How to use chatbots for your marketing

Have you ever visited a website and found an automatic chat window offering you help? These are called chatbots, and you can use them to effortlessly and conveniently boost your small business marketing. 

Not only will chatbots advise or promote products or services, but they’ll save you time. But to succeed with chatbots, you’ll need to know the best practices. 

This guide covers chatbots in small business marketing, including:

• What is a chatbot?
• How chatbots can strengthen your marketing
• How to use chatbots for your marketing

If you’d like to know how to use chatbots for marketing, let’s start with the essentials. 

Chatbots are automated messaging software with programmed responses or learning capabilities (artificial intelligence). They aim to determine a user’s needs and provide useful information. 

You can integrate chatbots into:

• Your business website
• Social media channels 
• Messaging apps

Since chatbots are automated, they can take work off your hands and save you time. With the necessary information, they can sell your business well and lead people along the sales journey. 

You may run a business, but you’re only human. You can’t always be at your computer answering questions for potential customers. 

Luckily, chatbots can do that for you. They increase your business’s accessibility by offering 24/7 support.

If you design them well, your chatbots can help you earn more traffic to your website and convert browsers into buyers.  

In fact, a study shows that chatbots can increase marketing awareness by 29% while also improving your conversion rate by 39%. These are impressive growth numbers for such a passive and effortless tactic.

Did you know on average 41 -55% of website traffic bounces or leaves the site without clicking past the home page? Chatbots can increase the navigability of your website and provide context for your business, retaining website traffic. 

To succeed with your chatbot marketing, it’ll need to be well-designed and engaging. Let’s go over how to set chatbots up and what to include to make them effective.

There are two main types of chatbots you could use for your marketing. We’ll compare the options. 

Rule-based

You pre-program rule-based chatbots with set responses to common questions or information. 

To do this, you’ll develop a decision tree, which offers the bot a limited number of outcomes and responses based on the person’s message. 

Rule-based could be the right choice if you offer a relatively simple set of products or services and expect a narrow set of questions. 

Artificial intelligence (AI)

AI chatbots use machine learning to improve their usefulness as they interact with more users. You can program in the essential information, and, over time, the bot will adapt to answer more complex questions. 

If your business offers more complicated or flexible services, making it difficult to anticipate users’ questions, AI might be the right pick. 

Website chatbots

There are plenty of chatbot creation tools to help you make one that works for your platform. Consider looking at a tool like ChatBot to design one that works for you. 

Alternatively, you could hire a software developer to design one unique to your brand. 

Keep in mind that your chatbot needs to integrate into your application programming interface (API). In other words, it needs to communicate with your website. 

Social media and messenger chatbots

You can integrate a chatbot into your social media channels or messenger apps, like Whatsapp, to message relevant users and promote your products. This is an informational and productive way to get your business out there. 

To do this, look to platforms like Chatfuel or Hubtype, which can help you design and use chatbots for various social and networking platforms.  

As you create your chatbot, include as much relevant information as possible so it can support your business independently. Create a list of frequently asked questions or relevant information about your business. 

While you strategise your chatbots, also consider your overarching objectives. 

For example, you may want to promote a new product through social media bots. To measure the success of this, you could track click-through rates from the bot’s links and see how many sales you earn from them. 

When creating your chatbots, there are a few ways to enhance user experience so people will stick around. 

To optimise your chatbots, consider incorporating: 

• Visual elements – make it look good so people will engage with it. For example, you might include your logo, a fun font, and your brand colours. 
• Transparency – Inform people they’re interacting with a bot.  
• A call to action (CTA) – Add language that promotes activity from the user and incorporate a link to your business website, products page, or subscription link. 
• Tests – make sure you test your bot before sending it out there. This will help you catch errors and bugs for smoother interaction with users.

As you use chatbots over time, you can track their success and flag ways to increase their helpfulness. Ensure the chatbot is updated at all times to offer the most relevant information. 

Hopefully, this article teaches you how to use chatbots for marketing. Doing so well can help you save time while growing your audience and earning more sales. You’ll just need to:

• Determine which chatbot best suits you 
• Design it using the right tools and strategy
• Optimise it for high engagement
• Update it over time for best results 

Want to consider other modern marketing tactics to enhance your brand reputation? You might want to check out our article on how to use FOMO in marketing next. 

As your chatbots bring in more revenue, you’ll need to organise your growing finances. 

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