In the era of technology and the digital world, it is becoming easier for customers to communicate with chatbots. All thanks to artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Now anyone can create an AI-enabled chatbot and use it for their business benefits within a few minutes without having any technical knowledge. And the benefits of using chatbots are endless. Name any business sector, and you will find a chatbot there. You will be surprised to know that chatbots are also doing great for marketers, especially in successful social media strategies.
But the question is, what are AI-chatbots, and why is it buzzing on the internet in 2021?
Chatbots are artificial intelligence programs that are responsible for stimulating the conversation amongst users automatically. We can also call it a digital assistant that learns human capabilities and responds accordingly. Bots record, process data and interpret the user intent and give responses accordingly. Bots can understand and communicate in various modes, including Voice, text messages, etc. You can also customize its functionality to understand multiple human languages and voice messages.
Google Assistance is the perfect example of this; it is also based on Artificial Intelligence and works as digital assistance. Incorporating chatbots into the website is very easy, but better to consult any web developers if you’re not technical enough. Now you know the basics of AI-Chatbot, so let’s move further and see how marketers are using it in their marketing strategies. Here in this article, we will also tell you the reason why chatbots need to be part of your social media marketing strategy.
The reason why use chatbots in your Social Media Marketing Strategy
There are many reasons why to use chatbots in your social media strategy, but here we have listed some of them. So let’s begin with the first one:
1. Collect accurate data
AI chatbots are a reliable source of collecting customer data because bots communicate with the customers directly. If you’re a marketer, you better understand the value of data and how it can impact your marketing strategies. It not only helps you know your customers but also makes your marketing strategies even more effective. But when it comes to collecting data personally, it’s a daunting task, whereas this is not the case with Chatbots.
Chatbots make conversations with humans easy. They feel more comfortable sharing their personal details, including contact details, date of birth, user’s choices and interests, etc., that marketers later use to attract customers.
Chatbots also predict human preferences and interests with their search behavior and show them results accordingly. This information is especially useful for shaping your content strategy: you will find out which keywords your audience uses the most and reflect in your content to optimize searches.
2. Engaging your audience through social media
The popularity of instant messages is growing rapidly, and to beat that speed, you need to rely on something that can do this for you. People preferred receiving messages, whether personal or professional, instead of calls. It saves their time and gives accurate information that they can use in the future too. If you want to achieve that top-level, then having social media accounts isn’t enough – you need your customers to be able to send you a message or comment instantly. This is where chatbots come into consideration. Chatbot helps attract customers, solve their queries and encourage them to take action through social media channels or directly on your website. With the help of a chatbot, you can promote your products, run ad campaigns, send notifications, get customer’s details, etc., to make your social media strategies successful.
3. Offer customers personalized promotions and discounts
It is difficult to reach out to your customers manually and tell them about your products and services. So, for that, a chatbot is the best option. Marketing has become very personalized, and people love seeing you care about your customer’s choices and interests. They will feel their value and increase trustworthiness, and this helps strengthen relationships with your clients and make them your loyal customer. Chatbots are closely tied to social media and can collect user profile data-name, preferences, purchase history – personalizing tips, promotions, and discounts to make your searches more personalized.
4. Simplify the payment process
The payment process is final, and the most crucial step to ending the whole buying process, and the easier buying process always attracts your customers and motivates them to buy more products. The easier the buying process, the higher the brand reputation and more sales. Chatbots identify the issues in the buying process, help customers with the solutions and solve their sales queries. If you leave the entire process on chatbot, it will positively impact sales and reduce the labor cost.
5. Choose the most promising clients
Your marketing strategy is only effective when selecting the leads you want to target with your marketing campaign. If you want to convert your audience into leads, you need to know what your audience is looking for. You can do that by asking the right qualifying questions. The chatbot will find out your customer’s interests, tastes, and preferences and then relay the information to the sales department. This will save time, money and help you find the right audience for your business.
6. Form a personal relationship with your audience
AI chatbots have now become very advanced and give the feeling of a real person talking to them. It has now become more personal than other types of marketing communication. It communicates with customers in a natural language as we do in our day to life. It can understand audio as well as text and give responses accordingly. The bot’s “personality” should reflect your brand as much as possible in order to attract consumers and facilitate sales.
7. Available round the clock
The best part of the chatbot is its 24/7/365 availability for its customers. Remember that your customers are searching for your business round the clock, which most businesses are lacking. They mostly fail to serve their customers and solve their queries round the clock and may end up losing potential customers. But this is not the case with chatbots, and it offers real-time conversations 24/7, helps customers to solve their queries, shows your business availability, and helps conversions. It will increase business credibility and help gain customer’s loyalty and trust.
4 Tips for Using Chatbot in your Social Media Marketing Successfully
I hope you’re clear about the importance of chatbots. Now it’s time to take a look at the best practices for using Chatbots in your business.
1. Choose the right e-commerce platform
Choosing the right platform always compliments your business growth. It’s not new that a chatbot is a third-party tool, and if you want to implement this on your website, you need to choose a trusted source. You can’t take risks when it comes to promoting your business and attracting new clients online because of lots of money and time invested into it. So, it recommended relying on trusted sources. And whether you’re starting an e-commerce business or already running one, make sure technical errors won’t be an issue.
2. Humanize your Chatbot
Chatbots are meant to automate the process according to their programs, after all, it’s software and not a real human. So, it would be best if you humanized your chatbot programming to make it ready for a conversation like humans do. Chatbots can’t replace human interaction entirely, but they come pretty close by making it user-friendly for clients.
3. Focus on user experience
Our main goal for inserting chatbots into our website is to increase user experience. And when you’re planning to incorporate chatbot into your marketing strategies, your focus should be on offering the best user experience to your customers. You can opt for a chatbot source that is easy to customize and respond to as per our requirements without any technical errors. Once you have incorporated it into your website, don’t forget to optimize it to make it user-friendly. Make sure your chatbots don’t start randomly, and ask critical questions and give correct answers when the client wants.
4. Monitor the process regularly
To make chatbots available 24/7 for your customers, monitor its process regularly. Analyzing its process regularly will help identify errors, improve its quality and make it more conversational. Don’t trust traditional strategies to attract leads in 2021. Things become conversational, and to meet that level, you need to improve your strategy.
Bottom line
The chatbots reflect your brand as much as possible in order to attract consumers and facilitate sales. And your customers expect their experience to be personalized according to their needs and desires. Chatbot in social media marketing is a great way to incline your customer’s attention without significantly changing your overall marketing strategy. Implement chatbots into your marketing to make conversations more smooth and effective and see how customers react. I hope this article will help improve your marketing strategies like never before. If you have any questions or suggestions, comment below.
Ravi is a digital entrepreneur who has a vision of helping businesses to increase their online presence through websites, mobile applications, and SEO. He is the Founder & CEO of Webomaze Pty Ltd, a one-stop digital agency based in Melbourne.