Everyone's chatting about chatbots, in fact, everyone's chatting to chatbots these days.
And who can blame them when the tech is just so clever!
Chatbots and other conversational marketing tech can play a key part in elevating your sales and customer support processes, but just where and when should they fit into your business?
This week Rob & Kennedy managed to pin down marketing genius Paul Ince to find out everything you need to know about how to implement some nifty conversational marketing and get results!
- Conversational marketing is the process of instigating a conversation between a brand and a customer.
- It’s basically someone who is going to be doing business with someone else, that could be B2B or B2C.
- People ask questions all the time, but that doesn’t necessarily need to include humans. You regularly as Google stuff, you look on TripAdvisor if you’re booking a holiday, so we’re having these conversations all the time whether it’s with devices or with people.
- When people are looking to do a transaction, they want to ask questions before they buy, and that’s where conversational marketing comes in.
- If you want to scale I think automation can be really helpful. You’ve got things like chatbots or Google or even FAQ pages on websites. These things all help to have a ‘conversation’ with a customer and help them go a bit further along the customer journey.
- However, I think that if you don’t try to scale you can sometimes actually have a greater impact.
- I use an app called Bonjoro which lets you send an individual video message to customers when they make a purchase. So, when someone buys a ticket to one of our events they receive a personalised video from us saying thanks. It doesn’t really scale but it has an amazing impact!
- I think chatbots are incredibly helpful to provide a better level of service to a customer than you might be able to deliver as an individual.
- I suggest people look at the internal processes they have in their business. Which part of your process involves interaction with customers? It could be before, during or after the sales process.
- A lot of the time people ask questions which can be answered with information from a database.
- These are the types of questions that don’t necessarily need human to answer, as long as your data is accurate.
It’s also really important to have a solid understanding of which questions definitely do need a person to get involved. These would be things like escalation points, or more important/individual queries.
- Personally, I think you should be completely open about it.
- If something goes wrong, like the bot doesn’t answer the question correctly or the standard response doesn’t quite meet the mark, you can immediately lose trust.
- When a customer thinks they are talking to a human initially and then realise that they aren’t, you can lose trust and possibly lose the customer.
- I generally make sure that the conversation always starts with the bot declaring itself – ‘Hey, this is the 3 Marketers bot. How can I help?’
- You need to give people a reason to use it.
- It has to be really clear what the bot is for and why it could be beneficial to use it.
- If it’s a bot that’s there to answer basic questions about someone’s account, you need to explain that that’s what it is there for. Once people understand why something is there they can decide whether or not they want to use it.
- They need to understand the benefit. If they know that they’ll get a faster answer to their question then they are more likely to use it, because nobody wants to be waiting around.
Firstly, you need to look at where you want to use a bot and what you want to do with it.
One of the easiest to start out with is a Facebook messenger bot. They’re really accessible and they’re generally free to use.
- ManyChat – this one is really good for things like payment integration.
- Chatfuel – this is my current favourite because I like their AI side of things. We use the AI element to help our bot learn how to answer questions more intelligently.
- Dialogflow – this is Google’s chatbot tool, it’s really good for writing something once and implementing it in multiple places.
- Flow XO – this one has a tool that allows you to integrate external systems like a database.
- Landbot.io – this one allows you to build a chatbot without integrating with Facebook messenger, so it can just sit on your website.
If you haven't listened to the full episode yet, you definitely should…the bonus round looked something like this:
A book that you would recommend…
Everybody Writes by Ann Handley
What really grinds your gears?
The hustle and the 5am club, it’s really not for me.
What is your top success habit?
It’s a really annoying one, but I do like going to the gym.
Who do you look up to?
There's no single one person. I like people who are determined and have something to say.
How do you define success?
Making a positive contribution to someone’s business or life.
Here the big one…who do you like more, Rob or Kennedy?
Kennedy – one more point on the board.
Finally, where can folks go to find out more about you?
I’m known as BizPaul on all channels (even my kids have started calling me that). So you can find me over on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. If you want to chat with me by email you can reach me at paul@likemind.media
*BONUS*
Paul is also hosting an amazing marketing event MarketEd.Live at the end of September. He’s managed to bag a super line-up of expert speakers on hot topics like PR, websites, content marketing and so much more!
It’s taking place on 25th September 2018 in Nottingham and if you want to find out more head over to marketed.live
P.S. For a mega discount on tickets for this event head over to: marketed.live/3marketers
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