Artificial Intelligence software will soon take away some of the roles of human resource play at workplaces. This is given that businesses are determined to automate various departments using AI and Machine Learning. This is for various reasons including efficiency in business operations, cost reduction and also to ensure 24/7 customer service. The areas where chatbots are used mostly is in the role involving client interaction. We have seen chatbot marketing and chatbot customer service trends in various established and growing businesses.
So what are chatbots and how do they operate? Chatbots are also referred to as technology-driven personal assistants. They are programmed to mimic a human conversation interacting with users through audio and text chat interfaces. Through Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, these digital assistants can effectively serve in marketing and customer service. These technology-driven assistants have a huge potential of replacing the human resource in various roles in marketing if deployed effectively.
In this article, we focus on how businesses should deploy chatbot marketing. The ultimate goal is to guide small and big enterprises on the best approach for deploying this new marketing trend. Are you thinking of deploying chatbots marketing in your business? Keep reading to find out the guide that you need to achieve successful deployment of chatbot marketing.
#1 Come up with a Proper Chatbot Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan that is formulated to achieve the marketing objective (MSG). Just like other business endeavours, it is important to make sure you have a good plan that is precise and well researched. These are critical to making sure that bot marketing achieves correct implementation. Through ensuring you have a proper marketing strategy, you are guaranteed you will ultimately achieve success. The same is important when it comes to using of chatbots for marketing.
To get started, you have to determine the problem that you are addressing. We have mentioned that chatbots handle different issues from customer service to marketing. Let us assume that the goal that you want to achieve is improving marketing. Further, you have to make sure you have identified the specific marketing function that you want to handle. For instance, it can be to:
- Building the reputation of your brand
- To drive engagement on your website
- To increase brand awareness
The specific reason why you want to deploy the marketing chatbot tool will help to determine the best approach to use. This can be deploying marketing chatbot through messenger apps or on your website. In other instances, you have to deploy the chatbot marketing strategy across all platforms. But before you come to conclusion, you have to determine the strategy that will guide you.
Companies fail when deploying chat marketing because they fail to strategize.
A good example of a company that achieved great success with chatbot marketing is Starbucks. This is because the company had a clear plan of what they intended to achieve from the beginning of the project.
#2 Focus on Personalizing the Experience
In marketing, a personalized conversation is the key to achieving a successful sale. Therefore, you should try as much as possible to make the customer comfortable. The best approach to achieve this is personalizing the conversations by ensuring you recognize the individual. Therefore, while deploying the chatbot marketing tool, ensure you infuse creativity to personalize the experience so as to achieve long-term success.
If you are a regular web user, you will agree that banner ads on almost every website annoy and damage your browsing experience. Businesses that are trying to hawk their products bombard web users with dozens of ads that are irrelevant, and this marketing approach annoys many people. This is why it is important to ensure a personalized experience with every chatbot marketing tool deployed.
Offer a personalized shopping advice based on the customers past online shopping instead of randomly sending adverts. Make sure the digital assistants understand your target clients by connecting on social media and studying their behaviour so as to personalize the interaction.
Example
Match.com has deployed a successful chatbot called Lara bot that helps people to effectively find a date. To offer a personalized match of interest, the Lara bot studies imperfections, the profession of the user and interests of the user before judging the best choices to suggest to a user. Ideally, the chatbot makes suggestions based on the database of information that integrates with the website.
#3 Deploy Marketing Chatbots on your Website
A study revealed that 83% of online shoppers expect they will receive support before clicking on the “buy now” tab on your website (Charlton). These shoppers will quickly look elsewhere if you don’t offer online support on demand. Therefore, it is important for marketers to place the marketing chatbot where customers most need it. Basically, we are saying that you need to provide the chatbot on all platforms through which your customers reach you. Don’t only concentrate on the social media platforms and forget about the traffic coming to your website.
Most businesses have achieved success by deploying pro-active live chat plugin on their website. The chatbot will mostly offer support to shoppers who have limited experience of online shopping. The online shoppers want to ask about products and prices before making the final buying decision. Ensuring quick interaction improves customer experience making it easier for the clients to come back. To deploy marketing chatbot on your website you can do so by coming up with a conversational landing page, conversational banner, or a conversational form.
For the conversational landing page approach, the marketing chatbot interacts with the website visitors. This involves offering guide where an action is needed. Basically, while deploying this marketing chatbot that takes landing page approach, you have to take the customers buying journey into consideration.
