Marketing has evolved multiple folds in the past few years, and there’s no questioning it. Brands have evolved and built a strong communication channel with their customers. Both B2B and B2C businesses are seen investing time, money and efforts in effective communication via different channels. 

While brands are at it, chatbot service providers and other tools have helped businesses grow. This blog is an attempt to help growing businesses know the benefits of chatbots for marketing. Let’s get started.

The Hotspots In The Marketing Industry 

Businesses have evolved with digitization and so have their marketing methods. From traditional ways of marketing, they have turned towards digital marketing to reach a targeted audience. And to make it more measurable and to capture the essence of organic branding.

There are multiple channels of marketing in digital applicable to different types of businesses.

Let us see which ones are they and how chatbots can be implemented in those channels.

Email Marketing 

Do you too, at times wonder – Wasn’t email supposed to die this year? And last year? And the year before that? As much as marketing gurus claim the final nail of email’s coffin is forthcoming, the data tells us it’s not even close. 

In the U.S., email usage has grown every single year since 2013 and 91% of American internet users use email. In fact, most of the millennial generation prefer communication from brands via email.

As of now, subscribing to your favorite online publications through email is the best way to keep up with their latest stories and news. And since it takes an average of six to eight touchpoints to generate a qualified sales lead, persuading people to subscribe to your emails and, in turn, constantly consuming your content will generate more leads and revenue for your business.

Growing an engaged, loyal subscriber base also speaks volumes about the quality of your content and its emotional resonance. Even though hoards of content saturate the internet and most people’s inboxes today, people are still actively engaging with your content, which is a clear sign that they actually value it. 

Talk to any marketer and they will agree that email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing methods. Not just that, it’s one of the most cost-effective strategies any business can use. 

In fact, for every $1 a business spends on an email campaign, they gain $38 return on investment (ROI). That’s undoubtedly one of the highest ROI in digital marketing. Nowadays, many businesses have started to leverage the latest technological trends such as chatbots for marketing.

How can chatbot give your email marketing a boost?

Email can help you reach out to your customers and communicate with them. But that’s just one part. What must follow is, navigating your customer to the right business asset. This asset can be your landing page, a blog, a downloadable guide and so on. 

Once you have successfully invited your customers within your ecosystem, you should try to provide on-demand support and answer all the questions they might have. A chatbot for email marketing can help you do exactly that. Not just that, a well designed chatbot can help you collect further information like their query, the domain they belong to and the budget they might have. 

Next on, study those details and curate marketing campaigns to align with your prospects. 

Social media marketing 

Most people surf social media to escape everyday life, entertain themselves and connect with others. Sometimes, though, brands forget why people use social media in the first place, blindly pushing their content to as many people as possible.

With over 3.6 billion social media users across the globe today, millions of brands are promoting their content via these platforms. This has flooded each platform with heaps of articles, photos, and videos, skyrocketing the supply of content while the demand for it has plateaued.

So how can brands cut through the noise? One strategy is to publish engaging videos, interact with fans as much as possible, and post content that doesn’t direct users to another website, like insightful status updates instead of links.

How can chatbot give your social media marketing a boost

Social media marketing is not limited to normal posts on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter. These days, most of the brands are not scared of spending money on social media ads. 

In fact, brands from different domains are retargeting their customers on different platforms because they don’t want to lose a single prospect.

In this case, when retargeting, geography specific or interest specific ad comes into the picture. Wouldn’t it be great to offer them real-time support when they click on your CTA which for example, is ‘Know More’? 

Well, with a chatbot, you can try to conversate and convert every visitor there. All you need to do is train your bot to answer in the right manner, which is no daunting task!

Chatbots are now seriously regarded as a potent tool to transform the core of social marketing itself by changing the meaning of engagement. As opposed to the traditional concepts of online advertising wherein engagement refers to playing a video or an ad click, engaging with a bot is essentially about having a real conversation with a human sounding bot.

SEO

Search engines are arguably the best marketing channel for acquiring attention – most people discover new brands and publications through Google. 

In fact, according to Google, 89% of B2B buyers and 81% of online shoppers use search engines to research new products and services.

Search engines are also one of the highest converting marketing channels. Since people actively search for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems on Google, they’re likely to download your offer or sign up for a free trial if you can provide them with what they’re looking for.

How can chatbot give your SEO efforts a boost

SEO is known as a goldmine for every marketer. If a marketer is truly able to cater to the demands that the search engine has, they have mastered the art of marketing – at least to some extent. Now how is chatbot helpful for SEO, you wonder, right? 

Today, vague and uniform user experiences do not result in sales. To build relationships with your target customers and inspire their loyalty, you need to tailor your marketing strategy to their needs and preferences. Research says that most of your customers are willing to give you their personal data and wait longer to receive relevant deals and offers.

With chatbots, integrating personalization with digital marketing has never been simpler. And, Nike’s chatbot is a perfect example of how this can be done. Namely, their so-called Stylebot lets users create their own, personalized outfits or pick the existing ones. There’s a lot of styles to choose from and, if you like the result you get, you can find more information about it on a website or simply buy it immediately.

Well, mastering SEO and bringing searchers onto your website is one thing and entertaining and answering them is another. Chatbot for marketing takes care of the latter part. 

