how conversational insights take the guesswork out of marketing

Google and other search engines have attempted to crack the consumer intent code for over two decades. The entry point for a search marketing campaign is the keyword list. Yet keywords—whether spoken or typed—represent the tip of the iceberg for understanding what a user wants. There’s no way to measure (or identify) user intent clearly. Still, Google is getting better at figuring out what a user wants with technologies like Google Hummingbird, an algorithm update they rolled out in 2013. Google introduced Hummingbird in response to the increasingly conversational nature of search queries. 

Asking a search engine or virtual assistant a question begins a conversational journey that carries the searcher across channels until they ultimately find what they want (or not). Per a 2013 article in Wired, “Google is now examining the searcher’s query as a whole and processing the meaning behind it.” In January 2020, Statista reported roughly 40 percent of US search queries contained four or more terms. Keywords pull the curtain of intent back, but they only provide a glimpse of the customer journey, labeling the searcher’s thoughts without revealing the “why” of what they’re searching for. 

Once a user clicks on a search result, the conversation is over from the search engine’s perspective. But thanks to advances in natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI), businesses have access to a much deeper understanding of what consumers want across the entire buying journey. AI-powered chatbots that “speak” to consumers can collect customer intent data and take the conversation beyond an initial keyword query. They enable businesses to instantly leverage customer intent data to scale one-to-one personalization in direct chat. Below, we discuss how conversational marketing platforms employ NLP and AI in chatbots to guide customers through the buying funnel, using casual analysis to understand customer intent that goes far beyond keywords.

Content created in partnership with Spectrum.

The customer conversation is online.

According to Hootsuite’s Digital In 2020 report, 60 percent of the world’s population is online. The report found that, globally, users spend an average of 6 hours and 43 minutes online daily—40 percent of their waking life using the internet. A large chunk of that time, more than two hours, is spent using social media.

Consumers were using mobile messaging and chatted an average of 20 minutes per day in 2020, with Business Insider predicting that the standard would grow to 24 minutes by 2021. Interacting with chatbots is a natural extension of consumers’ comfort with messaging in social media apps like Facebook and Instagram. Increasingly, messaging is how we connect. Facebook and Instagram are at the center of this trend. Businesses can reach and engage with over two billion people on Facebook and Instagram using their messengers. This level of engagement gets to the root of consumer intent, diving beneath surface keywords to the conversational data that can help companies understand what’s motivating the consumer to conduct their search in the first place.