4 Reasons Why Chatbots Are The Future Of Digital Marketing

Instant messaging applications are on the rise, and they are the way people communicate with businesses. You’ll often find people using messaging platforms such as Telegram, Facebook, WeChat and WhatsApp to communicate instead of email or phone call.

This gradual increase in the number of instant messaging app users is a huge positive for brands and businesses, only if they can take advantage of it. So what benefit does the increase in instant messaging app users bring? How can brands and businesses take advantage of this benefit?

Chatbots provide the answers to these questions, as they give brands an avenue to reach out to the massive user base of various instant messaging platforms. It makes the instant messaging app user experience seamless; users can ask questions, play games or even check for news updates through them, so they have become a welcome feature on many social media or messaging platforms.

In the next couple of years, the number of instant messaging app users will continue to rise exponentially, with the current count at billions of active users. Chatbots will become the go-to approach for brands and businesses to market their products and services to potential customers. The most significant impact of chatbots has been felt in the area of customer relations for businesses, and this is gradually being channeled to digital marketing for converting potential customers.

Here are the 4 reasons why chatbots are the future of digital marketing:

With Chatbots, brands can create a “conversational form”, to provide a more intuitive way to capture leads information than traditional web form. Visitors can follow a series of guided qualifying questions, enabling brands to profile them, adding them into different segmented subscriber lists and sync them up with their CRM. Marketers can then take advantage of them to reach out to the targeted subscribers, nurturing them through personalized messages and converting them into a paying customer.

Digital marketing is hard work. It requires a lot of effort and constant availability of digital marketing teams, and it is even more difficult in the digital space where there is an increase in the number of messaging channels and platforms. One way to handle this, is to expand the digital marketing team. However, prudent brands will take advantage of chatbots instead.

Chatbots are the leading digital marketing agents of the future. A savvy-marketer understands this, so they implement Chatbots that can automate replies on Facebook Messenger and Facebook comments when it detects that users are having the intention to purchase. The chatbot could intercept the chat automatically to provide pricing information and recommend relevant products to them, giving the digital marketing team the time to tackle problems that require 24/7 human interaction. Another example of automating marketing task is the chatbot’s ability to auto subscribes users to a “messaging journey” based on certain rules that is triggered during the conversation, this automated series of messages will gradually nurture user down the path from being visitors to subscribers and then customers purchasing products regularly.

Chatbots are designed to collect and process large volume of customer data which they use to interact with customers in a unique and personalized ways. By providing a personalized customer experience for your users, you can quickly gain their trust.

While the large number of instant messaging app users is an avenue to reach out to more people, it also poses a challenge of marketing the right products to the right people. Traditional digital marketing methods involve marketing the same product to all users on social media platforms or instant messaging applications, and it takes a long time to market the right product to the right customer.

On the other hand, chatbots are good at analyzing huge amount of data and remembering individual customers’ preferences, hence, it can solve the problem by providing a personalized user experience at scale. By leverage on this, brands can now start marketing the right products to the right people immediately, saving time, money and winning over the customers before the competitor does.

In the near future, Chatbots might be closer to your customers than even the customer care agents or the executives at the company. You’ll find many brands taking advantage of this to analyse customer data, keeping track of their activities and purchase patterns.

All of this analysis will be to gain an extra advantage. When you understand a customer, you are able to know their needs and recommend the right products to them. Hence, Chatbots will create an avenue to target potential customers better, leading them to the right products, providing them with personalized offers and converting them into purchasing customers in less time.

Just like the Internet, Chatbots will gradually prove to be relevant in the digital marketing space as they’ll be used to build contact lists, improve customer conversion, provide personalized customer experiences, and help the digital marketing teams automate mundane tasks and make smarter decisions.

For brands that think long term, looking for ways to gain an edge over their competition; the use of chatbots to drive leads and make more sales is going to be a huge positive. You’ll find more brands joining the bandwagon; however, the first adopters will gain the most from the use of Chatbots for digital marketing.