Messenger Chatbots: Boosting Your Content Marketing Efforts

⏱ Reading Time: 7 minutes

Have you noticed that more and more often we communicate with friends using emojis, likes and tweets? By analogy, brands are increasingly communicating with their consumers via chatbots.

And it only, at first glance, seems that automated communications are inefficient and impersonal. In fact, the opposite is true. Modern chatbots have huge marketing potential, which we are going to uncover in this article. 

What is a Messenger Chatbot? 

If we do not delve into programming and code, then it is possible to say that the messenger chatbot is a piece of messaging software. It is based on artificial intelligence algorithms and is intended for text communication with users due to the ability to recognize certain requests. Chatbots are based on machine learning, and therefore are able to perform exactly those functions that developers have trained them to perform.

🚀Read: Chatbot: What Is It and How to Build One 🚀

Chatbots in Marketing: The Most Important Task or How It Works

The main objective of marketing in an online business is to provide potential customers with complete and accessible information about company products or services. Most often this is done using the offline and online media mix – websites, landing pages, social networks, blogs, emails, thematic forums, paper advertising, PR events, and many more. It all depends on what is your company goal and what audience the message is designed for.

Each of the media placements and platforms is able to give a certain result. For example, you can interact with your audience more efficiently and actively using instant messengers and chatbots. They allow you to reach up to 80% of your subscribers with one click.

For greater efficiency, regular publication of content can be automated. It is enough to develop an algorithm for interacting with the target audience and launch a chatbot that will be in touch 24/7. At the right time, it will complete all the planned actions without losing anything important.

Chatbot in Marketing Strategies – Key Benefits 

The main advantage of chatbots for instant messengers is that it is a relatively new and not yet boring tool. It does not cause rejection among users, but rather, on the contrary, attracts their attention. In addition, chatbots have some other important advantages: 

• You can be sure that your message will be opened and read.
  Messengers are private communication methods. We are subconsciously accustomed to the fact that here we receive messages from those who are important to us. And from those who give us valuable information.
• Work with the target audience, which has a clear portrait.
  This means that it is possible to develop personal offers for it that have the greatest “conversion power.”
• The millennials generation (the segment of the most active Internet users) follows the trends.
  And chatbots are a trend. This audience easily agrees to experiments, and are happy to test new technologies and services. If the interaction with the chatbot meets their expectations, the company will be provided with an active and loyal audience.

How to Use Chatbots for Business and Marketing?

As part of marketing communications, chatbots can be used for the following purposes.

Deliver Useful Content

This is the easiest way to implement a bot in business. The principle is simple – with the help of a bot, you regularly send useful content to everyone who initiated a dialogue with it.

Example. The Wall Street Journal bot can send you the latest news, exchange rates and stock summaries of large companies. This is a great way to transfer publication announcements from a clogged-up news feed to private messages.

Consulting and Customer Support

This is another fairly simple but effective implementation option for the bot. Customer care should always be in the first place, and a good chatbot, although it does not replace a specialist, can solve typical customer issues and provide the information they need. Studies show that it is possible to save up to 30 percent on support services by developing and launching the bot once.

The reason for this savings is that customers get an instant answer to a question. And by the way, this is exactly what they most want from bots.

Picture 1. Chatbot use cases and trends to look after

Collection of Information and Feedback from Users

You can use incoming information from users for high-quality segmentation and create targeted content for each group. This function must be included in the bot program. Using it separately is ineffective. It is unlikely that the audience will like it if the bot will request contacts or collect feedback, but will not offer anything in return – neither useful content, nor pleasant conversation.

Training

A chatbot can be a good conversationalist, as well as help your customers learn. It is suitable for educational products.

An example is Duolingo chatbot. The bot gives assignments, checks their implementation and monitors the progress of the student.

Picture 2. Duolingo chatbot example

Fast Order Processing

A messenger chatbot can act as an intermediary between a customer ready for purchase and a manager. It is enough for the buyer to send the bot information about the order, and it, in turn, will transfer the request to the sales department. It is convenient, easy and fast.

By the way, customers also like to discuss their orders with a chatbot. Take a look at the following chart.

Picture 3. Chatbot Automatization: The most popular customer service questions during holidays

Search for Information on the Given Parameters

This can be either a search for weather data and exchange rates or a search for the right products in an online store, cheap flights, hotels, real estate, etc. According to the study we have already mentioned, real estate is the most promising business area to introduce and use chatbots. 

Messenger Chatbots: Increase in the Business Results

So, we figured out the main features of chatbots in messengers. But let’s find out what real business value they carry, and how profitable they are. You can get the following results by implementing interaction using bots.

Get Cheaper Leads with a Sales Funnel

Auto sales in instant messengers by analogy with e-mail marketing can reduce the cost of attracting a client. Having paid for attracting the target subscriber once, it’s enough to competently build a content policy in order to receive repeat sales and profit maximizers for a penny.

Automate Sales

Already today you can create full-fledged online stores with a catalog, ordering, payment, FAQ, and warming up content in popular instant messengers.

Of course, not every store can simply be taken and transferred to the messenger. But for example, a catalog of 50-100 products with clear rubrics can only work successfully on the messenger platform, even without a website. The owner can administer such a store from the web admin panel or the downloadable Excel spreadsheet, or directly from the Telegram, sending the bot the necessary texts and photos. Notifications of new orders can also be configured in CRM, by mail or in the messenger with all the necessary information on the order.

Boost Sales for Large Retailers

For large online retailers, more sophisticated technologies already exist. The bot can encourage site visitors to register, log in, participate in promotions, offer assistance depending on their behavior on the site, the products they are looking for.

For example, through a question-answer system, a bot can formulate an alternative to the classical catalog, which will be more convenient for the user. And thanks to end-to-end analytics, the bot can offer the most suitable products and special conditions for their

Conclusion

In order for the chatbot to justify its responsibilities, it is necessary to regularly provide information useful to customers. Anyway, it should be created professionally. You may use professional writing service such as  Studicus, or hire a freelance content writer to help you. 

What is more, your customers should feel that you care about them. Examine your potential customers, find out through which applications they are used to communicate, adjust your interaction strategy. Then you can send content useful to them, for example, personal discounts, reviews of goods or services, inform about new products or answer questions of interest.

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Bridgette Hernandez holds a Master’s in Anthropology, who has branched out into a number of other fields over the years, especially the psychology of marketing and photography. She is planning to publish her own book in the near future. Now she is a content editor at PickTheWriter. The texts she writes are always informative, based on qualitative research but nevertheless pleasant to read.