Bot Marketing: What Is It and How Can You Use It?

In the Star Wars franchise, there are countless examples of people using droids, or robots, to assist them with various tasks and make their lives easier. From making X-wing repairs to assisting Trade Federation visitors, these droids serve a wide range of functions.

Star Wars may be science fiction, but bots are very real. And just like they can help the Jedi or the Rebel Alliance, so too can they help your business. Bots are great for automating various marketing tasks that you’d otherwise have to do manually.

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What is bot marketing?

Bot marketing, as you might expect, is the process of integrating bots into your digital marketing efforts, particularly on your website. Those bots can carry out a few different kinds of tasks related to your marketing campaigns, as we’ll cover below.

The primary benefit of marketing bots is that they help automate your marketing, freeing you to focus on other aspects of running your business while still satisfying your target audience.

What can marketing bots do for you?

You’re probably wondering, “What is it that website bots do?” There are a few ways bots can help you run your marketing, and we’ll cover three of the biggest ones below. Keep reading for a breakdown of each one!

1. Guide customers around your website

One of the most common uses for sales bots is customer assistance on your website. You’ve no doubt seen chatbots before — you visit a website, and as it loads, a small support widget appears in the bottom corner of the screen.

These chatbots serve as a way for site visitors to get the help they need and find the information they want if they can’t figure it out on their own. They can do so all without needing to speak to one of your in-person representatives. 

That frees your team to handle other tasks without compromising the user experience.

2. Nurture leads toward a conversion

When chatbots interact with site visitors, they can do much more than guide those visitors to helpful information. They can also sell products directly to those users, recommending specific products and guiding people through the purchase process.

Many of these types of bots can act like miniature salespeople, chatting with users in a conversational voice and asking questions to help discern what the users may want. Ultimately, these bots can be an amazing way to elicit sales from people who might not otherwise buy!

3. Pull data and conduct research

Bots are fantastic for helping you conduct marketing research. To start with, they can help you conduct searches more effectively, pulling info from across the web in response to your queries. They can also analyze your site traffic to provide quick analytics insights for you.

Additionally, you can use these bots to pull data on your site visitors. As chatbots talk to users, they can ask survey-like questions about the users’ demographics, locations, interests, and more. Many users will respond voluntarily, providing you with useful data that can enhance your marketing.

Tips for setting up marketing bots

If you choose to use marketing bots, there are a few things you should keep in mind. Here are three tips to rely on when you set up your bots!

1. Balance your human and bot components

One mistake you’ll want to avoid is relying too much — or too little — on bots. Naturally, you want bots to handle whatever they can, because the more you automate, the easier your job becomes. But there’s a limit, and you want to ensure you don’t exceed it.

Essentially, while you’re free to use bots for as many tasks as you want, don’t completely remove humans from the equation. As helpful as bots are, they’re a long way from having the sentience possessed by the droids of Star Wars and other sci-fi stories. They can only do so much.

When users have questions your chatbots aren’t qualified to answer, you’ll want to give those users a way to get in touch with a member of your team. For that reason, set up your chatbots to connect users with human representatives when the bots can’t fulfill their requests.

2. Be honest about your automation

Another thing to avoid is misleading users about your chatbots. Some companies opt to pretend their bots are actual people, giving them human names and profile pictures. That’s all well and good at first, but as soon as users start asking questions the bot can’t answer, things go downhill.

People don’t like to be lied to, and that includes being led to believe that a bot is a real person. As soon as they realize that “Dave from Sales” is just an automated program, they’ll become irritated at being misled, especially if they just spent the last fifteen minutes trying to get a straight answer.

For that reason, be sure to tell users upfront that your chatbot is, in fact, a chatbot. That way, they’ll know what they can expect from using it.

3. Don’t be obtrusive or annoying

One last thing to consider is that you must avoid making your bots obtrusive and annoying for site visitors. Many bots give you the option of greeting users as soon as they arrive on your site via a pop-up box.

Sometimes this is helpful, but not always. Many users are irritated by having to close out of the box in order to keep browsing your site, especially if you already have other pop-ups and notifications they have to deal with.

If you’re unsure about whether to use the greeting pop-up feature, you can always try running some A/B tests to see if users respond positively to it. If not, it’s best to disable automatic pop-ups and simply let users click on the chatbot of their own accord if that’s their choice.

WebFX can help you get the most from your bot marketing

Bots are a great way to spruce up your web design, but they can’t fix all your problems. It takes an experienced team to put together a website that engages your target audience, and WebFX has just the team for you.

When you partner with us for our web design services, you’ll get help creating a website that ranks high in search results and drives conversion among your site visitors. We’re a “do-it-for-me” agency, so while you’ll have final say on everything, we’ll do all the work.

To get started with us, just call 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!