With how automated it is, chatbots are easily one of the best tools for marketing purposes. How so? That's because chatbots are simple, efficient, and in the long run, money-saving.
The last decade has seen a rapid surge in online messaging that has seen consumers’ messaging shift with brands. To provide even more superior customer services, companies today are focused on integrating chatbots into their processes.
Why?
Well, chatbot marketing has become immensely popular, especially in industries where customer interaction is at its peak and the center of the business. This applies to the banking, healthcare, and insurance industries. Chatbots have played a critical role in how these industries operate and perform.
Today, even more businesses and industries are integrating chatbots into their systems, hoping to save critical performance and operational time. Gone are the days when customers had to wait for several minutes, even hours, for a customer care representative to answer their calls.
Chatbots offer the conversational marketing success rate per interaction you need to take your business to the next level.
Now, the more important question: what are chatbots?
Let’s find out:
What are Chatbots?
You don’t have to be an avid internet user to have interacted with these conversational marketing chatbots. Today, almost all websites have chatbots integrated into their systems.
But what are they?
Chatbots are Artificial Intelligence programs that simulate conversations (chats) with users in natural language. This can be through messaging applications, mobile applications, websites, or by phone.
For instance, if you want to buy shoes from a local retail store, you simply need to find the store’s website, search for your preferred shoe, and purchase it. However, what if the local store had a bot? Your only job would be to communicate with the bot by sending a message of the shoe brand you want, the size, color, and any other features the shoe might have.
The bot will do the rest and provide you with a host of options centered on shoes that fit that description to choose from.
This new digital marketing strategy provides more pleasant user experiences and faster, simpler customer service interactions.
Most businesses and people alike don’t yet realize that you can leverage chatbot marketing for consumers’ and businesses’ convenience. Start leveraging these amazing innovations to streamline your customer communications, success, and sales today.
If you think you are ready to start building a chatbot for your website today, you are in the right place:
Benefits of Chatbot Marketing
While some believe that the rise of robots might inevitably spell disaster for human jobs, this revolution is ultimately beneficial from a business standpoint.
More importantly, chatbot marketing also brings good news for customers. Ideally, anything that can help you improve user experience and foster brand trust and loyalty. That’s a good thing for any brand looking to become an industry leader and succeed in an industry.
With that said, here are some of the benefits of using chatbots in your digital marketing strategies:
1. Save Time and Money
First, you will find that implementing a fully functional chatbot is quicker and cheaper than creating a cross-platform application for every task. As of writing this post, companies already have hundreds of conversational marketing services you can use.
This ready-made software is developed by Microsoft, Facebook, and other big IT companies. You just need to find the right chatbot that integrates perfectly with your website, and you should be good to go.
Since chatbots are automated processes, they allow businesses to handle several customer interactions at once, simultaneously. Therefore, by using chatbots that complement your human agents, you won’t only save on customer service costs but also avoid problems that human errors might cause.
2. Boost Customer Engagement
It is vital always to keep your customers happy and engaged with your brand. Businesses that engage with customers through social media have witnessed a significant increase in their client spend by 20% to 40%. However, integrating chatbots into your system has also been known to increase customer engagement further.
Sometimes, a great sense of humor is all a customer needs to engage with your website more and possibly convert into a lead.
Chatbots also only give slices of information to customers, thereby leading to even more engagement by customers. That’s why you will hardly find customers bored because they received irrelevant or unnecessary information. Instead, customers will linger on your platform longer and keep the content flowing.
3. Generates Traffic to Your Website
Chatbot marketing is one of the best digital marketing strategies that’s very active at capturing more leads and predicting customers’ buying journeys.
Businesses can use bots to collect customer data such as location, gender, characteristics, price range, and a lot more. This saves both your business and the customer a lot of time as it helps identify target customers.
You never have to waste time or resources gathering buyer personas about your new customers.
Chatbots can engage your potential clients and ensure your leads remain connected as well after making initial contact. You can use these programs to ensure your content flow is always in the right direction for even higher conversion rates.
4. Get Your Products Known
Bots provide businesses with a useful platform that allows them to broadcast product updates, reaching potentially wider audiences. You can use chatbot marketing to maintain friendly and consistent customer contact. This eliminates customer frustration from unanswered emails or cold calls.
Think of chatbots as the digital marketing strategy that forms the basis for push notifications that showcases your products/services. The best part about using bots is that they send notifications to the appropriate clients only, based on their interests. Customers will feel appreciated and interested in your product/service rather than irritated.
Chatbot marketing enhanced customer relationships and experiences using your products, thereby increasing brand loyalty. The Facebook chatbot is one of the apps that often comes up with product recommendations.
Over 44% of consumers have admitted to purchasing from businesses after having a personalized shopping experience with those businesses’ bots.
5. Gather Customer Feedback and Data for Analysis
With the feedback bots collect and receive from customers through simple questions, businesses can improve their products/services and even optimize websites by adjusting low converting pages.
