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As of recently, chatbots have made it to the mainstream. They've become very popular, and many businesses have started integrating them in their marketing mix. There are over two billion people using internet messengers on a daily basis, and the number is projected to grow to nearly four billion within the next five years. This is excellent news for the companies looking to tap into chatbots, considering how easily those integrate into platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and others.
Chatbots allow users to execute a broad spectrum of action much quicker and much more efficiently. In this article, we'll take a look at the ways you can use your chatbot to revive and considerably improve your B2B content strategy by tapping into chatbots. Let's dive right in, shall we?
If you're at the very beginning of your path to explore and potentially incorporate chatbots into your company's content strategy, here's a short breakdown of the functions they can execute in this department:
• Greet potential customers and answer FAQ's
• Stimulate your readership and prolong the time they spend on your site
• Collect first-party data from prospective customers
• Provide them with quick content based on their interests and preferences
• Provide them with immediate human-less customer support and help them troubleshoot potential issues
• Inform your clientele on promotions
The modern business ecosystem is gradually moving into an era of first-party data. This trend is partly defined by the GDPR and other similar legislature passed in Canada and the United States. Furthermore, it's commonly known that third-party data is unreliable, due to its imprecision; and this is something B2B businesses cannot afford, considering that they have a much smaller market, compared to the customer-oriented organizations.
An alternative to third-party data is second-party data, which is purchased directly from the owner of the data, which partly eliminates some of the imprecision on the provided information. However, in the post-GDPR era, the businesses that look to sell data to other companies need to abide by a broad set of standards and regulations, which makes their "sourcing their product" much more complicated.
First-party data is the consumer data you receive directly from your customers, with their consent, which makes it "ethically sourced." It allows businesses to extract a much more extensive range of benefits, compared to the two mentioned above.
Besides collecting leads, chatbots can be a great source of information about your customers' preferences and interests, along with their contact information and names.
As mentioned above, bots are undoubtedly an invaluable asset to any business's marketing strategy, especially if you're looking to engage your customers by using content. Once you've used chatbots to collect first-party data from your existing and potential customers, you'll be able to better understand their needs, fears, and interests. As a result, this information will allow you to create a much more accurate customer persona.
Joan Watts, the content strategist at IsAccurate told us that: "Considering that your business operates in a particular niche or a set of domains, your customers will be interested in consuming content that relates to them or is adjacent to the topic, at the very least. Despite that, your business must find its "empty slot" in the industry, which will be partly defined by the expectations your customers have in regards to your content."
Here's what we mean: let's imagine two distinct online services — they are Company A and Company B. They both provide high-quality services to their clientele. However, they have very different customers.
Let's say that Company A is more of an indie product. It has human-centered values; it's passionate about ensuring a very meaningful interaction between them and their clientele, along with a very personable customer support experience. At the same time, Company B is has a more "corporate" personality. Its target audience are executives that value their time and are very data-oriented. They are interested in getting stuff done, and valuable interaction with the services they use isn't exactly their most significant issue.
Therefore, it's safe to assume that the customers that use the services of Company A are more passionate about content like:
• Customer reviews
• User-generated content
• Blog posts
• Product reviews
And the ones choosing to go with Company B are more curious to read things like:
• Case studies
• Internal industry insights
• Industry news
• Research and studies
• Infographics
This differentiation allows businesses to divide the market and identify their customers. But this understanding of the market does not come overnight. This is where chatbots come into play.
We spoke to Jeremy Willis, the senior marketing specialist at WoWGrade and Studicus about market identity, here's what he said: "By understanding what your customers' projection of your brand is, you'll be able to carefully adjust your corporate image and the content you publish to fit their needs better."
Once you've sorted out the peculiarities regarding the content types and formats your audience is after, it's important to tap into chatbots as a means of content distribution. Obviously, the best way to do that is to allow chatbots to return content for your customers based on the keywords in their queries. Here's an example of how the Washington Post approached this issue:
Similarly, your chatbots can compile articles you've published within a certain period and offer it to your customers as a weekly or daily digest.
It's important not to get caught up in publishing very "self-centered" content that revolves exclusively around your company. Customers are inherently expecting that you care for their wellbeing and posting content that is only designed to lure them into spending more money with you isn't quite what they need/expect. This is why it is imperative for businesses to look into curated content.
Providing your followers and clientele with carefully selected and valuable news and articles pertaining to your industry will only fuel brand loyalty and will establish your position as an industry opinion leader.
Some marketing specialists suggest posting content relating directly to your company only once in every three or four posts.
Whatever other content you post should be directed exclusively towards providing your customers with valuable data that they can extract benefit from.
An impressive feature that the chatbots integrated into Facebook's Messenger can explore are the Facebook Instant Articles (FIA). According to an article published on Statista, many major publishing houses are now harnessing the benefits of Instant Articles. Below, you'll find a breakdown of their engagement with this new presentation format.
This new format allows businesses of all kinds to post articles that load ridiculously quick directly in their followers' feeds. You can recognize them immediately by looking for posts that have a lightning bolt icon on the thumbnail.
According to Facebook's reports, this new article format pops up on their users' screens ten times quicker than your typical web article, which stimulates readers to stay engaged with the content in question.
By choosing to distribute content on Facebook by using a Messenger Chatbot, you'll be able to take advantage of this impressive new format, and you'll also have the opportunity to monetize this content.
If you'll consider investing some time and effort into incorporating this technology in your marketing mix, it's vital that you take the right amount of time to develop your bot's personality. A suitable bot persona will do wonders to your overall customer experience and customer satisfaction.
Once you've defined the ideal personality for your chatbot, it's essential to determine the ways it's going to use language to interact with customers. Your choices are pretty much limitless. You can have a bot that speaks like a middle-aged woman from Texas, with a heavy accent; or a young millennial or a representative of the Gen Z that uses modern slang.
There are now many businesses like Trust My Paper, Grab My Essay, Best Essay Education, and Supreme Dissertations, along with tools like Grammarly and Hemingway to better calibrate the bot's lines of dialogue in accordance with the mood and personality you're trying to convey.
Chatbots are a fantastic piece of software that can revive and freshen up your content strategy by providing your customers with value. We strongly recommend you explore the potential of these small, yet very powerful machines.
Good luck!
