Marketing has changed a
lot for the last 20 years. Indeed, Internet has changed the ways companies sell
their products to their targeted audience.
While Search Engine Optimization was dominating in the 2000’s many other
communication channels appeared along time. From SMS to Facebook or Slack more
recently, communication channels have flourished. But today I wanted to look at
a specific channel that every marketer has or should have heard about in the
last couple of months: Chatbots. Everybody is talking about those bots! The
biggest companies around the world are experimenting them and often invest
hundreds of millions of dollars on Chatbots. While it was still few months ago
to talk about “something to try” we can argue today that it is a must have for
any company that wants to master communication and marketing.
Why Bots are the future
of marketing?
1) Engagement beyond clicks
In traditional online
communication channels such as SMS, Facebook Ads, Google Adwords the engagement
with your audience was passive. What does it mean?
Well, traditional online
communication channels are roughly based on this communication schema:
The company creates
great content - advertises it – wait for
engagements – make money from the audience
Chatbots are disrupting
this schema by making your audience active:
The company creates a
bot that is customer centric – The customer searches for contents he/she is
interested in – Got information he/she wanted – Buy
The “content
consumption” is totally reversed. With chatbots consumers have the power. If
people really like your product they will interact with your brand without
pushing them doing so through massive advertising campaigns
The engagement is thus
“astronomical” as the customer is a way more interested in what he is saying or
hearing from your bot as it was his/her decision to talk to you.
As Judy Hopps a
marketing officer at Disney states “users spent more than 10 minutes on average
talking to the character and many users restarted the conversation to replay a
different scenario.” This is a huge amount for marketers during which you can
display crucial information to your audience.
2) Insights directly from
users:
Thanks to bot you can
get personal insights from your customers themselves. Chatbots can asks
questions that are characterized as intrusive by everybody. Some examples from
the article are just great:
“Where do you live?”
“What music do like?”
“Where’s your dream
travel destination?”
“What do you think of
the latest Geico commercial?”
As the writer mentions
“questions that are awkward or annoying coming from a brand are socially
acceptable and even welcome in chatbot interactions”
It becomes super easy
for marketers to better “score” their leads thanks to those gold mine of
information. Results? Better understanding of who is your customer = better
targeting for campaigns = More profits through marketing campaigns.
3) Maximum opportunities
for personalization
Bots do not “just”
collect information about your audience. They also permit to personalize every customer
journey. Your “churn rate” basically becomes equal to zero as your customer
finds what he wants.
Personalization has
always been the “Big thing” for marketers and many tactics have been used such
as display ads, retargeting or personal cold emailing. The results are often low,
and those tactics are most of the time very costly, well not anymore with
chatbots.
The Sephora’s bot is a
great example of personalization highlighted in the article. “The bot first
inquires what users are interested in learning about: eyes, skin, hair, nails,
etc. — and only suggests relevant products, beauty tips, and tutorials”.
Those 3 arguments
perfectly show the power of ChatBots for marketers in 2017. Facebook has
although announced that companies will be soon enough able to plug their
Messenger Chatbots onto their landing pages. The possibilities of growth will
be enormous!
If you want to read more
interesting reasons why bots are the future of marketing I highly recommend you
to read the entire article written by Adelyn Zhou from TopBots:
https://thinkgrowth.org/chatbots-are-the-future-of-marketing-67d21bd557db
Axel Girard and Victor Huyghues Despointes
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