3 Remarkable Ways to Scale Your Content Marketing Initiatives

Each day about 2 million blog posts, and billions of content pieces on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms are published without fail. Marketers are faced with capturing their own new Pokémon monsters to stand out and lead.

Despite these glaring statistics, 76% of B2B marketers and 77% of B2C marketers plan to create more content this year. Scaling content marketing is not just expensive but often confusing as most efforts tend to be me-too initiatives. Remarkably, 66% marketers are creating content without a documented strategy.

Many marketers do not have a specific approach towards defining success. To differentiate yourself the 3Ts – or the trilogy of right tools, teams and an element of tolerance – is critical.

In this post, I’ll go through each of these in detail and share views on how your content marketing can be scaled for future brand success.

Goals of your content marketing efforts

Many brands are incessantly adding content to a plethora of channels and platforms to be discovered by consumers. But the key to success in a long term initiative like content marketing is defined by asking your teams the following questions:

• What’s the key goal of your content marketing program?
• How do you define the success of your content marketing program and how are you measuring it?
• What resources and tools have you planned to use?

If you have a documented plan and know answers to these questions, you’re already ahead in the game. You know that the key to success is in being able to scale and prioritize efforts that work.

Without scaling your efforts effectively, content is unlikely to show a positive ROI. Experience shows, scaling doesn’t come without its own obstacles.

Here are a few:

Key challenges to scaling content

• New Channels: It’s unending. Each day you’re faced with the proliferation of more channels and platforms on the social web. Where do you start?
• New Competition: From traditional competitors, startups, small businesses, bloggers and even your consumers
• Low Efficiencies: Creating content is far from free. Creating substantial content for global markets using new platforms, while maintaining efficiency at scale is a challenge for any brand – no matter their size.

A well thought out content marketing strategy can help create operational efficiencies, new creative energy and also aid in risk management. All you need is to focus on the 3Ts of content marketing: your teams, tools and tolerance. I’ll go through each of these spokes of content success with examples to help you see the light at the end of the tunnel.

How to scale your content marketing efforts: the 3Ts.

1. Using tools to scale your content marketing

Technology is the underlying enabler of operational efficiency. You need to get out of your own way and work with automated tools.

Throughout the content marketing lifecycle, marketers are adopting tools for automation, measurement, distribution, creation, curation and publishing. Tools also enable marketers to get real time analytics for data based decision making keeping the strategy flexible.

Choose tools based on your goals with specific KPIs that you’re tracking as success parameters. This tool selection is key. 67% marketers named measurement as the top area in which they needed to invest.

Here are some tips on choosing tools that you will need for your content marketing initiatives:

How to choose your content marketing tools: 

• Focus on your actual needs and look for measurable improvement from your current processes
• Look for easy integration with current processes and a simple user-friendly interface
• Seek acceptance from your team and get feedback from actual users

Case Study: Using tools to identify scalable content

Much of the scaling operations involve you trying to identify content that your audience is finding a connect with. While many tools (good old Google analytics) are able to generate this, an interesting case study comes from the newspaper Telegraph.

Journalism of the past was based on the writer/ editor’s instinct. But now, data on which piece of content is doing really well.

You also need to identify sources that are referring traffic to your content. Using a tool called Parse.ly has enabled Telegraph to map user data, and optimize the content that does well without burdening the writers.

With 100 million visitors a month, you can imagine how important it is for them to be able to consolidate data insights on an everyday basis.

Image Sources: Parse.ly

2. Creating special teams to collaborate and win

Content is a team sport. And there’s absolutely no denying that. Content marketing at scale needs the effort of teams within and outside the organization for both co-creation and distribution.

How to create team collaboration:

• Get support and sponsorship on content programs from senior leadership and set common goals for collaboration
• Communicate and demonstrate the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) to encourage and grow employee ambassadors for both content co-creation and distribution
• Work with cross-functional teams in creating content that spans across the organization but is critical for customer engagement and experiences
• Open opportunities for collaboration and innovation with external stakeholders including future customers (as beta testers, idea generators, extended customer support etc.)
• Provide support, direction, resources, training and tools for collaboration between teams to scale efforts
• Help the team collaborate and set up integration across various data systems, third-party tools, analytics and all media types (earned, paid, owned)

Case Study: Using tools to collaborate and share insights

There are many tools that allow you to build integration with social platforms and provide analytics that you can track, in collaboration with your team to improve.

