Artificial Intelligence has improved in leaps and bounds in the past several years. As chatbots become more and more powerful, they have been adopted by almost everyone ranging from large corporations to small local businesses. However, these tools have primarily been designated for use in the customer service areas of business, missing many of the potential upsides to incorporating chatbots into other aspects of your business.
If you’re in charge of marketing a business right now, you may be reluctant to invest in chatbots as yet another tool to improve your marketing strategy. Whether you are ready to buy into the hype surrounding chatbots or are biding your time to wait for new updates to programs, now is the time to invest in a chatbot to improve your marketing strategy! Keep reading for a deep dive to understand how your business can profit from these powerful new marketing tools.
Understanding Chatbots
For the unfamiliar, chatbots are AI-powered software tools capable of interacting with human users by responding to questions and queries with helpful insights and information. Thanks to their NLP, or natural language processing software, these tools are also capable of learning from the users they interact with, meaning each interaction could potentially be different from the last.
The evolution of chatbots over the past decade has been truly incredible to watch, and these tools are only gaining more tools to interact with and better ‘understand’ users. For example, developments in the chatbot sphere have allowed chatbots to respond to users’ voice requests, adding another powerful layer to these tool’s capabilities.
Chatbots in Marketing
With all of this being said, you may be wondering what exactly a chatbot can be bringing to your new marketing strategy. This is a great question, and there are three main areas where the opportunity to bring on a chatbot could allow for incredible growth and return on investment down the line.
Automated Marketing
No matter how advanced our chatbots become, these tools aren’t ready to take over from human marketing employees just yet. However, the level of automation allowed by bots is a great opportunity for marketers to relieve themselves of tiresome tasks and refocus on more high-level engagement strategies.
Chatbots are the perfect tool for initial marketing steps, such as collecting customer information or providing direction to customer concerns that would normally have to be addressed by a community manager at your business. These bots are also capable of acknowledging when they’re in over their heads; if they don’t understand a request, they can quickly forward it to a superior who can take a look at it and respond accordingly, ensuring that only the most high-level requests take up valuable office time.
Grow Conversation
By examining the impact of chatbots from a statistical perspective, they are a key element to increasing not just customer satisfaction, but also the range of customers which can be engaged. As they develop a greater understanding of your customers, they can be positioned to target customers who are more likely to make purchases and address them with a more personal approach. This allows them to bring in customers your primary marketing team would not have had time to focus on normally, providing a massive boost to sales and brand recognition.
Incorporate Sales
Chatbots have a huge potential for bridging the gap that is all too commonly seen between marketing and sales teams. When tapped into CRM, these chatbots can serve as a brain as well as an arm of your business. Using gathered customer data from sales they can directly inform the moves of the marketing team, as well as the other way around. These bots are capable of making sure your entire team is in the loop while providing key insights your marketers or salespeople may have missed without their powerful AI-capabilities.