#4 Practice a Friendly Disruption
Disruption is a common trend with the new technology. It is important for marketers to ensure that this disruption is friendly. Remember that in some instances, it is best practice not to disrupt. Definitely, you want to ensure that you don’t send spam emails or cold calling at odd hours. With AI it is possible to know when your marketing chatbot should call the target clients. So how do you ensure that your marketing chatbot sticks to friendly disruptions?
To begin with, make sure the clients have allowed your chatbot to send sales notifications or updates. Ask the simple questions like “subscribe now?”, “do you want to receive new product notifications?” etc. Another important practice is ensuring target audience can choose to start the conversation or close it.
Through this practice, it is possible to ensure you are not disrupting your target clients. This is because these onetime friendly questions will help the chatbot gather enough information to determine the best time to target your clients and the message that best suits them. In addition, through this approach, you will get new business leads to drive engagement with your clients. Even most importantly, this is the best approach to qualify your leads.
Ultimately, you will realize that this works surprisingly well and in most cases, the target clients don’t even know they are actually talking to a bot. Υour audience will enjoy the conversations while you take the most out of it. However, for this to happen you have to ensure that the marketing chatbot doesn’t seem to be a bother to clients.
#5 Avoid Over Complicating your Marketing Process/Keep it Simple
Artificial Intelligence features are helpful but can hurt the experience if simplicity rule is not adhered to. Basically, to come up with a perfect product, it is important that you make sure your marketing bot is simple. This is achieved right from the design phase by ensuring the marketing chatbot only handles the functionalities that target audience value the most. Ensure that the bot is more focused on these functional areas and roll out additional functionalities as the need comes about.
It is important to consider the simplicity of use while trying to enhance these features. In this regard, the developers need to ensure the bots don’t complicate the processes that customers are already used to. Rather, they should make it easier by ensuring greater efficiency in the intended use.
A simple digital marketing chatbot will increase user engagement driving more sales. Naturally, people prefer simple procedures to complicated ones. Therefore, if you come up with a marketing chatbot that complicates payment procedures, this will create more harm than benefit your company. This is because users will criticize your new system affecting the rate of adoption.
Example
Domino`s Pizza has invested in a marketing chatbot that eases the process of buying a pizza online. A simple tweet will initiate the pizza ordering process at Domino`s Pizza. The chatbot runs on multiple social media platforms and makes ordering of Pizza simple.
#6 Ensure you Hire the best Talented bot developers
There are different approaches that you can take to deploy a chatbot on your website or preferred platform. These include building your chatbot from scratch or even buying an existing bot and customizing it to serve the target market. If you want to build your marketing bot from scratch, you might want to hire a team of in-house developers or outsource the service from another party.
Ideally, you have to go for the best cost-effective approach while also putting into consideration coming up with an efficient application. We have talked about several other expectations that you have got to meet. These have to be at the forefront of your priorities when determining the appropriate approach to deliver a successful marketing bot.
Your budget is an important factor, but you have to ensure you will not compromise the quality because you want a cheap solution. Remember that a simple and efficient system is what you need to achieve success.
#7 Consider Integrating Chatbots with Social Media
Social media applications offer the best platform for marketing. Businesses should, therefore, focus on integrating their marketing chatbot with social media platforms. Through this approach, there is a great potential for achieving higher engagements. Don’t forget that loyal followers will also help by sharing links to your marketing bots. Therefore, integrate the chatbots to your social media accounts. This promotes the chatbot and makes sure your clients are well informed about the chatbot.
Conclusion
Developing and deploying chatbot marketing is not as easy as it might seem to be. This is the reason why you have to make sure you have a proper strategy in place before you invest the amount needed. Remember that in cases if you have to purchase a solution or hire developers, you need to put a lot of money into the project. A proper strategy is crucial for ensuring successful chatbot marketing.
Customers receive so many spammy emails and are also shown irrelevant ads on the web. This can have a negative effect on your marketing initiatives. Therefore, it is important to make sure you personalize the content that they receive through chatbot marketing. In addition, make sure that the chatbot marketing disrupts clients in a friendly manner. Note that if you deliver content that destructs your clients, they will ultimately block you using the ad blocking tools.
Ultimately, you have to make sure you market your chatbot so that target clients start making use of it. Basically, you just need to make sure the marketing chatbot is popular and to achieve this, the social media offers you the best approach. You can place a link on the social media platforms and take advantage of the existing followers to drive engagements. Encourage your social media followers to share the link so that you reach as many people as possible.
Gather and analyse all Web & Social mentions to your brand
Mentionlytics works 24/7 and scans for pages and users mentioning your brand and your competitors. Get Share of Voice, Sentiment Analysis, Influencers and many other reports automatically.