I like using Buffer, TweetDeck, HootSuite which all come with collaborative features and analytics. I also like checking out trending topics using BuzzSumo.

The example I will share in detail, however, comes from small business CRM provider, Zoho, which has launched its social product recently.

For a current client of mine, we were working on improving top of mind brand recall using social media (Facebook, specifically). While native Facebook insights are really solid in terms of the sheer amount of data they share, discussing it with the team efficiently often needs more visual dashboards which Zoho Social provides.

Here’s a snapshot of a 30-day performance report (easily downloadable) for the client. The good news is that, at one quick glance you’re able to see the the entire content engagement funnel, and more importantly the total reach (you can also see details per content piece).

By setting up a private group on the tool, I am able to share it internally with the team, as we collaborate and discuss the metrics for further improvement.

(Direct screenshots taken with client permission using Zoho Social tool. Client name not shared for confidentiality)

The tool also provides stats on the community like demographics, sources of likes, most engaged community members, types of content creating most engagement etc. My favorite aspect while scheduling is a “smart Q”, which tells me at a certain time, what percentage of the top brand engagers I will reach. This is a ready made guide for posting at the right time, always!

As marketers, finding a single platform to get all the details in, is often not easy. Choosing the best tools is a great win in that direction. Instead of spending hours with manual reporting and adding onto your email queue, you save time by a quick chat with the team, and visual dashboards. Your team’s time can now be invested in creating more relevant and timely content. 

3. Creating a culture of tolerance to engage

To enable what ex-Head of Strategy at NewsCred, Michael Brenner, calls the “culture of content”, brands need to articulate the importance of content across the organization. The common goals and creative approach needs to be shared and made accessible.

It’s important to create a risk-free feedback culture encouraging creativity and content flows both bottom up and top down. Engaged employees in a culture of creativity, within a brand tend to be more productive.

How to create a culture of tolerance:

• Let data speak. Make decisions based on data and consumer insights. Assess all content based on data and KPIs
• Personalize client experiences and make that the center of any content marketing efforts. Listen to consumers across channels
• Establish a common inspirational vision exemplified by leadership. Design content for unifying brand experiences for consumers and employees
• Establish a culture of taking creative risks with team collaboration and support
• Ensure that team workflows, tool accessibility and best practices are shared for deep collaboration and learning across the organization
• For different geographies and cultures in the case of large organizations, ensure contextual needs are met with the relevant resources 

Case Study: Using tools to build employee ambassadors

An interesting case study of a company connecting with its internal employees as brand ambassadors comes from former mobile giant Nokia.

The company uses SocialCast and Agora (tools) to share information, visualize social data and encourage employees to share stories across social media. The tools pick up and curate every social story related to the company. This enables Nokia to have an army of creators and distributors while maintaining the spirit of the Nokia brand. After all, who likes the brand more than its own employees?

Nokia uses social stories internally to inspire or motivate and externally for social hiring and talent management. No wonder, it is often seen as one of the most sociable brands online. With a few thousand employees, any content generated by the brand is shared internally and externally using the strong push from employee amplification.

What are some of the challenges you’re facing as you scale your content marketing initiatives? Share your thoughts with me in the comments here or on Twitter!

Guest Author: Upasna Kakroo (@upasnakakroo) is the co-founder of  Brandanew , helping brands create compelling stories and content marketing strategies. Upasna has 13+ years of global experience in the online content and branding industry. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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6 Visual Storytelling Trends That Will Forever Change the Way You Do Digital Marketing

Storytelling has been a buzzword in the marketing world since the origin of advertising.

From John Deere’s first edition of “The Furrow” published in 1895 to the story of childhood friends reunited through Google Search, storytelling has always been a vital component of some of the most effective marketing campaigns in history.

But what does the future of storytelling look like? How will technology change the way we tell stories?

The overnight success of Pokémon Go may provide some insight.

