Conversational Marketing: What Every Business Needs to Know

Drift, the chat and marketing software company founded in 2015, spent the past few years pushing the term “conversational marketing” into the mainstream, and by early 2019 its co-founders David Cancel and Dave Gerhart had a book by that exact name explaining the pitch: replace slow forms and drip email sequences with a real-time conversation on your website. The idea had real merit and real limits. This is a framework for telling which side of that line your business falls on.

What conversational marketing meant by 2019

At its core, it meant swapping the traditional “fill out a form, wait for a follow-up email” pattern for a live chat widget or bot that engaged a website visitor immediately, asking qualifying questions and routing them to a salesperson, a piece of content or an answer in real time. Tools like Drift, Intercom and Zendesk Chat had all built products around this, and the underlying premise, that today’s visitor with a real question doesn’t want to wait a day for an email response, held up reasonably well as a description of buyer expectations by 2019.

Question one: does your sales cycle benefit from real-time answers

Businesses with a genuine question-and-answer buying process, B2B software evaluating a purchase, higher-consideration purchases where a visitor has specific questions before committing, saw real value in a live chat option, because removing the delay between a question and an answer measurably shortened how long a deal took to move forward. Businesses selling low-consideration products where visitors rarely had complex questions got much less out of the same investment; a chat widget sitting on a simple ecommerce product page often went unused or, worse, interrupted a visitor who just wanted to browse.

Question two: can you staff it

A chat widget that promised real-time response and then took hours to answer did more damage to trust than not offering chat at all, since it set an expectation the business then visibly failed to meet. Before adding conversational marketing to a website, the honest question was whether someone could realistically monitor and respond during the hours visitors were browsing, not just during a marketing team’s own working hours.

Question three: bot or human, and for which questions

The chatbot overreach of 2017 and 2018 had taught a clear lesson by 2019: a bot handling narrow, predictable questions (business hours, pricing tiers, whether a product shipped to a particular region) performed well, while a bot attempting to replace an actual sales conversation frustrated visitors and pushed them toward a competitor’s site instead. The businesses getting this right in 2019 used a bot to triage and answer the predictable questions, then handed anything more nuanced to a person, rather than trying to make the bot do everything.

Where voice fit into the picture

Smart speaker adoption kept climbing through 2018 into 2019, with a meaningful share of U.S. households now owning one, and it raised a related but distinct question for marketers: conversational interfaces weren’t limited to a website chat widget anymore. For most small and mid-sized businesses, voice search optimization (making sure basic business information was structured cleanly enough for a voice assistant to read back accurately) was the more realistic near-term move than building a dedicated voice application.

The honest recommendation

Add conversational marketing where a real question slows down a real buying decision and you can staff the response properly. Skip it, or keep it narrow and bot-only, where visitors are mostly browsing rather than deciding, or where you can’t realistically commit to answering quickly. The format only builds trust when it delivers on the immediacy it promises.