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Introduction
As you might expect, bot marketing is the process of incorporating bots into your digital marketing efforts, particularly on your website. These bots can perform different types of tasks related to marketing campaigns, which we discuss below. The primary benefit of marketing bots is that they help automate marketing tasks, allowing you to focus on other aspects of running your business while still serving your target audience. You’re probably wondering, “What do internet bots do?” There are several ways bots can help you with your marketing. Below we look at three of the most important ones.Read on to see a breakdown of each item!
What is Bot in Digital Marketing Strategy?
Bots’ digital marketing strategy is software you can program for a definite set of actions. It’s like a wind-up toy. First, you build it to do what you want, then wind it up and let it perform the steps on its own. This can save you time and help you complete tasks more effectively. Clicks from the bot translate into more revenue for the website the ad is hosted on and increase the cost of the ads.
In addition, the best-designed bots can randomly vary the time they spend on a page or even fill out primary forms to make them seem less mechanical and harder to spot. A bot, a short form of a robot, is a software application programmed to perform specific tasks as part of another computer program or simulate human activity. Bots are designed to automate tasks independently without human intervention, thus eliminating cumbersome manual processes.
Steps to Include Bots in Digital Marketing Strategy
Here are eight steps to include bots in any digital marketing strategy.
1. Communicate with website visitors
- This is one of the most valuable and popular bot actions.
- It takes a lot of work off your hands and has a lot of profits. In addition, companies visiting your site will want replies about your products or facilities.
- If they can’t find those responses, they may never return. Serving your potential customers is a primary concern, but that can be challenging if you have a small customer backing or sales group.
- That’s where bots can help out and save the day.
2. Conduct research
- If you find yourself multitasking every day, a bot can take on some of those responsibilities and let you focus on the essential things.
- If all you’re doing is a few Google searches here and there, having a dedicated research bot would honestly be overkill.
- But if you are constantly checking up on your competition and always finding new content to use, then a bot will be worth its weight in gold for you.
3. Qualify your leads
- That’s right. These bots can even qualify your leads for you.
- Lead management can often give you a headache. Tips sometimes require a lot of nurturing, and while it’s worth the result, it’s also pretty tiring.
- So why not have a bot do it for you? For example, you can program sets of questions to find out where a customer is in the sales funnel.
- This works surprisingly well; often, your customers won’t even know they’re talking to a bot.
- Driftbot by Drift is an excellent example of this kind of software.
- The best way to properly qualify your leads is to use live chat (with a natural person) alongside the bot.
- The bot handles the grunt work of bringing the lead in and finding the right product or service for them.
4. Organize your team
- When we say “marketing strategy,” we often think of things like SEO, Facebook Ads, and blog posts.
- We don’t often think of team performance. But that’s one of the essential parts of every marketing strategy.
- There’s always a certain amount of friction that happens within teams.
- Getting everyone on the same page will reduce that friction and help you do everything better.
- Bots like Standup Bot and Nikabot make that task a lot easier.
- These bots help you track what everyone on your team is doing and keep everyone up to date with each other.
- These tools are handy if you’re part of a remote team.
5. Personalize the user experience
- 71% of customers prefer personalized ads.
- Customers love personalization across the board.
- If you’re not providing that customized experience, you could be losing out to your competitors.
- It’s a lot easier than it seems to use bots for customization.
- One way that bots get personalized is to provide “quizzes” or a series of questions.
6. Integrate bots with messaging platforms
- This is where the bots shine.
- chatbots are more popular among messaging platforms.
- That makes a lot of sense. After all, most bots are designed to communicate with your customers.
- In particular, there are many bots available for Slack and Facebook Messenger.
- Slack bots are great to use behind the scenes at your business, while Facebook Messenger bots are best used for leads.
- Messenger bots are especially handy for e-commerce stores. You can sell your products without ever lifting a finger. The bot does it all.
7. Sell your products
- You can create a bot to sell products entirely by yourself.
- The bot interacts with the customer to find the correct product, and the customer can even go to the checkout directly from the bot’s interface.
- The clothing company H&M uses a Chabot to sell items on the Kik messaging service.