For starters, the line between fiction and reality will continue to blur, as will the borders separating producer and user; story and game; entertainment and advertising…

But before we dive into the trends that will shape the future of all communication fields, let’s first take a look at what makes storytelling – especially visual storytelling – such a timeless and indispensable tool.

Storytelling: A tool for creating meaning

Just imagine for a second that you lived in a world without stories. What would that look like?

More than just a world without Jon Snow or Holden Caulfield, it would be a place defined by the absence of meaning.

Something like an infinite number of isolated moments floating in space and time, with nothing to make sense of them or put them together in a logical sequence.

Sound horrifying? It is.

But here’s a real test to prove how fundamental storytelling is to our existence. Read the following three sentences:

He went to the store.

Fred died.

Sharon went hungry and wept.

Did you assume that “he” in the first sentence referred to Fred? Did you imagine that Fred died while at the store and that Sharon cried because Fred never came back?

This simple test from the book Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story by Kendall Haven reveals that the human mind is built to make connections and find meaning through stories.

Since our daily lives play out mostly in the form of stories – complete with settings, characters and plots – it makes sense that our minds automatically process every new experience through mental story structures.

Because our minds demand meaning, we even go so far as to invent stories and connections between events so that they fit into our mental narrative of reality.

The Future of Storytelling

When you combine the timeless necessity of storytelling with the sheer power of visual content, you arrive at one of the most potent forces shaping the future of communication today: Visual storytelling.

Here are some of the trends I believe will shape the future of this field by blurring the lines between once-neatly-defined concepts.

1. Fact and fiction

Stories are unique in that they allow us to make sense of reality and, at the same time, help us escape from it.

While some of our favorite text-based stories relied solely on descriptive language to conjure up the right images in our minds and whisk us away to far-off lands, visual storytelling is taking this to its maximum expression by building fictional worlds we can see from all kinds of dynamic perspectives.

By transporting viewers to the middle of a scene as it’s unfolding, virtual reality is already on its way to creating experiences that will eventually involve all five senses.

Take, for example, the VR film Allumette (see video above). The first of its kind, this masterpiece by Penrose Studios takes visual storytelling to a whole new dimension.

Viewers can actually explore this tiny world, originally imagined by Hans Christian Andersen, by walking around this Venice-like city, following protagonists wherever they go and even poking their heads through windows and walls to view important plot developments.

Although fictional worlds that appeal to our senses of smell and taste have yet to be created, it’s only a matter of time before they appear on the scene.

This Kickstarter project, for example, promises to provide new smells and sensations through wind, heat, mist and vibrations.

But for now, we’re still seeing a lot of hybridization going on. In other words, real-world environments with superimposed fictional elements.

Besides the obvious example of the insanely popular Pokémon Go, there’s the virtual reality park The Void, where visitors can explore a virtual space with VR headsets and, at the same time, explore the real physical space that overlaps it.

But the blurring of fact and fiction won’t stop there.

Latitude’s study on the future of storytelling also predicts that, in line with audiences’ growing appetite for never-ending sagas, we will start to see real-time storyworlds that have 24-7 lives, just like us.

It doesn’t matter whether we tune in or not, we can receive news flashes from this alternate reality all throughout the day.

Imagine reading a tweet or Facebook message from Francis Underwood while in a meeting or in the middle of lunch?

2. Us and them

Another trend that will continue to shape the world of visual storytelling is the blurring of lines between ourselves and other people, whether real or fictional.

One of the primary aims of text-based storytelling has always been to allow to reader to see the world through the eyes of the protagonist by being privy to his/her thoughts, emotions, desires and experiences.

But visual storytelling formats will take this to a whole new level by allowing users to see and experience the world from another person’s point of view.

While some may dream of becoming 1960s adman Don Draper or a heroine like Sansa Stark, this type of storytelling has real-world implications too.

Consider, for example, the VR project A Walk Through Dementia. It allows viewers to walk a mile in the shoes of someone living with dementia.

Or take a look at The Guardian’s virtual experience of solitary confinement 6×9 (see video above).

Both of these out-of-body, immersive experiences are designed to increase empathy for those who are living a very different reality from you and me.

3. Game and Story

While the limits between characters are being pushed, so are the lines between video games and nonfictional stories like documentaries.

