Whether your business is just getting started on Facebook, or you’ve already established a solid presence, Facebook chatbots (aka Facebook Messenger bots) are a great way to extend your sales and marketing reach.
Not only do automated, AI-driven bots give prospects and customers a friendly, time-saving way to interact with your business, 69% of consumers prefer them for quick answers to simple questions.
From brand awareness to talent recruitment, here are 7 ways to use Facebook chatbots to help grow your business.
1. Brand building
Because Facebook chatbots can be as uniquely designed as your business, they’re an ideal vehicle for:
- Showcasing your company’s distinct personality
- Personalizing your messaging and marketing
- Connecting directly with targeted buyers
By presenting an authentic, interactive brand voice, bots help warm up your audience before moving them down your sales funnel.
2. Lead attraction
Not only is the Facebook Messenger app free and easily accessible, it’s currently used by 1.3 billion people.
That makes Messenger bots especially helpful for:
- Growing your contacts (by enabling giveaways, for example)
- Attracting more product page visitors (by encouraging users to explore your collection)
- Qualifying new leads (by asking visitors directly about budget and needs)
Even better, marketing competition via Facebook chatbot is still relatively low. While there are 9 million advertisers on Facebook, for example, there are only 300,000 – 400,000 chatbots on Messenger.
3. Customer engagement
Facebook chatbots can both interact with your customers and potentially increase their value by:
- Upselling buyers with order add-on suggestions during e-commerce transactions
- Keeping existing customers engaged with special offers and new product announcements
- Using re-engagement to target previous customers with complementary products or services
Not only can Facebook chatbots remind customers to purchase products discovered during earlier interactions, they can retain personalized information ranging from shoe size to food allergies.
4. Service improvement
Adding a chatbot to your Facebook page can save your business time and money, while streamlining the customer service experience.
Use chatbots to help your customers:
- Schedule appointments and follow up on orders
- Resolve problems and get answers to common questions
- Avoid awkward support hours and delayed response times with 24/7 availability
Bots can even reach out to buyers after a purchase to make sure they’re satisfied.
5. Marketing Expansion
Facebook Messenger bots offer an alternative way to boost sales with direct response marketing blasts.
You can harness a bot’s power to:
- Connect contacts directly to your email marketing platform
- Run stand-alone drip content marketing campaigns
- Make impactful augmented reality part of your marketing strategy
It’s also worth noting that it costs far less to build a Facebook Messenger bot than it does a mobile app.
6. Customer feedback
According to the Spiegel Research Center, a product with five reviews is 270% more likely to be purchased than a product with no reviews. As a natural extension of your sales and marketing process, you can use Facebook chatbots to request reviews from verified buyers and conduct surveys to get valuable customer feedback.
7. Talent recruitment
Did you know Facebook chatbots can make screening, vetting, and communicating with job candidates more efficient?
Interactive recruitment bots use one-on-one instant messaging to:
- Collect contact information and resumes
- Ask applicants about their experience, knowledge, and skills
- Answer questions about jobs and the application process
Once your bot has gathered the relevant data, it can schedule interviews or just forward the information to you or another human recruiter to review.
57% of business executives agree that conversational bots can deliver significant ROI for minimal effort. With people and companies exchanging more than 20 billion messages on Messenger every month, using Facebook chatbots to automate some of those exchanges could prove a lucrative way to grow your business.
