5 Ways to Up Your Facebook Messenger Marketing Game
August 28, 2019
Facebook is a huge resource for business owners, especially if you’re willing to think outside the box; or, in this case, inside the platform. Facebook is a website built on the premise of social sharing, and it’s in this functionality that so many amazing marketing tools were born.
What is digital marketing, if not sharing socially in the hopes that it will be shared and shared again? To do this effectively, it means taking advantage of all the social features available to your brand through Facebook. This is where Facebook Messenger comes in.
We all use messenger to chat, whether between friends and family, or in response to a customer question. But what if you used Facebook Messenger at its full potential and reaped even more benefits than casual chit chat? Here, we’ll discuss 5 ways that you can cash in on the Facebook Messenger as a marketing tool.
1. Use Chatbots for Surveys and Reviews: Reviews play a huge role in the success of a business online. Consumers have become wise to the ways of old-style marketing jargon and empty promises. They want to know that what they’re buying is legitimately great. And, the best way to test this theory is to see what others are saying.
In the past, consumers would use word of mouth to determine which brands were best. Or, they might read about it in a magazine, or be lulled into a false sense of security by “real people” trying products on the home shopping channels. Now, consumers want to see several positive reviews, and maybe even snoop out what the negative ones are saying, before buying.
Chatbots are an excellent resource for you to gather this information yourself. The more transparent your brand is, the more your customers can trust it. Displaying all your reviews, good, bad, and ugly, for the world to see will positively impact your brand. Design your bot to ask questions about a customer’s experience and allow them to elaborate on what they liked or disliked and why. Be sure to follow up with negative reviews and try to rectify things if possible.
2. Try Chat Blasting for Greater Read Rates: A blast is any time you send a message to all or many contacts at once. The blast is usually the same message. For example, a family member might blast a holiday greeting on Christmas morning. This allows them to reach everyone they know in one swift click of the mouse, rather than typing in 20 or more messaging windows. Similarly, you can use chat blasting to increase read rates for your messages.
You might be thinking that this would be better directed through e-mail, and that’s still a viable option. However, social media chat sites have become wildly popular over the past few decades, and you may just get more reads if you use this channel along with, or instead of, email.
The key to a successful chat blast is to send the right message. You may want to scale down from a massive e-mail sized correspondence. Instead, include only the highlights of your latest announcement, promotion, or update. Adding graphics or a video also greatly impacts readership.
3. Make Your Chatbot a Virtual Assistant: Gone are the days when consumers had time to schedule everything over the phone. Now, people are lucky if they have time to brush their teeth at night. Between work, family time, extracurricular activities, and other responsibilities, there’s barely time to breathe. Your chatbot can help increase the chances of generated new appointments and simplify your customer’s lives. How? By becoming an online virtual assistant.
Chatbots can be programmed to do a multitude of things, including scheduling appointments for your customers. This will take a bit of fancy programming to sync your current schedule with your chatbot so that customers can’t double book themselves. But, with the right fenagling, and some due diligence, your customers will be able to schedule an appointment over Facebook no matter the time of day. No staff on duty to respond to a message? No problem! Chatbot will have your customer scheduled in no time.
4. Let Your Bot Take Payments: It sounds like something super futuristic, but, allowing your chatbot to complete purchases is the logical next step in our technological journey through social media. Think about it, you already make sales online and customers already input payment data through your website to check out, so why not Facebook?
The question stands, “why not simply link your customer to your website?” Well, in some cases, a customer might be looking at a product they found directly through your Facebook site. This means, having to link over and seek it out on another website before buying. The more steps you put between the “yay, I found what I was looking for,” and the “cha-ching!” stage, the more chances there are that a customer will change his or her mind.
5. Send Out Mini Correspondences: E-mails are great, but they can seem so lengthy. If all you type in an e-mail is one sentence, it appears unfinished. A message box, however, is designed to take short correspondences regularly. It’s the perfect place to send out a quick video, meme, or blurb about the brand. It keeps you on the customer’s radar and shares whatever information you were hoping to get out. It also makes your chatbot seem more human, and humanizing your business makes it more personal.
There are plenty of ways to use Facebook Messenger to your advantage as a business. Play around and get to know it to discover all the ways you can benefit.