Add a lot more value to all the SEO efforts and drive quality traffic by providing powerful support with chatbots. 

Stories

Before we even dive deeper on this section, let us agree on this: Stories aren’t just for consumers anymore. While stories essentially are one of the functionalities of social media, brands can take advantage of the feature to connect with followers and humanize themselves with content like behind-the-scenes footage, tutorials, and polls.

How can chatbot give your Instagram and other stories a boost

Instagram mentions that any page with 10K+ followers or a verified label can add a link to their stories. This, to be honest is a bias but a powerful approach. People are seen raising funds, sharing news updates and in fact selling merchandise with this feature. 

Now, how about having a chatbot to everyone’s rescue when they land on this unknown world? Big help, right? Chatbot for marketing, clearly has been doing wonders. Let’s understand the use case here with an example: A human activist is raising funds to save trees and has shared an update about this on their Instagram story. Now, the people willing to donate have a couple of questions before they actually make the payment. Queries like where can I know more about the initiative or how will I get the receipts can be quickly addressed by having a chatbot in place.

Text Messaging

While it may seem intrusive at first blush, text messages are actually a great way to connect to consumers who have shared their phone numbers. These do not require your customer to have internet connectivity, does not get lost amongst notifications from other 100 social networking apps and are easy to consume. 

While most agree that we tend to ignore the majority of the SMSes we receive, SMS marketing isn’t dead. Let’s understand how chatbots can boost the efforts you invest on this one. 

How can chatbot give your SMS marketing a boost

The strategy of customer acquisition via SMS is simple. You enable an SMS bot on your phone number. Then, a potential client clicks on an ad (more about those later), or texts you from a button on your website, social media, business card, billboard, etc, and they’re placed into a conversation with your bot. By the end of that conversation, your bot should collect the information you need to turn this lead into a client.

With almost every business going online, it’s getting almost impossible to set up a customer support team in place. In these instances, a chatbot service comes as a saviour. Assist your customers throughout the way through pre-trained bots and use chatbot for marketing to make the best of all your efforts. 

Live Streaming

The rise of platforms like Twitch, Tik Tok, Linkedin Live demos, Instagram and Facebook live, it is known that streaming services and its consumption is here to stay and only expand. These channels now have the potential for B2C and B2B brands alike. That’s according to Kristen McCabe, senior community marketing specialist at software review platform G2.com.

How can chatbot give your live streaming a boost

Live streaming is yet an unexplored channel for a lot of marketers and businesses. It holds a lot of potential and is seen to be fetching great marketing value. Chatbot for marketing can be a good add-on here. The reason is clear. 

Let’s assume you host a live webinar or use a social media channel to go live with a leader in the industry. The chances are that you will be bombarded with over hundred of queries – some of which are often assumed already. In such a situation if you create a chatbot quickly with the drag and drop functionality and feed the answers, it can prove to be an amazing experience for your customers. 

Use Cases Of Chatbot For Marketing 

The above mentioned section is an explicit read for anyone who is looking at understanding how chatbot for marketing can add 100x value and change the way things take place today. A quick overview of all of this can bring in is as follows:

Lead generation: In most instances, chatbot for marketing is a platform to not leave any visitor unattended. This, clearly can enhance the lead generation process for businesses across the industry. Training a bot to get basic details like email can go a long way. Pass these details onto your sales team and let the funnel begin. 

Improved conversion: As a customer, if all your questions are answered with ease and addressed well, there are higher chances that you will move to step 02. Chatbot for marketing can help you bring more power to all your efforts by enhancing the conversion rate to a massive level.

Real-time support: As mentioned above, chatbots are available 24*7. This means, there’s no rest for chatbots. And that is something that differentiates chatbots from live chat. With a powerful chatbot in place, never miss a chance to turn a prospect visitor. In fact, assure them that your services are 24*7, truly. 

Enhanced navigation: A business website has a number of properties – industry specific landing pages, blogs, knowledge centre, pricing and so on. And a visitor has hundreds of questions. There’s a possibility that these visitors find themselves lost. Chatbots can help them navigate better by directing them to the right piece of information. 

Key Takeaways

• Almost all forms of marketing efforts can be accelerated by integrating a chatbot
• Some of the biggest benefits a chatbot can bring in to a marketing team in any organisation is lead generation, effective conversion and an enhanced experience
• Some of the biggest brands in the industries like Nike and Spotify are setting an example to smoothen the marketing efforts and creating an impact
• Chatbot for marketing is becoming an essential for every marketing team that wants to sustain, scale and grow

Conclusion

There’s no end to the talking about what all these chatbots can do. For brands and consumers alike, we have a chance to redeem communication and commerce. Research would be convenient, purchases streamlined, and service personalized.

Don’t miss the opportunity here. By nature of what bots are, they offer a radical new reality. Bots are built to be helpful. They require a person to opt-in. And for the first time, they encourage scalable, one-on-one conversations between brands and consumers.

It’s the makings of a marketer’s dream: a world where brands can build authentic relationships with their buyers, and buyers can learn to trust brands again. 

Do you plan to explore and experiment with chatbot for marketing next? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section and we shall have your back, always!