When you hear the term “inbound marketing,” you likely think of compelling blog posts and informative videos. Both resources can be entertaining and helpful for a brand’s audience—but there are a pair of potentially more effective ways to engage your audience: conversational AI and live chat.

As a part of their inbound content marketing efforts, businesses are integrating chatbots and live chat into websites and social media channels. When someone visits one of a business’s owned channels, they’re often greeted by a chatbot or live chat rep. That said, it’s usually the visitor’s choice to take the first step and interact with the conversational marketing solution offered by a business.

If you want to find out how conversations are shaping the future of inbound content marketing, you’ve come to the right place. These three reasons will give you a better overall idea of how they can help your business drive its inbound content marketing efforts.

1. Customers Can Directly Reach Your Brand at Any Time

When businesses grow their customer base to a certain size, it becomes tough to keep up with each contact. Every prospect or customer believes their purchase or problem is the most important—and rightfully so. In fact, from 2019 to 2020, frustration among customers with no access to service outside of business hours grew by 1.4x, according to Drift’s State of Conversational Marketing report.

A chatbot or live chat solution can help you accommodate customers no matter when they contact your brand. Instead of forcing people to call or email your business during specified hours, offer your audience the option to directly interact with your brand whenever they want through chat. This quick communication option should help chop down long queues and response times for your customers.

Keep in mind a live chat solution may still lead to long queues based on how much support staff you have and how many people are looking for support. Consider also deploying a chatbot to offer speedier service for the most common queries your customers and prospective customers contact you about. With automated scripts, bots can handle multiple queries at once. A customer or prospect will be able to seamlessly talk to your chatbot well after business hours are a wrap.

Design your chatbot script to make the bot sound human and aligned with your brand’s style and tone. Prospects will likely feel more comfortable speaking to a bot that uses natural, conversational language than a bot that sounds, well, robotic.

Your audience will also value bots once they see how helpful the technology can be. If customers see your bot has answers to many of their questions, they’ll be more likely to trust the tool and your brand.

2. Chatbots Can Serve Customers Personalized Content

Just like a live service rep tailors solutions for customers, chatbots can share content with site visitors based on what they’ve said in the conversation.

For someone looking for general information about an industry trend or topic, the bot might direct them to a top-of-funnel blog post. A bot will also direct a user looking for pricing information to the brand’s pricing page. The extent to which a chatbot can do this will vary based on what type of knowledge base the chatbot interface or software running the chatbot is linked to.

But these personalized content recommendations aren’t just based on what customers request directly in the chat. A bot’s artificial intelligence (AI) processing can “remember” information from previous conversations and use that knowledge to make future recommendations. Say a user had trouble accessing their account dashboard the last time they reached out. When they ask how to perform an action in the dashboard in their next conversation, the chatbot might pass along a resource about how to sign in just for good measure.

Bots that consistently provide users with personalized content will help drive loyalty. They’ll want to interact with your brand’s bot because they know it provides valuable information in a matter of seconds.

Content doesn’t just come in one form either. Many businesses already know this and create a number of different types of content, including blog posts, podcasts, and videos. Unfortunately, a lot of the content resources that a business offers can get buried deep within a website, making it hard for users to find.

Distributing content through your bot can help breathe new life into it. Content that used to generate a significant amount of traffic for your business can be reused through conversations. It’s an opportunity to help drive engagement with your older content without having to invest in completely redoing it. If the content is aligned with a user’s needs, there’s a good chance they’ll consume the full blog post, podcast episode, or video your bot sends them.

Distributing content through your bot can help breathe new life into it.Click To Tweet

3. Conversations Can Supercharge Your Sales Funnel

Getting prospects to become customers is one of the biggest challenges of any business. To do so, you need to guide them through a sales funnel and have content ready for them at each phase.

With a chatbot or live chat solution, you can easily boost the speed of your sales funnel efforts. A chatbot or live chat rep can speak directly to your user to find out where they are within the sales funnel. Some people might just be starting their search, while others want a little more information right before they make a purchase.

Wherever your user is in the sales funnel, your chatbot or live chat solution can help with lead nurturing. They can ask specific questions, answer a customer’s product question, and even pass along a lead to a representative that can give more specific help (with the lead’s permission).

You can even deploy a chatbot solution on your Facebook business page. If a person visits your company’s Facebook page, they could be greeted by a chatbot that can give them basic information they’re looking for. It’s also a great way to redirect customers to your website, so they can learn more about a certain product or topic if they’re interested.

This way, chatbots and live chats are not only helping identify leads, but they’re also bringing them down the funnel. They’re able to get to the root of what a user is actually looking for and can align them with the right solution on your website.

Need More Help with Your Inbound Content Marketing Efforts?

Conversations are a great way to supplement your inbound content marketing efforts, but you need to ensure you’re still doing your homework when it comes to competitors. Investigate how they’re attracting leads and customers to their brand with content, so you can engage your audience even more effectively.

If you’re looking for an easy and effective way to find out what kind of content your competitors are dishing out, our competitive website analysis feature can give you all the details you need about what they’re publishing and the content’s engagement levels. Try our free 14-day trial to get access to this feature and much more today!

The post Why Inbound Content Marketing Needs More Conversations appeared first on Alexa Blog.

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