In a survey of Fortune 500 marketing professionals carried out by LiveWorld, 52% of respondents thought that advances in technology would allow them to engage in meaningful two-way conversations with their customers. Social media, messaging apps and, in particular, chatbots are seen as effective tools to usher in ‘conversational marketing’.

Conversational marketing is the shift away from brands trying to dictate to customers how to think and feel about products and services. Instead, through the use of chatbots, auto-responders and tech that integrates live agents, brands can actually converse with their customers in real-time, leading to personalised experiences and lots of lovely data on consumer intentions and behaviours.

"To put it simply, chatbots are made to simulate human conversation using computer programming and a degree of artificial intelligence. The capabilities of chatbots can range from basic to advanced, and are most typically used to field customer questions.

Chatbots aren't going away anytime soon, which is why marketers need to begin their long-term game plan now. There are a multitude of different ways marketers can integrate bots into their social media strategy.

Right now the Golden Age of bots is fast approaching. As users flock to messaging apps, marketers simply need to incorporate bots into their social media strategy. With the sheer number of active users, it’s clear that messenger apps are on the way to becoming an umbrella for a multitude of other functions to give users access to convenience beyond simply chatting."

People yearn for human interaction and relationships. The key to chatbot success is for brands to find a way to equip bots with the ability to seamlessly transition from a chatbot to a human, in the middle of a customer interaction, with the conversational context to avoid customer frustration.

“While chatbots can serve as an efficient way to offer customers solutions to their problems, their future success will depend on how thoughtfully brands leverage them to meet customers’ needs. After all, delivering a great customer experience depends on it,” says Kristopher Arcand, a Forrester Data Analyst.

The fact is that most chatbots aren’t intelligent. They are built based on decision-tree logic, where the bot response depends on specific keywords identified in the user’s input. Bots with linguistic and natural language learning capabilities are still quite rare.

What do WhatsApp, Fb Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Kik and WeChat have in common?

They’re all messaging platforms.
They saw more active users than social media did in 2016. If predictions mean anything then 2017 is only going to see this go uphill from here.

Chatbots Are Transforming Marketing

Can a Facebook Chatbot replace landing pages? This guide will show you how to build a Chatbot that talks to users and converts them to leads on autopilot.

"Here’s an explanation of the different types of chatbots and what their functions are:

• Chat As Chatbots
• Triggered Task Chatbots
• Interactive Information Access Chatbots
• Complex Task Interaction Chatbots
• Search Chatbots"

"What are chatbot-ready videos like? Short and to the point, like an SMS message, and persona-based. That doesn’t mean abandoning long-form videos. Existing videos can be repurposed to make them chatbot-ready and viewer-friendly with clickable chapters. Viewers looking for specific information can be directed to the appropriate chapter. Interactive video services like HapYak make this easy. They also make it easy for you to offer video viewers the opportunity to branch to specific information—just like a chatbot.

You can extract segments from longer videos to make them accessible in other contexts. You can make persona-based explainer videos. Your engineers and other subject matter experts can create stock (or personalized) answers to FAQs. They can add graphics with simple video tools like ViewedIt. Constructing your explainer and other videos in Q&A format, rather than in the usual problem-solution-benefits approach, will yield more chatbot-ready videos."

ChattyPeople
MEOKAY
Smooch
Botsify
Beep Boop
Chatfuel
Facebook Messenger Platform
Telegram Bots
BotKit
FlowXO