The Rise of Bot Marketing
Bots can make digital marketing easier for marketers and develop a seamless user experience for customers. Already we are seeing how bot technology are interacting with customers and how this is providing a positive relationship between a brand and its customers.
Recently you may have come across the term bot and AI (artificial intelligence) many times. This has emerged as a new marketing channel and is set to impact marketers as they are becoming a powerful form of marketing and personalisation to offer a seamless user experience.
What exactly is a bot?
A bot is a software application that runs automated tasks over the internet. Typically, bots have gained a bad name to marketers as they are often associated with bringing fake traffic to a company’s website by mimicking page views or clicking on search ads. However, as they have evolved and become much more sophisticated, marketers are seeing this as an opportunity to better target consumers.
How are they used?
Chat bots are currently leading this growth as brands are integrating bots into their chat systems. Social networks such as Facebook have already incorporated this within their messenger app and many brands have started to use this as a tool to connect with their customers.
Spring
Spring, a clothing brand for example are using chatbots to communicate with their customers conversationally, as well as being a personal shopping assistant. This offers a more personalised approach to marketing and brands can provide new promotional opportunities to customers. Furthermore, every conversation is logged, which will help marketers shape and build targeted campaigns.
Philadelphia
Philadelphia have even created a Facebook page specifically to encourage customers to use their messenger which offers food inspiration with relevant Philadelphia based recipes with the help of bot technology. Not only does this make customers life easily, this is also promoting the brand on a product level and increase its usage.
The idea is that chatbots will eventually help customers find anything, without having to call, search the web, or open various apps to look for information.
Voice based intelligence
Apart from chatbots, voice based intelligence such as Amazon’s Alexa are encouraging marketers to create voice skills. This uses an intelligent personal assistant that is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists and other real time information. Using nothing but your voice, customers can search the web, shop online and get weather reports etc.
So why should marketers pay attention to this? As customers are using their voices to get search results, this can help brands to get their apps discovered more easily. Marketers will therefore have to spend more time on reputation management to ensure what Amazon find is good and hopefully shows their brand in the top results (acting as a search engine), which would consequently bring a brand more conversions.
Ecommerce
Online stores are constantly finding new ways to improve customer experience and stand out from their competitors. As a way to accomplish this, a few ecommerce brands are looking at bots and AI to create a smoother customer journey. A bot for example, would be an ideal way for a customer to find out more about the product. They could talk about product spec, add on items or warranty terms. The rise in ecommerce data could also mean in future that bots will help brands segment and automate email messaging to certain customers.
Accordingly, bots can make digital marketing easier for marketers and develop a seamless user experience for customers. Already we are seeing how bot technology are interacting with customers and how this is providing a positive relationship between a brand and its customers.
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