Blackout, for example, is a VR experience (set to be released at the end of this year) that is part documentary and part video game.

Using an Oculus Rift headset or Google Cardboard, players can explore strangers’ streams of consciousness, based on actual interviews, as they walk through a stalled New York City subway car.

They can selectively listen to certain passengers’ thoughts or stick with one person and eventually be transported into their memories.

Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel is another part-VR documentary, part-gamer narrative by the BBC that allows users to relive a part of history (in this case, the Irish 1916 Easter Rising) through a remarkably vivid and realistic depiction of the event.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is not far behind with its own award-winning VR documentary on the lives of children displaced by war and persecution.

The objective of all of these is not only to enable users to empathize with others, but to provide audiences with deeply immersive experiences that will forever change the way they look at life and reality.

4. Work and play

For those who regard interactive games and stories as a waste of time, there’s also something called social benefit storytelling.

Beyond providing enjoyment through immersion and interactivity, this type of visual storytelling is designed to have a positive, tangible impact on the user and the real world.

Consider, for example, the augmented reality drama game Conspiracy For Good.

Part social movement, part interactive story, this game challenged participants to bring down an evil global security firm and, in the process, perform good deeds such as donating toys to a children’s organization and building libraries in Africa.

What about a game that encourages you to stay healthy?

There’s also an app for that. It’s called Zombies, Run!, and it makes running fun by allowing users to participate in a series of missions to save a fictional town from the zombie apocalypse.

Both of these cases exemplify the way interactive storytelling is blurring the lines between work and play, duties and distractions, shoulds and wants.

5. Producer and user

It’s no news that the people formerly known as the audience have now become the storytellers.

As the masses are empowered, it is becoming harder to distinguish between author and reader, producer and user, director and audience.

The growing appetite for control and interactivity has given rise to films which will allow audiences to the determine the final outcome of the story.

Late Shift, the first fully realized interactive movie, is now available for Apple iOS devices, and it’s everything audiences have been waiting for.

This game-movie hybrid allows you to become the protagonist of the story by giving you the power to choose whether to help a tourist with directions or ignore him and jump on the next train; to trust the police or listen to a woman you just met.

More experiences like these are already on the way.

For example, Steven Spielberg’s most recent project for HBO, Mosaic, will be an experimental movie linked to an app that will allow viewers to pick their adventure and decide certain elements of the story.

6. Entertainment and advertising

Whether to demonstrate a product’s attributes or sell aspirational lifestyles, immersive visual storytelling is now being used by several big-name brands such as Mercedes and Marriott to woo consumers.

The latter, for example, set up a 4D tourism booth, complete with Oculus Rifts, wind jets and heaters to give users a realistic teleportation experience to London and Hawaii.

Meanwhile, Mercedes created this 360-degree video featuring its upcoming 2017 SUV to take viewers on an adventure through the snowy mountains of Colorado.

And Toms Shoes, always the trailblazing storyteller, set up a VR chair in its flagship store to transport customers to remote villages where its products are given away to impoverished children (see video above).

Latitude also predicts that in the future advertising will become even more seamlessly integrated with our favorite interactive stories.

If users like a character’s new pair of shoes, for example, all they’ll have to do is click on them to get more details and purchase them.

Visual storytelling without limits

While it’s clear that the future of storytelling will lead to a greater convergence of formats and the rise of transmedia narratives, what’s not so clear is how far the limits of storytelling can be pushed.

As we strive to become the authors of our own stories, let’s not be surprised if one day we have to pinch ourselves to find out whether we’re living in a dream or the real thing.

Guest Author: Nayomi Chibana is a journalist and writer for Visme’s Visual Learning Center. She has an M.A. in Journalism and Media from the University of Hamburg in Germany and was an editor of a leading Latin American political investigative magazine for several years. She is particularly passionate about researching trends in transmedia storytelling.

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6 Ways to Create Killer Webinars That Will Ignite Your Business

Clément Delangue has many reasons to be proud of himself.

He worked for eBay at the age of 17, being one of the first professional sellers from France. And after being the co-founder of various startups, including VideoNot.es and UniShared, he is now the chief marketing officer of Mention, one of the top social media marketing tools for businesses.

