Harnessing the Power of Chatbots for Your Marketing Strategy
Chatbots are far from a new phenomenon in marketing contexts. They haven’t taken over overnight but have gradually been refined into their modern selves. Therefore, using chatbots for your marketing strategy is not an untrodden path.
Indeed, there are many ways to do so once you’ve identified your target market. Today, let us explore the main ones to hopefully give you some inspiration.
Use cases for chatbots
First, let us briefly examine some use cases for chatbots of all kinds. In doing so, we may offer the user’s own perspective – and thus, why audiences embrace chatbots.
For one example, suppose you’re in Tampa like us. You’re exploring commercial moving options as you look to hire local movers. You’ll have to rely on a local team, but how do you pick one? Do you search individual websites, manually comparing the services and prices of each top Google result? AI-powered chatbots, like the rising star ChatGPT, can do so for you in seconds.
For another, suppose you have found any vendor’s social media profile or website. You want to discuss an offering, raise concerns over a purchase, or do anything adjacent to those. Do you sometimes wait for a customer support agent to get back to you during work hours? Social media answerers and customer service chatbots can get back to you instantly and anytime.
Finally, suppose you’re trying to enhance your content marketing strategies. Your teams must craft impeccable content to boost your SEO, generate leads, and increase user engagement. Do they waste hours researching and fine-tuning every piece of content with questionable time efficiency? Chatbots can assist them in this regard, too, not by automating the entire process but by significantly improving it.
The effectiveness of chatbots in numbers
Using chatbots for your marketing strategy is not a desirable goal just for personal convenience, either. Chatbots are both well-liked by audiences and demonstrably effective at their roles, as statistics show. Among many, consider the following:
- Chatbots are the fastest-growing brand communication channel.
- 70% of white-collar workers have some interaction with chatbots, and 67% of global consumers do so, too, at least yearly.
- Only 12.8% of consumers have negative experiences with chatbots.
- 55% of businesses that use chatbots generate more high-quality leads.
- Chatbots can save businesses as much as 30% on customer support costs.
In addition, bots have become increasingly satisfactory at their roles – even without human intervention. Chatbots handle 68.9% of chats from start to finish, increasing as chatbots are refined. The average satisfaction rate of bot-only chats is 87.58%, too, leaving little room for doubt.
Indeed, there are many things people may dislike about your digital marketing strategy. Chatbots are not among them, however. Audiences appreciate the convenience of 24/7 availability and have even come to prefer bot-only chats in many cases.
Using chatbots for your marketing strategy
You likely should consider chatbots to enhance your marketing is a given. How do you do so, however? There are four main chatbot types to consider, and each can be implemented where and how you deem fit.
Social media chatbots
Likely the most common type, and certainly an appealing one for active brands, is social media chatbots. Many, like Sprout Social, consider these social media applications – but their value remains.
Social media chatbots will primarily be tasked with responding to social media messages. They may answer simple questions, forward more complex ones to humans, or carry entire chats independently. They can increase audience satisfaction and maintain user retention through swift responses and query acknowledgments.
If you’re tech-savvy, you can consider developing your own. However, this may strain your budget, especially across different social media platforms, so pre-developed chatbots may be the safer option. Among many, you can consider Chatfuel, Aivo, and Pandorabots.
Website chatbots
Website chatbots follow a very similar blueprint in that they function similarly to social media chatbots for websites. These are the type often dubbed “live chatbots” and are the ones that often greet you on the bottom right of the screen when you visit a website.
For many, this type started the conversation about using chatbots for your marketing strategy. Such bots effectively address lead acquisition by catering to newly-generated leads and website visitors. Websites can often serve as internal search engines, delivering the most relevant content or information to users.
There are many chatbots of this type, including those of HubSpot, Tidio, ManyChat, Freshchat, Drift, and more.
Customer service chatbots
Another prominent type, and one which customers increasingly expect and appreciate, is customer service chatbots. As the name implies, these take up customer service and deal with post-purchase concerns.
Such chatbots can be as simple as ones that offer knowledge base articles, offering a means of self-help. They may be ones that recite FAQs or ones that assign more complex queries to support agents for manual review. In all cases, chatbots of this type considerably increase customer retention; a plain query acknowledgment has been found to significantly help with customer satisfaction, let alone proper solutions.
Most chatbot platforms offer this type alongside website chatbots, including the above. For alternatives, or ones more focused on this type, you may explore such options as MobileMonkey, DialogFlow, and Ada.
Content creation chatbots
And finally comes the emerging type of content creation chatbots. This type primarily assists marketing teams instead of users or customers and leverages AI to boost content marketing endeavors.
The benefit of this type for marketing purposes cannot be overstressed; such tools can save considerable costs, enhance outreach efficiency, and reduce time waste. They may not be fit to completely overtake content creation just yet, but they can be invaluable assistants.
ChatGPT aside, there are other chatbots of this type you can consider, like ContentBot, Frase, and Wibbitz. No matter which you choose, however, remember to treat them as assistants; humans are still the best at writing for humans.
Conclusion
In closing, using chatbots for your marketing strategy is far from a novel concept. Chatbots of various types and with distinct functionalities have been seeing marketing use for years and have now been refined enough to be safer than ever.
You may consider social media chatbots and website chatbots for swift, automated communication. These types will keep your audiences engaged, answer their simpler questions, and often delegate more complex ones to your human staff. Customer service chatbots can also act as self-help portals for existing customers, improving customer retention rates. And finally, content creation chatbots can assist your marketing teams with content creation, expanding your reach and fine-tuning your content.
While brief, we hope this article gave you some ideas on how to leverage this technological asset.
Description: Discover why the tried-and-tested practice of using chatbots for your marketing strategy is indeed valuable and how you may best do so.
Keyword: using chatbots for your marketing strategy
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About the Author:
James Anderson is a freelance copywriter and avid SEO enthusiast. He collaborates with various SMBs in the relocation industry, as well as with digital marketing agencies and behavioral health centers.