- The bot does practically all the marketing and sales; you never need to step in and do anything yourself.
8. Increase engagement by starting a conversation
- Advertisers have been figuring out how to start conversations with customers for decades.
- With bots, you can start a literal conversation. You can set up your bot to reach out to the first user.
- The bot acts like a retail sales associate, greeting you as you enter the store.
- In this case, you’re a digital customer visiting an online store.
- The bot happily asks specific questions: Even though you know it’s a bot, you can’t help but feel compelled to respond.
- There’s some major psychology at work here. Think about it. If you walk into a store, you may or may not start a conversation with a clerk.
- But you will respond if someone reaches out to you and starts talking.
- Using bots to start conversations is very useful. You are almost guaranteeing a response from the user, which means it automatically goes down the sales funnel.
- That’s not all. If a bot asks the right questions, it can drive the momentum of a real face-to-face conversation. Your bots don’t have to stay in the background.
- They can take the first step and many close sales for you.
Uses of Bots in Digital Marketing Strategy
There are a few ways bots can help you run your digital marketing strategy, and we’ll cover three of the biggest ones below.
1. Guide customers through your site
One of the most public uses for bots is customer support on your website. But you’ve never seen chatbots before. For example, you visit a website, and while it’s loading, a small provision widget appears in the bottom corner of your display. These chatbots help as a means for site visitors to get the help they want and find the data they want if they can’t figure it out on their own. Moreover, they can do it all without speaking to one of your representatives in person.
2. Develop principles toward a change
When chatbots interrelate with site visitors, they can do much extra than guide those visitors to useful information. They can also sell products directly to those users, recommending specific products and guiding people through purchasing.
Many of these bots can act like miniature salespeople, chatting with users in a conversational voice and asking questions to help discern what the users may want. Ultimately, these bots can be a fantastic way to elicit sales from people who might not otherwise buy!
3. Pull data and conduct research
Bots are fantastic for helping you conduct marketing research. First, they can help you conduct searches more effectively, pulling info from the web in response to your queries. They can also analyze your site traffic to provide quick analytics insights.
Additionally, you can use these bots to pull data on your site visitors. As chatbots talk to users, they can ask survey-like questions about the users’ demographics, locations, interests, and more. Many users will respond voluntarily, providing you with valuable data that can enhance your marketing.
Tips for setting up Bot in Digital Marketing Strategy
Here are three tips to rely on when you set up your bots in digital marketing strategy
1. Balance your human and bot components
- One mistake you’ll want to avoid is relying too much — or too little — on bots. Naturally, you want bots to handle whatever they can because the more you automate, the easier your job becomes.
- But there’s a limit, and you want to ensure you don’t exceed it.
- While you’re free to use bots for as many tasks as you want, don’t altogether remove humans from the equation.
- When users have questions your chatbots aren’t qualified to answer, you’ll want to give those users the time to contact a team member.
- Therefore, please set up your chatbots to connect users with human representatives when the bots can’t fulfill their requests.
2. You must be honest about your automation
- Another thing to avoid is misleading users about your chatbots.
- Some companies pretend their bots are real people, giving them human names and profile pictures.
- That’s great at first, but for that reason, be sure to tell users upfront that your chatbot is, in fact, a chatbot.
- That way, they’ll know what to expect when using it. Unfortunately, things go downhill as users ask questions the bot can’t answer.
3. Don’t be nosy or annoying
- One last thing to consider is that you should prevent your bots from annoying site visitors.
- Many bots allow you to greet users when they arrive on your site via a popup box.
- Sometimes this is useful, but not always. Many users chafe at closing the box to continue browsing your site, especially if you already have other popups and notifications.
Conclusion
Customers are always going to want a great experience. Even if everything is automated in the future, nothing will change the need for optimal user experiences. We can use bots to automate a lot of the marketing process, but that doesn’t mean we can make the process cold and impersonal. Remove the opposite.
The main benefit of marketing bots is that they help automate your marketing, allowing you to emphasize other aspects of running your business while satisfying your target audience. You have to think of your customers every step of the way. Only then will tools like bots be able to do their best. So if you are considering using bots for your marketing strategies, try them!