Somewhere among his list of achievements is the fact that he made around $10,000 within just two hours of his first webinar.

How about that?

The value of webinars

“There is nothing more powerful, leverageable or exponentially more profitable for you and your business than a well executed webinar strategy,” says Amy Porterfield.

She would be the right person to know. When it comes to webinars for businesses, Amy is something of a legend.

Webinars can be an extremely powerful tool for businesses looking to market a product or service or even startups wanting to attract audiences and gain visibility. A well-planned webinar is a win-win both for your business and your customers or prospects. It gives you a chance to interact with, and sell to, your customers, while building value for them that no other sales strategy can offer.

So be prepared to take notes. Here are the 6 best ways you can make tons of money and a name for your business, even before you hit the market:

1. Choose the perfect topic to attract your audience

What’s the first thing about a webinar that draws people in? It’s the topic, of course.

Selecting that topic is one of the most crucial steps when it comes to creating webinars. Not only should the title be perfectly worded to appeal to most people, the actual nature of the topic should be such that your prospects and customers cannot resist joining in.

If you have no idea where to start with the topic, don’t worry. You can find a topic with the Keyword Planner. The amazing Google tool offers you an array of features that help you gauge the popularity of your keyword and stay on top of what people look for in your niche.

The topic you settle on after extensive research through the Keyword Planner must be unique. See what other people are offering and find ways to set yourself apart. If you’re new to the market, the only weapon you have in your arsenal is attracting people by offering what no one does.

Here’s an example of a perfect webinar topic:

2. Create a well-crafted plan for your webinar

In marketing, there is no such thing as a stroke of luck. Every successful marketing endeavor is a product of a great deal of thought and planning. Same goes for webinars. If you’re aiming for success with your webinars, you need to have a well-designed strategy.

Before you start, ask yourself this question… Why exactly do you want this webinar anyway? Webinars can be used for various purposes and each one demands a different strategy. So determining why you want to do it is the first step towards a successful strategy.

You may want to attract new leads or strengthen your relationship with your new customers. You may want to launch a new product or service or simply establish yourself as an expert in your niche. Whatever your purpose may be, you need to discover that first.

Below is an example of how to create a webinar plan:

3. Sell your idea in advance

“You don’t need a finished product to start making money with webinars,” says Mariah Coz. “You don’t need a blog, a social following – you can literally build up your business with webinars.”

This is an amazing idea if you are just starting off your business venture and want to attract new leads. So what if you don’t have a product yet. You have the skills and knowledge to educate people, right? Why not use those skills to create hype around your upcoming product and get people excited? You can also use the webinar to build your Facebook business page.

And, of course, a couple of thousand bucks that you can make with the webinar itself can’t hurt either.

That’s what Mariah Coz did. She offered webinars 30 days before the product was released. Not only was she successful in advertising her product, she also managed to earn around $30,000 dollars through the webinars in those 30 days. Not a bad deal.

Here’s the right way to go about Webinars according to Mariah:

1. Do a webinar: See how many people register, gauge interest, pitch your product concept. Listen to their questions about your topic.
2. Pre-sell your product: Make money while you build it. More webinars.
3. Listen to your audience: Get feedback, build what they ask for.
4. Launch to your engaged, raving audience: Make sales.

4. Pay attention to the content

Even if your webinar marketing strategy is a success and you’re able to get a good number of people to show up, you can’t hold them in place or keep them coming back for more without great content.

The content of your webinar must be fresh and exciting. No one likes boring snooze-fests. It must offer useful information instead of being too salesy. No one paid good money to hear you advertise your products. And, finally, it must be engaging. The goal of your webinar is to interact with prospects and customers. If you can’t get them to do that, it’s a wasted opportunity.

Other considerations are equally important. One of those is the time. The webinar should not be so brief that people feel cheated. Nor should it be so long that it’s boring. The perfect duration for a webinar is somewhere around 45 minutes. Make sure to leave plenty of room for a Q&A session.

Here’s how Rapt Media thinks ideal content should be:

5. Host free webinars through Google+ Hangouts

The Google+ Hangouts On Air is a dream-come-true for those of you who want a free and flexible platform to host webinars. It offers a remarkable number of features that allow you to conduct meetings, organize workshops, and present them online. The only thing you can’t do through a Hangout session is charge people.

