will be ready to move on to the next idea. We want to have a connection with our work. Study after study has shown that millennials want to BELIEVE in what they’re doing and make sure that their life work has meaning and purpose. We’ve been blasted with advertising and constant media since we could understand language, so we don’t want to be sold something; we want to identify with it.

The constant theme when discussing video on websites was “testimonial videos.” Creating these videos usually happens like this: wait for your annual convention, set up a camera and a backdrop with your logo on it, shove as many of your franchisees in front of the camera as possible and force them to say nice things about your brand. If you go to a conference like the FLDC and hear that you need more video to attract more millennial buyers, and you force this type of video onto your website, then you’re actually TURNING AWAY those buyers.

This is why “testimonial” videos will always come up short. We seek out pieces that we can connect with. Empathy drives action, and when you’re communicating with millennials, this needs to be at the forefront of your thinking. Produce videos that are meaningful and allow for actual connections with the video subject’s life. These deeper connections are necessary to franchise buyers, and if you think you’re establishing connections through mere testimonials, you’re fooling yourself.

How do you get video right?

The value of emotionally-relevant video is really starting to bubble to the surface in franchise development. Smart, forward-thinking brands like ChemDry are stuffing their YouTube pages full of relatable, authentic documentaries. We get to know real people (who happen to be franchisees) and the way the brand, to which they’ve dedicated their lives, has shaped who they are. When a company as storied as AAMCO, or a company as new and fresh as Class 101 create videos like this, viewers can picture themselves as franchisees because they empathize with the human qualities of a Lou Fizzarotti or a Karen Feamster. I’m excited that brands like PostNet are not only making quality video the lifeblood of their franchise development web site, but they’re also producing videos that speak to people in a real way.

When you watch these sorts of videos, think about how much more emotionally engaging they are compared to typical content marketing. At the end of the day, emotion triggers action and pieces like these documentaries can be the glue your campaign needs to hold all the numbers together.

There’s an obvious reason the vast majority of franchise development sites lack this kind of video: it’s really hard to produce. But the best franchise developers are already thinking about their candidates in the right way – they get to really know them, make sure the right fit is there, and hold their hand through a massive life decision.

Now, think about that in terms of video. Real franchisee profile videos and documentaries take that kind of dedication – it means getting to know a franchisee, spending TIME with that franchisee and really digging in to see what motivates and inspires them. It’s storytelling on an empathetic level, and it really takes actual filmmakers to pull off such a project.

We love interesting franchisees who are doing amazing things within their franchise system. It’s so inspiring to run into franchisees – from boomers to millennials – and to hear their stories, see their environment and experience the businesses they’ve built. It’s these stories that we 20- and 30-somethings crave when making such an emotional decision like buying a franchise. If you’re looking to improve the way you speak to this exploding group of new franchisees, we’d love to discuss it with you.

What is Brand Journalism?

What is brand journalism, exactly, and is brand journalism the same thing as journalism?

By  Thomas Scott and Greg Lacour

Businesses may not know the answer to this complex question, but they’ve agreed on one thing: Using the tools, tactics and style of journalism to tell a company’s story is essential. The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) listed it as one of top 12 trends in public relations for 2012, and Entrepreneur magazine focused on it in its 2012 Branding issue.

Why?

Over the years, Western culture has been bombarded with marketing and advertising to the point where consumers are wise to the game and reluctant to accept much of anything on face value. Politicians have adopted old-style Madison Avenue marketing strategies as their own, further strengthening consumers’ perception of commercial slogans and hard sells as nonsense. If it sounds like marketing, people simply tune it out.

Then came 2008, the year that crippled Americans’ trust in its institutions. Through unethical, reckless practices, banks, brokers and retirement fund managers wiped out as much as 50 percent of the nation’s personal net worth — and the government failed to stop it beforehand or punish the guilty afterward. The housing market crashed. Banks dissolved. Jobs abruptly died. People lost savings, homes and big chunks of their future, and it happened virtually overnight.

As a culture, we lost faith in companies and stopped trusting them. We changed both the way we perceive companies and the way we make buying decisions.

Today, the typical person no longer trusts a company at face value. It is human nature to hate being sold, so most people avoid salespeople like the plague. When we want or need a service, we look to sources we trust and ask others for their opinions. You might say we are in the age of the expert opinion, and the expert is just about anyone besides a company trying to sell us something!

For companies, the implications are huge. Traditional approaches to marketing are not working like they once did. Customers don’t respond to campaigns, and even when there is a large market for what a company does, customers are just out of reach, giving one marketer reason to call traditional display advertising a ‘branding black hole.’

Thus enters the practice of brand journalism.

As long as people have been communicating, we’ve used stories to relate to each other, make sense of the world around us, and help us make decisions as we go through life. Advancements in technology have us sharing greater amounts of information, and we’re finding ourselves making more decisions based on those stories. You might say that the story is the essence of communication. Always has been and always will be.

As humans, we’re wired with a desire to make a real and meaningful connection. This might explain why when someone is telling you a good story, you don’t even realize it. That’s the power of a well-told story. It allows the company or organization to become “human.” Being human is about having a real, honest connection with people, about being transparent, responsive and above all accessible.

