Guide on How to Successfully Implement Chatbot Marketing

Artificial Intelligence 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. 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 are 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.

With an audience of 1.4 billion people already comfortable interacting with chatbots on messaging apps, businesses have a significant opportunity to integrate these tools into their marketing strategies. 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 chatbot marketing in your business? Keep reading to find out the guide you need to successfully deploy chatbot marketing.

{Updated on 26/06/2023}

What is Chatbot marketing?

Chatbot marketing is a digital marketing strategy that integrates AI-powered bots into messaging platforms to interact with users. These bots, called chatbots, can communicate with users, answer queries, offer product recommendations, and even execute transactions on behalf of the business. The purpose is to automate and personalize customer interactions, boost engagement, and drive conversions.

By operating round-the-clock, chatbots also provide immediate responses, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. As a result, chatbot marketing is reshaping customer service, sales, and marketing operations, creating a seamless and interactive customer journey.

7 Tips for Successful Chatbot Marketing

Capitalizing on the potential of chatbot marketing means understanding how to deploy them successfully. Here are six practical tips to ensure a fruitful chatbot marketing experience:

#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 endeavors, 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. By 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 a 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 a 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 brands using chatbots is Starbucks. This is because the company had a clear plan of what they intended to achieve from the beginning of the project.

#2 Consider Integrating Chatbots with Social Media

Social media applications offer the best platform for you to ace your marketing game. By harnessing the power of a Facebook bot, you can add an extra edge to your marketing strategy and take advantage of social media automation. Therefore, your focus should be on integrating your marketing chatbot, especially Facebook chat bot with your social media platforms.

This integration not only makes communication smoother but also automates the process of publishing content, scheduling posts, and responding to messages. Your Facebook Messenger bot can play a pivotal role in social listening, providing valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, and opening a new avenue for you to conduct market research. Through this approach, the potential for achieving higher engagements is immense.

Plus, with these bots automating repetitive tasks, you’ll free up time for your team to focus on strategic creativity. Remember, your loyal followers will be interacting with the bot and sharing its links. This not only promotes the chatbot but also keeps your clients well informed, while gleaning valuable feedback to help you better understand your audience’s needs and interests.

#3 Focus on Personalizing the Experience

In marketing, personalized selling is one of 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 personalized shopping advice based on the customer’s 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 behavior 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 the 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.

#4 Deploy Marketing Chatbots on your Website

A study revealed that 55% of businesses using chatbots have generated a greater volume of high-quality leads. 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.

#5 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 one-time 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.

#6 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 the 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.

#7 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.

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, social media offers you the best approach. You can place a link on social media platforms and take advantage of the existing followers to drive engagement. Encourage your social media followers to share the link so that you reach as many people as possible.