You can’t ignore it. With over 1.3 billion active users and more than 2 billion messages exchanged each month, Facebook Messenger is a social media powerhouse. Learn how to take advantage of its massive potential in creating your social media marketing strategy.
The traditional routes of advertising—TV, radio, and print, as well as the newer, tech-based e-mail and banner marketing campaigns—have one thing in common: they treat their audience as passive receivers. Facebook Messenger changes that thanks to its interactive nature. People like being acknowledged.
Approaching your audience through chat makes communication feel more meaningful and personal, shows them that you care, and increases trust.
Since it isn’t possible to personally message hundreds or thousands of people, however, you’ll need some help from a chatbot.
What are Chatbots?
Chatbots are the evolution of auto-responders. You can think of them as smart scripts that can recognize patterns in what somebody types and then offer appropriate responses.
Going into detail about chatbots, how to set them up, and how to optimize them is outside the scope of this article. Services like Chatfuel and Botsify can assist you in chatbot creation and setup. Furthermore, if you know how to program, you can create a custom solution from scratch.
When you do have your chatbot ready to do your bidding, it’s time to dive into using it for promoting your business.
Automated Marketing with Messenger
Facebook Messenger allows four types of Ads:
- Ads in Messenger Inbox appear in Messenger’s inbox between conversations and direct users to a set URL.
- Ads in Messenger Stories appear between organic stories. You can use them to increase the reach of your Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories.
- You can create Sponsored Messages once your Page has enough existing conversations to set up a custom audience. They only appear in Facebook Messenger as typical messages, usually accompanied by a CTA button.
- Ads That Click to Messenger appear on Facebook and, when clicked, bring the user to a customized chat inside Facebook Messenger. Your chatbot can take it from there, turning the click into a sale.
It’s this combination of Ads That Click to Messenger and chatbots that can seriously elevate and automate your Facebook Messenger marketing. Here’s how:
1. Communicate
Sometimes your audience might reach out to you seeking a tidbit of information or a detail about a product. Chatbots can cover for a human in such situations, freeing up you and your employees.
2. Deliver Content
Facebook Messenger’s instant and personal nature compared to e-mail, combined with its interactivity, make it feel safer and more fun. Most people these days hate their e-mail Inbox. That’s why your audience is more receptive to your content when you deliver it as messages. It looks and feels the same as a conversation with a friend.
3. Smart Calendar
You can use Facebook Messenger to promote events and remind your followers about upcoming ones they signed up for.
You can build on top of this by offering updates during an event. For example, during a week-long seminar, you can update your audience on what topics you’re covering each day.
4. Keep Them Engaged
By presenting quizzes or interesting topics as conversation starters, you can keep your audience engaged with your brand using Facebook Messenger.
5. Chat Blasting
After applying for subscription messaging (to make sure Facebook won’t ban your attempts to reach your audience) try Chat Blasting. The term refers to sending a Messenger chat to all your contacts at once.
If you don’t overdo it, Chat Blasting is said to be one of the most successful ways to exploit Facebook Messenger for your promotions, with up to an 80% success rate.
6. Gather Feedback
Facebook Messenger’s ability to keep you in contact with your audience allows you to gather feedback quickly. The optimal way to do it is through quick and simple surveys, which offer a set amount of choices, and are over before they overstay their welcome.
Understanding your audience’s needs and wants, and giving them solutions, can turn them into loyal customers. (Image Source)
7. Offer Real Value
Offer truly useful information or how-tos and you’ll be practicing what’s called “Empathetic Marketing”. The idea here is to help solve your audience’s problems, which builds trust and establishes a human face for your brand.
8. Troubleshooting and Customer Support
Chatting with automated responders and selecting from predefined choices doesn’t have to be annoying. A smartly designed “tree of choices” for a troubleshooting customer service chatbot might help a customer find the answer they seek or a solution to a problem much faster than if they had to try to communicate it to someone else. Clicks are quicker than words.
By keeping the experience light and employing humor, you can keep the users engaged until they either find what they seek or discover they have to contact you. In both cases, you win.
9. Streamline Sales
By combining your chatbot with your e-shop, you can streamline and transport most of your sales funnel and ordering system to Facebook Messenger.
Your chatbot can guide users through choices that culminate in sending them, together with all gathered data, to your checkout screen to finalize the transaction.
Running on Auto
The best thing about these options for using Facebook Messenger chatbots is their combined power for automating your marketing and sales efforts. Find the ones that work for you, and then use them in parallel to achieve the best results.
After setting them up, chatbots need minimal maintenance: simply monitor their performance and tweak them accordingly. Once fine-tuned, you’ll be able to use them as a base from which to expand, gradually building a more sophisticated and automated Facebook Messenger marketing program, with bots doing all the heavy lifting. This, in turn, will give you more time to create engaging content that commands attention and builds connection.