Companies have never been adept at using stories to connect with customers. Beginning with newspapers, whose purpose as a business is to deliver advertising to readers, and going through the TV explosion and into the Internet era, companies have marketed to captive audiences, using one-way communication tools to get people’s attention. Traditional marketing and advertising has always focused on prompting a behavior change or action on the part of customers. Buy this, go here, call us, what author Seth Godin calls “interruption marketing.”

Brand journalism involves telling journalism-style stories about a company that make readers want to know more, stories that don’t read like marketing or advertising copy. It means having conversations with your customer — not preaching at them or bombarding them with bullet points but giving them real and interesting stories they can relate to. People today are so inundated with advertising and marketing speak, they now filter out marketing messages and a well-told story is the best way to get your message across.

The History of Brand Journalism

Brand Journalism actually has its roots in the franchise industry. In 2004, McDonald’s Chief Marketing Officer Larry Light said mass marketing no longer worked and that “no single ad tells the whole story.” McDonald’s, he said, had adopted a new marketing technique: “brand journalism.”

Light defined brand journalism as a way to record “what happens to a brand in the world” and create ad communications that, over time, can tell a whole story of a brand.

He was rejecting traditional marketing and advertising approaches that focused on brand positioning, in favor of a content stream approach involving multiple channels and journalism-style writing. His model was the way an editor approaches the creation of a magazine, with its array of very different content aimed at a wide variety of interests — hence, brand journalism.

Franchise systems adopted the practice early, and today it is one of the most productive ways to generate leads and engage customers. Big corporations — Boeing, Cisco and Imperial Sugar, to name a few — adopted it with success. Now even small companies use it with great results.

Ten years ago, search was the big marketing trend. Five years ago, it was social media. Today, it is brand journalism. We are in the content marketing era, and the quality of your brand stories can have an enormous impact on how effective your marketing is. As a result, companies are rushing to hire journalists, many of whom are out of work as newspapers fold.

Is Brand Journalism the same as journalism?

Absolutely. It’s simply another kind of journalism, just as political journalism is journalism, sports journalism is journalism, blogs on local issues are journalism, even Facebook posts on neighborhood happenings are journalism.

Before the internet, companies hired PR firms to write press releases and pitch to journalists, who digested the releases and wrote a story that was hopefully favorable to the company. Today, a company can bypass publications and PR firms entirely and publish its own articles. Using blogs, online articles, websites, emails and social media, companies now have an unbelievable opportunity to communicate directly to their customers using journalism-style storytelling.

“Journalism” as we’ve come to define it has traditionally been the domain of newsrooms. Reporters, schooled in the craft, consider the term to apply to a very narrow definition of someone working for a news organization. Ideally, reporters are neutral, bound to be as objective as possible and have a self-imposed responsibility for telling both the positive and negative sides of a story.

Reporters are taught that there is a separation between a news organization’s editorial content and its advertising content. In other words, if a company wants publicity, they should purchase an ad; that’s what ads are for. Reporters often scoff at the idea of people creating stories for and about companies. It isn’t objective, and it doesn’t often show both sides, so it can’t possibly be journalism. For a newsroom reporter, brand journalism is taboo — it somehow is different from what they do.

It isn’t, not really. Technology has torn down the walls and made new rules. Journalism today is a large umbrella that encompasses many variations. A newsroom reporter is certainly a journalist. A writer at a business publication is a journalist. A blogger can be a journalist. Citizens with cell phones at a news scene are journalists. People who use journalism skills to tell stories on companies’ behalf are journalists, and anyone who argues otherwise simply hasn’t grasped the dimensions of the new terrain we’re all occupying.

Because ultimately, it’s all about telling stories aimed at specific audiences. That’s it. Objectivity is a fantasy; a news reporter can’t help but bring his or her biases to a story, no matter how hard he or she tries to be impartial. The practice of journalism, at its core, is about earning and keeping a reader’s interest. Journalism is about finding the essence of a story and deciding how to retell what you find so it is interesting and helpful for a reader. This starts with a catchy headline, moves on to an interesting lead and continues through the body of the article. Like all stories, it has a beginning, middle and an end.

Brand journalists, writers who practice journalism-style storytelling on behalf of a company, have to accomplish the same goal: earn and keep an audience’s attention. They have to collect and edit stories about a company and present them to the company’s audience through a variety of media.

Stories have to be authentic, full of real people doing real things. They should offer transparency into the culture of a brand, and they should give anyone doing online research answers to the questions they are asking. Stories should be interesting to read and helpful. Solid stories earn and keep trust with readers. Ask yourself how many times you’ve seen a “business profile” in the newspaper. OK, it’s not technically an ad. But it sure has the same impact, doesn’t it? So what’s the difference? If a story is accurate and genuine and written to appeal to a specific audience’s interests, how is a piece of brand journalism anything other than journalism?

It works, too. Companies that put it into action produce amazing results.

A new opportunity for companies to create meaningful relationships with their customers

Somewhere out there is a potential or current customer who wants what you have to sell.

They may not know who you are or know anything about your company, but they already get what you do, are interested in your industry and have a need for your products or services. Gathering, writing and publishing brand journalism-style stories for your company website, blog, social media and online PR efforts is what it takes to earn and keep the attention of these potential customers. Contact us today to learn more.

What is your company’s story?

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