Content marketing is well on its course to replace traditional advertising in the coming years. The reason is simple; it costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.
No wonder marketing managers are pushing hard to frequently churn out quality content.
But will the methods of content marketing remain the same in future, or transform entirely?
If history has taught us anything, chances are that they will definitely evolve. And chatbots are bound to be at the frontier of this evolution.
In fact, we are already witnessing drastic improvements that chatbots have brought to content marketing in the past few years.
Here are the ways in which chatbots are en route in shaping the future of content marketing.
Allow Hyper-personalization
The plethora of content available on the internet creates a tyranny of choice for the end user instead of being helpful. From a user’s perspective, the easier it is to find a solution that perfectly solves their problem, the faster they’ll make a purchase decision. Hence, the more customer satisfaction.
This can be achieved with personalization; and chatbots can help you out with the same.
Chatbots are present on websites as well as social media messenger apps. Hence, they are the perfect medium to integrate what entices the users on social media and on-site.
AI-powered chatbots “learn” from these data inputs and are able to churn out accurate, hyper-personalized recommendations for every unique user.
Even today, bots successfully recommend personalized outfits on H&M and give beauty tips on Sephora. The future only holds something better!
Create High Engagement
Traditional digital advertising refers to a “click” on a banner or ad or video as “engagement”. No wonder people are installing more ad blocking extensions to their browsers.
Chatbots are able to actually converse with a user, even though not as great as a human. That’s what true engagement is. And with the rise of Natural Language Processing (NLP), chatbots are getting intelligent and human-like by the day. A new-age AI compliant website chat software enables greater customer/user engagement, offers customer support and increases sales.
Check out the example-
Disney has set the perfect example of the level of engagement that chatbots can bring. They created a virtual Officer Judy Hopps chatbot on Facebook Messenger to promote Zootopia’s release.
It allowed users to interactively join her in solving crimes instead of merely watching a trailer. This simple bot was able to generate more than 10 minutes of highly-interactive engagement!
You still want to rely on traditional ads?
Boost Lead Generation
The basic difference between traditional ads and chatbot interaction is that while the former gets “pushed” upon every viewer, the latter “pulls” users towards them. And Marketing-101 tells us that a pull or a demand is always better than pushing something relentlessly on the target audience.
Thoughtfully designed chatbots can effectively attract, entertain and positively reinforce the users towards your brand. The result is creation of high brand value and unmatched lead generation.
Facilitate Intelligent Collaboration
Apart from social messenger apps, chatbots are also being built for team collaboration software. One such example is Slack’s chatbot Howdy.
You can use it to automate your workflow and make your content marketing process highly productive.
Ladder shared their experience with Howdy in a recent post where they describe the effectiveness of the chatbot in increasing the in-house sharing of their content by 225%.
Their study proves that chatbots are the future of intelligent collaboration and bring genuine value to the table.
Enable Smart Idea Generation
Chatbots bring unmatched convenience to the users. And for marketers, they bring a goldmine of data.
Marketers struggle in identifying what their audience would love to engage with. Well, users are asking chatbots all sorts of questions, and that is the perfect place to learn about their requirements, likes and dislikes.
Moreover, you get to know the “personality” of your users- what slang do they use, where do they hang out, what they like about your brand, what other brands do they consume and so on.
Incorporate these elements in your marketing communication and you are gold! But this is only the starting and the future holds even higher levels of inputs from chatbots. Who knows if the chatbots would themselves create the content too without bothering us?
Skyrocket Subscriber Growth
MarketingWeek’s report includes several examples of chatbots that were highly successful in generating subscribers for brands. For example, the Adidas chatbot was able to get 2,000 new sign ups in merely two weeks. And Just Eat’s bot had a 266% higher conversion rate than their traditional advertising campaigns.
There are boundless examples of such exemplary performances of simple chatbots. As they continue to evolve, we can expect even higher results.
Increase The Reach Of Marketing Communication
Do you know the number of active users on Facebook Messenger across the globe?
1 Billion! And adding.
The average open-rate of this app is 80%, which is 4 times higher than the maximum open-rate for emails. If you are not tapping this channel to reach out to your customers, your marketing communication is not effective in reaching most of your users. Simple!
There are more than 30,000 chatbots on Messenger already. It’s high time you get yours.
Highly Effective Product Launches
If the opening-rate of messages on chatbot subscriptions is so high, why do marketers continue to launch their products on email lists?
The fact is, several brands have already realized the power of having robust website chat software and chatbot subscription lists and are successfully launching their products through this new-found channel.
Take the example of Josh Fetcher, who successfully launched his book “BAMF Bible” through his chatbot list, primarily.
In future, it is highly likely that email subscribers would be a thing of the past.
Enhance Intelligent Marketing Automation
Chatbots integrate easily with Zapier and Buffer APIs to automatically publish new content to your subscription list. Meaning that you just have to create the content, schedule it and relax!
Another problem faced by marketers is that while they are creating new content, their older content gets buried deeper and deeper.
But older content doesn’t always mean bad content.
Tools like Botletter help you provide new subscribers with your most relevant content (whether old or new) by sending a sequence of messages automatically.
Break The Shackles Of Typing
Although most current chatbots are text-based, voice-activate virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa are the key to the future of content marketing.
Chatbots with better Natural Language Processing will allow users to simply converse with them and discover what they are looking for.
Conclusion
If we believe Hollywood, bots will take-over the entire world someday, making humans their slaves. No one knows, if and when this would happen.
But we can easily extrapolate from the current scenario that chatbots will definitely take over content marketing, quite soon. Well, good for customer satisfaction!
About the Author
Robin is a Technical Support Executive. He is an expert in knowledge management and various Knowledge base tools. Currently, he is a resident knowledge management expert at ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.