Why You Need to Make Chatbots a Part of Your Marketing Strategy

You must have been told that technical evolution is one of the keys to business success. Bots are a big part of that. Chatbots in particular are showing up on the websites of more companies every day.

If you’ve been wondering whether your company should embrace the idea, it could make a big difference to know that chatbots can do far more than expand your customer service. This technology has the potential to be an exceptional messaging app that can both improve your marketing and the collaboration between team members.

Understanding the Chatbot

A bot is a piece of software that automates tasks, in this case communications. Multiple users can access them simultaneously with a simple click over any digital interface and ask or answer questions. The latest bots are powered with artificial intelligence.

Although AI can be seen as incredibly complicated if-then-else statements compiled by programmers, it means that chatbots can handle increasingly complex requests, personalized responses, store information, and improve performance over time by identifying and avoiding mistakes. All of this is done with little to no intervention on the part of your human staff.

Bots in Marketing

For the first time, messaging apps have eclipsed social media. That means more than 5 billion people looking for this type of solution. This is an audience more likely to use a chatbot to interact with your organization. This huge trend in consumer behavior is one that you can satisfy with the integration of an app tailored to helping them understand your brand, products, and services.

No more effort is required at either end. Visitors only need to be able to type, or as voice recognition technology improves, merely to speak into their own smartphone.

Customers and prospects don’t have to download or upload anything, follow a series of links, sign up and risk spamming, or wait on a response from a human operator. And improving the user experience while providing valued content is what modern marketing is all about.

Some Challenges

There are companies who have already tried chatbots and given up. But the reasons for that are either limited technology or limited investment. Bots in the past were implemented without a clear mission, were clumsy at interpreting conversation without plenty of context, or didn’t have any memory for statements that had been made previously.

Yet these awkward bots made no provisions for escalating matters to a human agent. That made for a very clumsy user interaction that diminished, rather than improved, the customer experience. They were quick to abandon this channel to your company.

But the tech companies rolling out chatbots are determined to make this tool work. The reason people turn to chatbots is that they want answers fast, on the spot, as they’re reviewing your content.

If you’re using chatbots as a resource for off-site team members, it’s even more critical that responses be timely, efficient, and accurate. Some of the bots in use are very close to mimicking human speech patterns so that the public may not even realize they’re dealing with a machine. But your visitors and your employees tend to be far more tolerant of mistakes made by humans than mistakes made by a machine.

The technology of chatbots has and will continue to reach new highs. But out-of-the-box solutions that actually work well are rare. It’s critical that your bots, like your human employees, are trained to represent you, their purpose, and your unique operation as well as possible. It must also use a platform that works smoothly with your data, messaging, and web applications.

Integrating the Bot

When you discuss marketing strategy, you can’t focus just on customer convenience and automation of support. The performance of your marketing team is also important in realizing the best ROI from your efforts.

Your campaigns may include everything from emails to social posts, but you’ll get the best results if everyone is on the same page. This means consolidation in the activities of salespeople, marketers, management, and increasingly, remote teams.

Chatbots as an information platform can provide a convenient and reliable resource for providing guidance and problem resolution to agents half a world away.

Smart bots can monitor what everyone on the team is doing to streamline and synchronize efforts. Particularly for those working on or with remote teams, chatbots can keep you updated whenever and wherever you need them. No matter what the goals or the scope of the project you’re taking on, these bots are a tool that takes team communication and performance to the next level.

Join the (R)evolution

The challenges in deploying chatbots aren’t technical anymore. However, in order to get the best value from it for your marketing teams, the bot has to understand what’s expected. It has to make hundreds of decisions for each member that’s using it. Successful use of chatbots comes down to the evolution of shared conversations.

Author Bio:

Jasmine Williams covers the good and the bad of today’s business and marketing. When she’s not being all serious and busy, she’s usually hunched over a book or dancing in the kitchen, trying hard to maintain rhythm, and delivering some fine cooking (her family says so). Tweet her @JazzyWilliams88