Whether you are a marketer or business owner, the question that often arises is how to improve your content marketing efforts?

Well, one of the most effective and innovative ways is to use Facebook Messenger chatbots. Chatbots are in the middle of a huge comeback and marketers have been realizing how much they can gain from using them. If you want to know all about it and hear some interesting tips, just keep reading.

The Rise of Automated Chat Technology

Automated chat technology is becoming one of the most powerful marketing tools in the industry. According to Business Insider, messaging apps overtook social media in a number of users even back in 2015. Apps like Facebook Messenger and the popular Asian messaging app WeChat are the ones that helped to drive this growth.

Messaging apps aren’t limited to text-based communications like before. Nowadays, they can also be used for sending money, communicating via images and video, and connecting to their favorite brands.

If you want to exploit the benefits of chat automation, you should have a complete understanding of what chatbots represent.

What Exactly is a Chatbot?

According to Oxford Dictionaries,

a chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.

To put it in a more simple way, a chatbot is an automated system of communication with users that integrates into websites, applications or instant messengers and helps entrepreneurs to get closer to customers.

What people like about chatbots is that they provide most of the services of traditional apps without having to go through the downloading process, setting up the apps, and creating new accounts.

Gartner even predicts that chatbots will power 85% of all customer service interactions by the year 2020.

When thinking about bots, it is important that you differentiate between the two basic types:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) based – This type uses natural language processes of either text or voice to figure out what the user wants. The best example is asking Alexa to perform a certain action.
• Automated Help (AH) based – This type provides lists of menus with some AI to recognize voice commands. For example, it is like when you have an automated phone system where you press 1 for customer support, press 2 for sales, press 0 for talking to a person, etc.

Choosing and integrating a chatbot as a new channel of communication and content distribution is a great way to modernize your approach to customer service.

The Benefits of Using Messenger Chatbots

The best marketers are actively turning to Facebook Messenger chatbots as one of their social media marketing strategies and if you want to know why just consider the following benefits.

1. Increase engagement

Customers love to engage with genuine and personalized content and if you deliver exactly that, they will show appreciation and trust your brand.

Chatbots can be your channel for fulfilling the customers’ needs rapidly and effectively. This will stay in their memory and result in repeated interactions over time.

Once the customers are aware that they will always get a prompt response over Messenger, they won’t hesitate to ask anything. When you provide them with that feeling of security and trust, they will also feel more comfortable to repeatedly purchase your products.

2. Grow your contact list

Facebook Messenger sees extremely high open rates – as noted, around 88%. Those messages bring responses and those responses can bring a growing list of contacts.

Thanks to the 24/7 chatbot availability, you can also grow your contacts and leads as your number of conversations rise.

You can even use automation tools like Facebook Messenger’s auto-responder on Facebook posts to boost interactions.

3. Seamlessly automate Q&As

Another way to use chatbots to your advantage is to build a conversational chatbot for Facebook Messenger marketing with question-and-answer triggers.

Q&A triggers will enable you to configure a chat experience based on keywords and common queries. According to your setup, the chatbot will answer questions and handle requests.

For example, you can use Facebook Messenger chatbot to handle your webinar sign-ups. The chatbot triggers will lead users through to where they can sign up. This will save you some valuable time and provide an ultimate user experience.

4. Resolve issues quickly

The less your customers wait for the solution to their problem, the easier you will gain their loyalty.

Unlike real employees, Messenger chatbot can help customers to resolve issues with order placement or product delivery at any time.

5. More customized customer experience

Customers are aware that they can find any information about the brand online so what they are really seeking for is a more personalized approach.

Chatbots can actually help marketers to provide even the general content in a quite personalized way. This is an effective way of improving the general communication of the brand.

What you can do is build bots that can filter existing content and provide the clients what they require. By doing this, you will reinforce your content distribution strategy and build a positive brand image.

How to Create an Effective Facebook Messenger Chatbot

Let’s say that you are ready to implement chatbots or you have already done it but you aren’t quite sure if you are doing it right. The following tips will show you what you need to focus on when adding chatbots to Facebook Messenger and how to avoid the principal mistakes.

1. Add reply buttons

Sometimes chatbots can’t accurately identify a topic of discussion and therefore, can’t provide customers with relevant answers. In order to avoid this, simply add corresponding reply buttons.

This will also help customers who have a problem with expressing their thoughts.

Besides some most common reply options, you can also always add “Other” as a reply choice, just in case if none of the suggested replies is the right choice for the customer’s problem.

2. Perfect every message

Chatbots should provide highly literate and grammatically correct answers. Don’t let some silly spelling mistakes lower the quality of your content.

If you are having trouble with proofreading and editing your messages, you can always resort to online services such as Grammarly or another AI writer.

No matter if you hire a service or you do it yourself, chatbots messages should be completely error and mistake-free. Considering that you’ll form them once for limitless usage, there is no excuse for poorly written messages.

3. Make the messages sound human

Even though you are using communication technology your customers should feel like they are talking to a real person. They should know that they deserve your attention and that their problem is important to you.

Achieve this by designing a framework with some emotional trigger phrases. If the chatbot is able to express different feelings such as surprise, excitement, sympathy, and compassion, the customers will feel like they are talking to a real human being.

4. Focus on personalization

Besides humanizing the messages, you should also personalize them. Every customer should feel like one in a million.

Use personalized salutation or refer to your customers by their name or surname. This will also help you to build brand loyalty and depict your company as caring and thoughtful.

5. Provide value

Incorporating chatbots in Facebook Messenger shouldn’t be for a meaningless chit-chat. It should provide real value to customers.

Chatbots should be the source of all necessary information so that they can play the role of a virtual specialist. Customers are reaching out to you over Facebook because they probably need some help fast and chatbots must give them the answers they need.

Every message sent by a chatbot should offer valuable and helpful information.

In addition, add a relevant link to your website, blog, or a file to download and provide them with optional sources of information.

Some Final Thoughts

If you want to grow your audience, drive traffic and conversions, and deliver a better user experience, adding Facebook Messenger automation to your Facebook marketing is the way to achieve it. Now that chatbots are gaining popularity around the globe, it is the right time to jump on the wagon.

Consider the above-mentioned benefits and how much this can change your business strategy and boost your content marketing. Feel free to test out this method because ultimately, you have nothing to lose and so much to gain.