You can also use chatbots to track your customers purchasing patterns and other consumer behaviors. This data will help you determine which products/services to market differently, which ones to market more, and which ones to redevelop for a relaunch.
Companies can now use bots to track their users’ commands and responses provided on the chatbots, allowing them to predict their customers’ responses. You can use this data to suggest more personalized products/services that customers find more convenient.
In other words, bots are the best tools to help businesses know what can be improved and what should remain the same.
BiQ Content Intelligence is a great SEO tool you can use to draft, edit, and optimize your products/services to meet your customers’ preferences. You can use BiQ Content Intelligence to find more effective responses for your bots that will be relevant to answering your users’ questions about your business.
Tips on How to Strategize Your Chatbot Marketing
One of the main benefits of marketing bots is the ease with which customers can access them. These tools also don’t need too much memory or long configuration or installation times, making them even more desirable for businesses.
The user won’t need to open another browser or mobile application to interact with the bot either. Customers interact with their mobile phones at least 50 dimes daily, with text messaging as the number one communication worldwide.
Here are a few strategies you can implement in your chatbot marketing:
1. Research on Your Product’s FAQ
As a business investing in digital marketing, one of the first things you must consider when using a bot is the content that it will contain. For instance, if you have a customer service bot, its aim will be to help customers to deliver speedy responses.
It’s always best to look for the most frequently asked questions relating to your brand in such instances. Therefore, you must ensure you start with questions and content that makes the most sense and the most appropriate, relevant, and effective responses for those questions.
There are a few great places you can look to find the most effective FAQs for your bots:
- Your social media support team, social media manager, or community team. Whoever handles your social profiles’ engagement should have an excellent handle on some of the most common questions coming in through DMs and mentions.
- Your customer service team. This team will likely have a heap of questions lined up for you off the top of their head. They probably hear different questions and sentences from customers they attend to all day and have the data you might need to get the job done.
- Your marketing and sales teams will also have a pulse on what question types they see more often as customers and prospective clients progress through the funnel.
To create a useful chatbot, you must first examine which difficulties your prospects usually have. You must also examine what customers don’t always understand when using your product/service. Analyze this data within your marketing platform to get more targeted and personalized responses for your clients.
2. Build Your Chatbot’s Conversation Tree
By now, you know that chatbots work best when they have concrete questions to answer. If you don’t specifically pre-plan your bot usage, it can become infinitely difficult for your chatbot to deliver believable experiences – if not the right answers to certain questions.
Therefore, it’s crucial for you to have a conversation tree that actually works. Picture a gigantic flowchart that starts with the initial “hello” before asking the client how “you” can help. Here’s where you will need a comprehensive conversation flow that can shift to different directions depending on the client’s responses.
The conversation tree is one of the main factors you must consider before even initiating the use of a bot on your website. You can pre-set your bot to make product recommendations or provide customers with information about nearby attractions.
Whatever your reason for using a chatbot, it’s best you prepare a conversation list of all the possible answers to your customers’ questions.
3. Give Your Chatbot Voice and Personality
Imagine you are using your digital marketing to boost your content. Chatbot marketing embodies the same effect and demands you think about your conversational marketing voice and personality.
This should be a natural extension of your digital marketing efforts.
Whatever brand personality and voice you use is entirely up to you. Just remember to stay consistent throughout the conversation tree. Remember, you are not looking to send your customers mixed messages about your brand. You might end up spooking them, especially your prospective clients who are engaging with your brand for the first time.
Some of the things that you might need to include to make your customers’ chatbot experiences better include:
- A catchy “Hello.”
- A solid first question that provides the customer with plenty of options to choose from
- Expectation setting. Let your users know they are engaging with a bot
You will be amazed at how many people enjoy interacting with bots. The experience itself can make them want to interact with your website more.
4. Make Sure Website Contents are Performing
Before you unleash your website’s chatbot to engage with your customers, you will want to try it yourself first. You can also show it to your friends to see how they interact and engage with the bot.
After you launch it, ensure you analyze how your clients interact with it to get even more insights into improving it.
Your bot should be very specific, especially when solving specific customer problems. Any misstep might result in an unpleasant customer experience.
BiQ Keyword Intelligence is a great tool that allows you to create an effective content outline for your target audience.
You can use the Keyword Intelligence tool to skim through your keyword list to ensure you include all the relevant and suitable keywords in your conversation tree as well.
Select the right keywords and add them to your data collection. This will help you organize your content, allowing you to provide messaging optimized to meet your users’ needs.
Conclusion
Chatbot marketing is the new marketing strategy businesses have taken to. Don’t get left behind because you didn’t integrate chatbots into your digital marketing strategy.
Chatbots can be a great strategy to market your business and product/service and improve employees’ work productivity. Start using this amazing program today and see better results.
