Welcome to your Chatbot learning journey!
You’ll get the most out of this guide if your desire to learn chatbot marketing (Messenger marketing) is exceeded only by your willingness to execute and test concepts.
Everywhere you go today, people seem to be talking about chatbots.
But what is a chatbot?
We have created The Ultimate Guide to Chatbots to show you exactly why you’ve probably already used a chatbot and didn’t even realize it.
The Ultimate Guide to Chatbots
Now, if you’ve been around anywhere on the internet, whether it’s Facebook or any of the other social sites, you are sure to have seen a chatbot in action.
What is a chatbot?
Maybe you don’t recognize it, or maybe you have seen it before, but let’s talk about what is a chatbot.
Technically, according to the Oxford dictionary,
chat·bot/ˈCHatˌbät/a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.“chatbots often treat conversations like they’re a game of tennis: talk, reply, talk, reply”
Now that all sounds pretty techie, so let’s break it down and show you some examples first of what a chatbot looks like, and then that will help you understand how they work.
Now, when we’re talking about chatbots, I’m going to be talking specifically about Facebook chatbots and their messenger marketing services.
So when we talk about bots, there are many types of different bots or chatbots in the marketplace. Today is all about Facebook because Facebook let’s face it, is the biggest platform socially in the world and it has been for a number of years.
They are spending a lot of money and a lot of time making sure that messenger marketing or chatbots are their future. They see how this marketing and communication aspect is really developing, so that’s why they’re spending a lot of money and effort in making these things work.
Fandango Chatbot
So let’s have a look at an example that you may or may not have seen, and by the way, you can go and check these out because they are real live bots that are running right now.
Here’s a chatbot for Fandango above. Now Fandango is a company if you haven’t seen it before, it sells movie tickets.
And if you have a look on this image above, you can see that when you click on the blue send message button, it pops up with the message and it says, “Welcome to the Fandango bot, I can help you get the latest showtimes, guarantee tickets and watch trailers. Your perfect movie night is just a search away.”
Once you click on the get started button, then the bot kicks into action, through the facebook messenger app.
Now automatically you can see that they’re covering a number of things; they’re giving you information, they’re showing you ticket prices and ticket locations.
They’re also giving you the ability to watch trailers, and you can purchase tickets through the bot. Yes, that’s right, these bots through Facebook messenger let you accept money for your business.
Now, just because I’m showing you some large companies here doesn’t mean you have to be a large company as well to do this.
You certainly can be a small company to install a bot. We have done it for many, many businesses that are very, very small and they are getting some fantastic results.
But let’s go back to this Fandango bot and show you what it looks like. So when you click on the get started button, you’re going to see it pops up and instantly it says,
“Hi Andrew.” Now how does it know who I am? It already collects that data from Facebook. Facebook is willing to give us that information so we don’t even need to ask the person’s name, we’re collecting it from their Facebook account.
In this case here, it says, “Buying movie tickets with friends is easier than ever.” You can see that there are some options down at the bottom. You can make a choice. Now, if you’ve ever read one of those, choose your own adventure books, that’s what this is like.
You get to choose the pathway that you want to go down as a customer.
However, as the owner of the business, you also get to help that customer on their journey.
You get to select the criteria and the questions and answers that you want them to answer, and you can lead them on a path. Maybe it’s a path of discovery, maybe it’s a path of selling a product or service, maybe it’s a path of booking time with you on your calendar.
As you can see here with Fandango, they’re giving you some options about movies, some theaters, and some trending stuff as well. If you click on one of those, it will take you to the next part of the journey.
Spotify Music Chatbot
Here’s another example, Spotify, the great music app that’s out there, a lot of people have it downloaded.
You can see that 21 million people like Spotify. When you click on their bot, of course, they know your name, and they’re asking you questions of what kind of music you like, and if you click on a certain type of brand it gives you a whole selection on the bottom there.
So it lets you go through a series of steps to actually take you through the process of that bot.
So there are some examples of what bots look like. We wanted you to see them first and now we can dig into the rest of this series.
As you can see, the foundation of good a chatbot begins with knowing the customer journey and building out from there.
Using The Ultimate Guide to Chatbots, we can follow these steps to fully understand how Chatbots are great for marketing.
We’ll spend time on each of these areas throughout this guide, but we wanted to introduce it here because it offers a look at how we structured the guide as a whole.
So check out the rest of our articles around bots because we’re loving showing people how to use bots. We love bots, we’re putting a lot of our energy and time into bots, and I think you should understand and educate yourself about them and how you can use them for your business.
SwingPointMedia is a marketing company focused on using content marketing, such as written articles, video and podcasts, to attract their customers ideal audiences. This approach has proven to attract higher quality customers while simultaneously reducing the sales cycle by as much as 70%.
SwingPointMedia serves local businesses in Southern California and can be reached by calling 760-422-5176.
You are invited to also attend a free weekly presentation, providing you the tools and strategy to roll out your own content marketing program for your company, or see exactly what SwingPointMedia does for its clients to achieve success. It can be viewed live on SwingPointMedia’s YouTube channel, at 11 am pst.