I Just Called To Say Check Me Out on My Chatbot
No slam to the Stevie Wonder song, “I Just Called To Say I Love You,” but for B2B marketers, calling is going the way of the operator. Phone calls and video calling are seeing a decline despite COVID-19.
Marketers are continuing to use email at high rates. What is trending are online live chat (real, live person), social media and chatbots (fake, robots).
This is real growth in an area called “conversational marketing,” or using technology and advances such as social content, chat or chatbots to encourage one-to-one approaches that help you learn more about your customers/donors/patients and create a more human buying experience. By using these forms of communication, you can shorten the buying cycle and better engage people with products, services and information.
We are all feeling deluged with too many irrelevant emails (just in the time it took me to write this blog post, I received more than 38 immediately deletable emails). In spite of that, email is still the king of B2B contact, but the more clutter, the less effective a medium becomes.
The study that Marketing Charts quoted found that the No. 1 hurdle keeping B2B marketers from achieving high levels of effective conversational marking was a “lack of marketing resources to maintain messaging and keep it fresh.” Unfortunately, that is a bit of a cop-out, because there are plenty of highly skilled organizations (like AMPERAGE) that can help develop and deploy fresh, engaging content.
Mark Mathis III is chief creative & strategy officer, partner and cofounder of AMPERAGE Marketing & Fundraising.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle. After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant. He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.” Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.” One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College. Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board. Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.