You can also customize your webinar by creating trailers and apps. Google+ not just allows you to broadcast the webinar through the Hangouts platform, but also live stream it on YouTube simultaneously or publish it there later.

Here’s how to create a webinar using Hangouts:

6. Find smart ways to market your webinar

Promoting your webinar is as important as, if not more than, creating it. After all it is this step which will get you your customers and enable you to pocket the revenue. The success and failure of your webinar depends upon how well you’re able to promote it.

This is why you need to find some of the best and smartest ways to reach prospects. You need to rely on a combination of the tried and tested strategies, an amalgamation of social media, email marketing, and the good old advertising.

When it comes to marketing your webinar through social media, you need to get organized. Create a social media content calendar and schedule regular posts so that your audiences are periodically reminded about the upcoming event. If you want to reach the widest possible audience, you should use a combination of various social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and others.

Here’s how to schedule a Facebook post:

Become a webinar guru

With the right amount of planning and effort, anyone can be as successful, in igniting their business through webinars, as Clément Delangue, Mariah Coz, or even Amy Porterfield.

Following these few simple steps can elevate your webinar marketing strategy to a whole new level. So go out there and conquer the world!

Guest Author: Bill Achola is a content marketing consultant specializing in content. You can hire him to help you write the right content that can help you generates traffic and revenue back to your business. He has been featured in top publications like Huffpost, Problogger and etc.

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How Facebook Chatbots Can Revolutionize Your Social Media Strategy

The artificial intelligence era… It’s all about embedding human smarts in machines.

Facebook chatbots are one application of this revolution, as they rapidly gain popularity and provide a new tool for marketers to leverage. These chatbots are the incorporation of automatic chatbots within Facebook Messenger.

Chatbots offer flexibility in order to automate tasks, and assist in retrieving data. They are becoming a vital way to enhance the consumer experience for the purpose of better customer service and growing interaction.

In April 2016, Mark Zuckerberg announced that third parties could use the messenger platform to create their own personal chatbot. Since then, the popularity of chatbots has rapidly grown all over the world.

In social media marketing chatbots have evolved, but their prime functionality remains the same, and that is to improve real-time engagement. Customers are always searching for prompt and ready replies to their comments and queries. The chatbots are designed in such a manner that they are able to answer most of the queries placed by customers, without human intervention. And this helps in bonding a strong relationship with your customers and potential crowds, without paying for high overheads on staff.

Two chatbots that have gained immense popularity in no-time are Apple’s Siri and Chotu Bot.

Chatbots: Why such a buzz at present?

Modern advancement in the field of artificial intelligence, which includes neural networking and deep learning, have permitted chatbots to acquire data sets exactly the way the human brain works. This is revolutionary.

Chatbots are instigating a stir in the present world of consumer services. Facebook created a revolution for technology by launching Facebook messenger chatbots which permit businesses to generate an interactive experience, content, e-commerce guides and automate customer service. Messenger has reached more than 900 million users, plus it offers the most striking platform to implement your desired bots.

Maybe the most renowned example  of a chatbot is Apple’s Siri. Like all chatbots, Siri is a perfect combination of pre-defined scripts and neural systems to anticipate a precise reaction to an offered conversation starter or explanation, permitting clients to skip steps while speaking. Siri is a masterpiece that took years for such a huge organization with loads of assets to develop.

The second example is a chatbot from an organization that is not as famous as Apple. But still the chatbot is so efficient that it has been able to create a lot of buzz for itself in the market.

The Chotu Bot helps you replace various software and get detailed information on various topics such as wiki search, PNR status, Vehicle registration number etc. inside your messenger. And the developers behind the Chotu Bot are preparing to update it so that it can reply to most of the queries asked from all around the planet.

How can a Facebook chatbot assist your marketing?

Facebook allows brands to connect their potential customers independently through these messenger bots which leads to a new era in advertising.

