Instead of Staffing Up For Your Marketing Campaign, Build A Chatbot. Bots are the smartest addition to your marketing team available.
By Murray Newlands Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
If you own a business, you can't afford to ignore chatbots. While often considered a simple customer service tool, these machines can now help businesses automate a huge variety of processes. They can also act as virtual assistants, giving back time to employees to focus on more important, revenue-generating activities. You need to know how to build a chatbot for your marketing campaign and how you can make the most of it.
Thanks to advancements in the artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) that powers these machines, they're now capable of undertaking a huge variety of tasks, making them an integral part of your various teams. With machine learning, they're able to learn from the data they gather, thus allowing them to engage with your customers where they're most likely to be: on social media messaging applications.
With that in mind, you can now integrate your chatbot into your social media advertising and digital marketing campaigns as a whole. Luckily, today, with the help of chatbot building solutions like ChattyPeople, you can create a chatbot in a matter of minutes, for free, without any prior programming experience whatsoever.
Related: Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business
The platform comes with a visual interface and a powerful dashboard that gives you a 360-degree view of your audience. Moreover, these chatbots can be specifically designed to help with your online marketing campaigns by:
- Integrating with your social media profiles
- Providing a self-service option with a chance to upsell and cross-sell
- Sending personalized promotions, offers, and deals, on demand
- Monetizing your social media profiles by integrating with major payment systems
How to Build a Chatbot for Your Marketing Campaign
Simply building a chatbot is not enough to effectively implement it into your organization's scheme. To create an efficient chatbot for your marketing campaign, you must remember to:
Set Measurable Goals
As with every marketing campaign, you need to establish what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it, and the same goes for your chatbot. By implementing a chatbot into your marketing campaign, it's important to have a vision for it. Know which part of your campaign you want your chatbot to focus on and design it once you have these measurable goals in mind.
Related: Enterprise Chatbots Platforms and the Future of Work
Get to Know Your Audience
To capitalize on the use of a chatbot as part of your marketing campaign, you need to know who it will be communicating with. Get to know your audience so that your chatbot can establish the best tone of voice, which products to push, and of course, where to interact with them. Your virtual assistant can draw information from social media profiles, browsing habits, and other sources to then to provide tailored ads that speak to each customer.
Collect as Much Information as Possible
Chatbots can track user data, so you should be collecting as much information as possible. Not only will it allow you to improve its performance, but also improve your marketing campaign as a whole. With the information your chatbot collects, you can identify common problems customers are facing and fix them to boost your interactions and sales.
Related: Enterprise Chatbots and the Conversational Commerce Revolutionizing Business
Allow Your Chatbot to Be Proactive
Many businesses have a reactive approach to customer engagement. In other words, they wait for a customer to start a conversation with them. Make sure your audience knows that your chatbot is available to help by sending a quick 'Hello' message as soon as they land on your website or social media pages. They'll be more likely to engage with it in the future, thus enabling you to gather more data.
Give Your Bot a Customer-First Mentality
Traditional advertising and hard-selling methods no longer work like they use to. With that in mind, you have to have more of an inbound marketing approach. Simply put, you need to have a "customer comes first" mentality.
Your chatbot should be designed with the aim of fulfilling a specific duty that will be valuable to your audience. Instead of packing it with a variety of glitchy features, deliver one flawless function at a time and make its abilities clear to each user it interacts with in order to set expectations.
If you create a chatbot that is unable to undertake one task, this will leave customers with a poor impression of your brand. Be sure to align your chatbots functionalities with your marketing campaign's goals.
Related: How to Create a Facebook Messenger Chatbot For Free Without Coding
Make It Personable
While you don't want your chatbot to come off rude or abrasive, giving it a level of personality is recommended. Train it to reflect your brand's vision and tone of voice. Make sure this personality aligns with your target audience and, of course, the industry in which you are operating. For example, if you want to implement a chatbot into your football marketing campaign, it would not have the same tone of voice as one designed for a banking firm.
Deliver Personalized Content and Promotion
One of the best and most practical features that modern chatbots can offer is the delivery of on demand personalized promotions and offers to consumers. By gathering data from social media profiles and past interactions, chatbots can learn about consumer behaviors, shopping preferences, and more.
Related: Make Chats With Chatbots Work
Nurture Your Leads
To create an effective chatbot for your marketing campaign, you first need to establish your buyer personas. From there, your chatbot can reach out to your potential customers in real time and qualify them automatically to provide you with high-quality leads. The chatbot you implement for your marketing campaign can work closely with your sales team, nurturing your leads as they go through their buyer journey, eventually leading them onto your sales department.
Upselling and Cross-Selling
Every time your chatbot has an interaction where it answers questions about products or services, or even gives shopping advice, it should be able to offer an upgrade, insights into new products, or information on products that could complement their current choices based on the user's shopping preferences. By doing so, your chatbot will also become an upselling and cross-selling tool that will help you generate more sales.
Related: The How-To: Using Chatbots As A Tool For Customer Service
Finally…
Chatbots aren't going anywhere anytime soon and to stay ahead of your competition and increase sales, it is important that you implement yours where it is likely to offer the most value to your customers. Follow the steps I outlined above to create a chatbot that can help increase awareness of your marketing campaign and help you make more sales.
