Chatbots have become an increasingly common sight online. Most of us now regularly visit websites that feature chatbots, either as a form of customer support or as a means of streamlining user interaction with the website. Similarly, chatbots have started to appear on social media platforms, where a number of businesses now use them to set up autoresponders for customers who send inquiries to social media accounts.
Chatbots have numerous potential uses, but all of these are contingent upon their owners knowing how to properly deploy them. Content marketers and website owners can utilize chatbots in a number of ways to enhance user engagement and augment their content marketing efforts.
A More Personalized Experience
The trend towards more personalization has been going on for some time now and continues to remain as strong as ever. Even the most basic implementations of personalization can make a significant difference in user engagement with content.
While the benefits of personalization are unquestionable, the problem remains for website owners of exactly how to best implement personalization. Simply addressing your registered users by their first name isn’t going to cut it anymore, people have come to expect the services that they use to be considerably smarter in this regard.
Content marketers can utilize chatbots to promote content in a variety of different ways. The more human a chatbot appears, the more effective it will be. Fortunately, creating a more human chatbot is easier than it sounds. Simple touches like adding some emojis to chat messages, as well as asking leading questions that encourage an engaged response from the user, can dramatically enhance the effectiveness of a chatbot.
Guide Your Customers Through A Sale Funnel
If you are not already familiar with the concept of the marketing funnel, then it is worth familiarizing yourself with it, as it is also a concept that content marketers can take advantage of. Essentially, the idea of the funnel is that as consumers progress through the various stages of using your business, from discovering its existence to finally searching out its content, there will be fewer of them at each stage.
While a great many people may see your marketing and, therefore, be aware of your brand, only a small fraction of them will actually seek out your business. Of this number, only a portion of them will ultimately go on to become paying customers. This is how the funnel effect manifests for most businesses.
By adding chatbots to your website that will interact with users as soon as they arrive, you can immediately guide them through your content funnel and steer them towards the right content. In doing so, you will reduce the portion of users that you are losing at each stage of the process. By having your chatbots actually ask visitors to your website questions about the kind of content that they are looking for, you can kill two birds with one stone and both offer a more personalized experience, while also funneling your users through your content funnel.
Distribute Your Content In A New Way
Consumers today are increasingly demanding that the businesses they use stand out from the rest of the crowd and offer something truly unique. Businesses have always strived to offer a unique selling point, something that sets them apart from their competitors. But in today’s market, consumers are even more discerning when it comes to bland and generic businesses.
Having an intelligent and unique chatbot on your website to guide users towards the content that they’re looking for will immediately set you apart from competitors who are still relying on older and more outdated methods. Even if visitors to your website do not use your chatbot in order to find the content they need, just seeing that it is present can demonstrate to them that your business is not like your competitors.
A growing number of websites are deploying chatbots to provide customer support, and others are using them in order to increase social media engagement. But there are still only relatively few businesses using chatbots in order to distribute content or to guide users towards the content best suited to their needs.
Improve User Engagement
Getting your content in front of as many people as possible is helpful in growing your audience, but it is only half of the story. If your content is put in front of people who are unimpressed with it, it will end up reflecting badly on the rest of your output. Ideally, you want people’s first experiences of your content to be as positive as possible. Having a chatbot to guide users towards the content most relevant to them is one way of improving customer engagement and giving them the best experience of your content as possible.
Similarly, the more users engage with your content, the more chance there is of them becoming a long-term consumer of it. Getting users to engage with content is notoriously difficult, although social media has made it considerably easier. If you can convince your audience to share your content amongst their social media friends, it can instantly expand your potential reach.
As well as encouraging users to engage more with your content, chatbots can also encourage them to engage more with your website itself. It is easy to configure a chatbot so that a user can type in single word commands and have the chatbot automatically perform the relevant action or retrieve relevant content.
Content marketers today are always on the lookout for ways to set the brands and businesses that they represent apart from the competition. Deploying chatbots as a means of engaging with users and encouraging them towards the right content is an effective way for content marketers to augment their other marketing efforts.
Any business that is marketing today without utilizing all of the technology available to it is missing out on potential customers. With so many trends and techniques coming and going, even the most attentive content marketer can find it difficult to keep up. Rest assured, chatbots represent one of the more promising innovations of recent times, and they are likely to only become more important to content marketing going forward.