The basic idea behind launching the messenger bots is to connect all the people directly to the business in order to automate customer engagement and interactions. Now there are more than 11,500 bots that have been developed on messenger and nearly 23,500 developers signed up in order to build their own bots using tools offered by Facebook. This means it assists you to automate informal interactions between businesses and users.

Recently Facebook announced new features for bots which can easily respond with video, audio, GIFs, and such files that make you build your own bots with ease.

How do chatbots help e-commerce platforms?

Chatbots assist the e-commerce industry by providing functionality in areas such as security, management, monitoring, and customer engagement which are key elements of e-commerce businesses.

Self-service and automation are the ideal way to go ahead in e-commerce, this the ultimate reason why businesses are using chatbots.

Here are just some ideas for how chatbots can make customer engagement easier:

Convenient, contextual and in control

Facebook messenger for chatbots is focused on generating the greatest customer engagement experience. They offer automated updates about traffic, weather, automated messages and much more.

Easy setup and cost savings

Bots help you save time and reduce the cost of hiring staff.

Unprecedented customer reach

The new receive/send API allows you to connect with more than 950 million people in and around the world. That’s the reason bots are growing as the key tool for businesses to gain wonderful networking and commercial opportunities.

How can you use chatbots?

Chatbots make it possible to offer a more proactive, personal, and efficient consumer experience.

• Chotu, one of the leading chatbot technologies, is an AI robot on Facebook messenger that assists in accelerating customer information acquisition through Facebook messages. It provides all the needed information from your messages itself, rather than relying on several different apps working together. Chotu performs multiple tasks at a single time and offers 24×7 customer service.

• Pizza Hut announced that Facebook messenger chatbots assist their customers in asking questions, viewing their current deals and much more. This helps Pizza Hut interact with their customers more easily at any time and from any place.

• 36LoveQuestions is a wonderful Facebook messenger chatbot that asks you 36 exact questions in order to determine whether you are in love with someone or not.

Chatbots: From the “simple” customer to enterprises

At present, chatbots are very prevalent in the customer space. From a business point of view, transportation businesses and e-commerce delivery enhance their chances by allowing their customer to purchase products more efficiently.

But bots are rapidly moving across to the enterprise space as most companies are now building their own chatbots in order to generate better engagement with their customers and create additional value for their brand.

How chatbots are minimizing the gap between customers and brands

Public vs. Private

One of the major problems that various organizations had to face while promoting on social media was to provide a primary customer service to their potential clients. The best thing about [messaging bot] is that you can have a ‘Message Us’ option and truly use this as a one-on-one, private channel.

Consistency

Messaging is a continuous and real-time process between a customer and a brand. You can have a real-time chat with a specialist from the brand, then you can leave and return a day later and see the history… That is truly energizing since that begins to effect customer behavior.

Accessing an audience of over a billion people

Facebook commenced this entire chatbot furor in April by permitting outside bots on its messenger. So even in the worst case, this is the potential crowd you can reach.

Include different systems (WhatsApp has not joined the chatbot fleeting trend yet) and the aggregate gathering of people on messaging platforms is well in an abundance of 1.2 billion. This is the crowd that you can target directly and provide each one special attention.

Who does not like a personal exclusive service?

Chatbots are poised to reform the customer-brand interaction. Facebook knows the potential of personal messaging and they know this idea can be really useful for brands to retain their audiences for a longer period of time.

Any organization today with a chatbot has the capacity to gain customer insights. The more insights they gain, the better the brand messaging will become, which ultimately indicates better targeting and more sales. The best part is that these chatbots are relatively cheap compared to other applications.

A business which takes time to understand chatbots and execute them have a better chance of offering things to their customer and this will really help them build a nice strong relationship over time.

Chatbots are the perfect fit for the modern e-commerce company looking to ramp up customer service.

Companies which are using chatbots are likely to experience better results and acquire the ability to advertise and market new products which ultimately generate customer engagement.

Guest Author: Hello mates!! I am Sumit Ghosh, a huge social media fan, a nerd, a geeky programmer and owns a digital marketing firm, successfully running for over 9 years. I also started the SocioBoard Blog to provide knowledge to new startups and entrepreneurs whose social marketing campaigns failed to generate ROI.

The post How Facebook Chatbots Can Revolutionize Your Social Media Strategy appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

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