Whether you plan to integrate chatbot AI into your business in the future or are already heavily invested in the technology, the current chatbot-boom era’s effect on the global market cannot be overstated. According to Chatbots Life, 85% of online customer interactions will be handled via chatbots by 2020 with 50% of entrepreneurs planning to spend more on chatbot integration than mobile optimization by 2021. Let’s find out more about chatbot marketing strategies in this chatbot-boom era.
Customers are more and more prepared to order items and resolve support tickets via chatbots rather than human agents on the other side of the chat bubble. This can create a plethora of content marketing integration opportunities for your enterprise and its utilization of chatbot AI in everyday customer servicing. With that said, let’s dive into some “why’s” and “how’s” of the current chatbot-boom era and how you can integrate content and chatbot marketing strategies into your AI representatives.
The Rising Trend of Chatbot Marketing Strategies
Before we dive into content marketing’s implantation into chatbot AI algorithms, let’s talk about why you should care about the process in the first place. After all, a chatbot’s primary purpose is to act as Virgil (guide) to your Dante (customer). In that aspect, chatbots should be written to be helpful, informative and respectful above all else.
According to research published by Sales Force, 52% of customers are likely to switch vendors if a company doesn’t provide them with a personalized experience with 65% of B2B stakeholders likely to do the same in terms of companies they reach out to. Melanie Sovann, Content Editor at Trust My Paper spoke on the topic of chatbots recently: “Think about what your customer representatives, online store and social media managers do on a daily basis and combine it into one — that is the true definition and potential of applying chatbots to your business.”
Her statement paints a clear picture of the public’s perception of chatbot integration into different aspects of online customer servicing. Above all, chatbots which are coupled with content marketing patterns and strategies can bring a plethora of benefits to your business at large, including but not limited to:
- Ability to integrate content marketing posts into chatbots as attachments
- Higher degree of chatbot personalization
- Higher engagement and conversion rates
- More expansive data analytics opportunities
- Higher return on investment in terms of already published content marketing posts
Content Marketing Strategies to Implement into Chatbot Algorithms
When it comes to retrofitting your chatbots to complement your content marketing, it’s best to treat them as an extension of your marketing strategy. In practice, this means that you should treat your chatbot dialogue queries as a personalized blog post, complete with calls to action, native ads, and multimedia.
Coupled with platforms such as Evernote and Grab My Essay, chatbots will be able to successfully resolve queries, concerns, support tickets and allow potential leads to convert into satisfied customers. Likewise, once you settle into a routine of treating your chatbots as a personalized marketing platform and not just a support center for customers in need, it will effectively become an essential part of your content marketing strategy going forward. With that in mind, let’s jump into several ways in which you can draw parallels between your content marketing and chatbot AI.
Brand Storytelling Opportunities
One of the best ways to complement your chatbot with content marketing methodology is to create a brand persona. Think of it as the football mascot to your all-star team of content marketing materials available for users to digest.
A brand persona can allow for unprecedented levels of personalization, business storytelling and most importantly — pro-consumer interactions through the chatbot AI. Your brand persona should represent your business’ culture, vision, values and be equipped with links to your products and services for the customer’s convenience.
These links can be presented as solutions to problems or queries users might have in regards to your online platform. Build your persona early on and let it show its gratitude over time by building up your business’ reputation as a pro-user platform.
Hook-Based Opening Lines
Chances are that most of your new visitors won’t be aware of the chatbot’s presence on the platform. In order to amend for that shortcoming, you should ensure that you hook your visitors with the opening lines the chatbot presents them with.
Think of these hooks as calls to action, or direct questions which will aim to solve concrete issues. For example, your chatbot can ask a visitor “Do you want me to help you find an item?” or “Do you have a question in regards to an item?”. These non-confrontational, personalized calls to action can do wonders for your engagement rate. Not to mention that they will effectively act as content marketing for any links or posts.
Development of Conversational Trees
In order to give chatbots a personalised and lifelike feel, you should equip them with conversational tree paths. Conversational trees should exist in your chatbot content marketing strategy. The simple reason is that no two customers will ever ask the same question in the same manner.
You can use that to your advantage and write several answers. These will revolve around the same solution (your link, post, product, etc.). Platforms such as Grammarly, Studicus, and Hemingway can be used to write different dialogue paths for your chatbot AI in a shorter and more concise manner than through traditional text-editors. Don’t allow your customers to come into contact with the same chatbot answers to different questions. Your personalization game will be that much better for it.
Addition of Multimedia Content
Multimedia content is an essential part of any content marketing strategy. Its presence in your chatbot AI can be highly beneficial both for your links’ engagement rates and your customers’ satisfaction. You can easily integrate multimedia items such as images, videos, GIFs and other materials into conversation trees. These serve as answers or parts of an answer as they are already a part of content marketing.
For example, you can follow a question such as “How do I use product A?” with a video demonstration of product A. Then you can continue with a follow-up query such as “Do you need any further help?” It’s important to leverage the usefulness of the provided answer. This emphasises the need to drive sales/traffic toward specific links present on your website. In that regard, multimedia should never be added for the sake of diversity.
Consider the FAQs
Lastly, frequently asked questions (FAQ) are a must-have part of any online storefront or service-based business. Customers will likely come in contact with similar issues. Or, pose the same questions to your chatbot over a period of time. Make sure that you keep a close eye on your collected data and chatbot logs. This is to spot interaction patterns between different chatbot engagements.
Once you discover several recurring questions and queries, you can formulate your FAQ. Then, add it as a standard link in the chatbot’s chat box and your website respectively. This will add to your goal of creating a content marketing-centric chatbot environment for users to engage with. Further, allowing refinement and development of your FAQ and chatbot dialogue trees alike.
Marketing Content through Chatbots (Conclusion)
Integrating content marketing into your chatbot AI strategy is an ongoing effort. It is one that will require you to analyze collected data and retrofit your findings for further customer engagement. However, you must get into the rhythm of building positive brand reputation through a chatbot content marketing strategy. Those efforts will reflect in your business’ engagement, conversion rates and revenue alike.
Blog Cover Photo Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-white-and-brown-cardboard-box-toy-figure-678308/
Originally published at https://blog.engati.com on August 20, 2019.
