How the new generation of chatbots will take your Marketing Strategy to the next level

How the new generation of chatbots will take your Marketing Strategy to the next level

The value of conversation is underappreciated. It is at the heart of both building authentic relationships, and discovering insightful information.

Now, more than ever, businesses cannot settle for ineffective, inauthentic communication. Valuable conversations face-to-face may be easy, but automating that interaction is a new experience for many.

This short article will outline how chatbot technology will allow you to improve your communication with your consumers, improve your marketing strategy, and create value, internally and externally.

Qualify Leads

Chatbots can do a lot of your marketing work for you.

Chatbots can satisfy customer queries. However, that is not all. They can also redirect them to the appropriate member of your team, and funnel them on to your waiting or subscription list, saving you time and money.

By funnelling website traffic, chatbots allow you to create a receptive audience that are primed and ready to receive your marketing content. After all, they clicked on your site for a reason.

The next part is down to you. An audience is worthless unless they are engaged. Having used a chatbot as a funnelling mechanism, you need to reap the rewards through bringing valuable, interesting and original content to your audience.

Chatbots can provide you with a great opportunity to forge a bond with your customers, whether that is in blog, podcast, or video form. The stronger this bond, the more effective your marketing strategies will be when directed to your customers.

Information, information, information

No matter how hands-on you want to be with your customers, you will always need as much information as possible.

With a chatbot that can initiate the conversation with a customer, you gain incredibly valuable knowledge from this interaction.

How much internet traffic flows in and out of your site, leaving no engagement or data at all?

If you have a chatbot that is able to strike up an informative conversation, you can learn more about your customers. Why are they on your website? What is their demographic? In what ways do they interact with your bot, and what emotions are they showing? What type of messaging do they respond to best? And so on.

The more you know about your customers, the better you can position yourself, and the clearer your marketing strategy will be going forward.

Better Customer Experience

Chatbots are very versatile. You can entirely customise your chatbot, whether aesthetically, or with a certain tone of voice. This can be an important adaptation when creating relationships with your customers. Ironically, you don’t want to come across robotic.

You can even begin to personalise the user experience. Through the use of forms, a chatbot can begin to truly understand the preferences of a customer. They can create travel itineraries, and book flights. They can suggest certain types of clothes, based on the customer’s style. More importantly, your sweet talking chatbot can close the sale right there and then. Not only is that effective, it also appears impressive.

With advances in transfer learning and natural language processing, chatbots are becoming increasingly multilingual. This is an increasingly important feature. With the underserved non-English speaking world becoming increasingly prominent, and 75% of consumers preferring sites in their native language (Hubspot), adoption of a multilingual chatbot will help you stay ahead of the game, instead of two steps behind.

Chatbots improve customer experience on site. Customers do not have to wait, and their questions are answered instantly. Yes, they miss out on human interaction. However, a study by ZenDesk suggests that where possible, 91% of customers would prefer self-help online if it worked effectively. With the chatbot market expected to grow, from $2.6bn in 2019 to $9.4bn in 2024, the effectiveness of the technology is only going to get better.

Prioritising the customer experience will allow you to fulfil those ambitious promises in your marketing strategy, and keep you moving forward.

Internally organize your team

This is an underappreciated benefit of chatbot implementation.

How can you have an effective marketing strategy with a disorganised team behind it?

A chatbot can be used to keep team members up to date on project progress, to identify or remove any blockers they may have, or as an internal search mechanism so team members can locate any information they need, instantly.

You may be bored of hearing about the long lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the realities of remote working are not going away. Taking your internal structure seriously will manifest itself positively in all areas of your company, not just your marketing strategy.

Chatbots can’t do it alone

You cannot expect chatbots to scale up your marketing strategy alone. Like a lot of technology, they are a tool for growth, not growth in themselves.

To truly take advantage of chatbots, you need to invest time and attention into authentic and interesting copywriting that properly engages your customers. Chatbots provide the opportunity for you to impress, but your copywriting and marketing team will have to do the legwork.

Be diverse. Text is the foundational element, but videos, audio clips and GIFs can play an important role in your content creation.

In the words of Barack Obama, “every act of communication is a miracle of translation”. Getting across true value to your customers when they interact with your chatbot is the key to unlocking the communication that can lie at the heart of your marketing strategy.