How to Develop a Chatbot Content Strategy

The reigning tech of the era is what brings eyeballs to content: first there was massaging content with SEO to rise to the high ranks of Google results, and now publishers have turned to optimizing content for social media feeds. But what happens when people begin spending more time in messaging apps than social media? To bring your content where users are, you’ll need to shift content marketing to chatbots and learn more about chatbot content strategy.

Chatbots are great for delivering key content ideas in a digestible way, and are a perfect solution to ever-diminishing attention spans online. Readers want immediate information, and a chatbot can provide a short, tweet-sized answer to whatever users ask. If users want to go more in-depth, chatbots can provide suggestions to keep the conversation going.

Finally, conversing to a chatbot is a more active experience than simply reading content on a blog or social feed. This makes chatbots great for encouraging calls to action and providing personalized content that you know users will enjoy.

Here’s how you can take content marketing to the next level by developing your own chatbot content strategy.

Set Your Chatbot Content Marketing Goals

While conversational UI is a different medium than a blog, devising a chatbot content strategy isn’t very different. In fact, you’ll ask yourself the same questions to develop content that you would for social media and blog content. Some big questions to begin with include:

Who is the audience? What do they want?
What should they know, feel or do after consuming the content?
What’s my goal here?

If you have an existing library of content, you could begin adapting for your chatbot. A good chatbot content model, though, isn’t a straight adaptation of other content. Instead, it’s easier to develop both kinds of content from simultaneously. The ideas will be the same, but should be delivered in a way that fits the medium. This way you don’t waste time and resources creating separate versions of your content—blogs, chatbot responses and social posts can all pull from a single library of sources.

Develop a Chatbot Content Strategy Around Your Audience

Before you set out to inform your audience, it’s important that you understand what they want and need. Map out every step of the consumer journey, building a narrative to carry the user along every step of the way. Ask yourself:

What are customers looking for?
Does your online presence do a good job at providing this information in other channels (blog, social media, etc.)?
What are consumer sentiments/feelings?

Once you’ve considered these questions, you can develop chatbot responses with a content strategist. Essentially, your chatbot should answer common, simple questions related to your content. For example, “What is a chatbot content strategy?” is a question at the heart of the content in this blog post.

A content engineer can help you integrate chatbot content into your CMS, allowing you to define questions and answers that pull from your longform content.

Keep the Conversation Going

Of course, you can’t explain a complex topic in a single chat message. When developing a chatbot content strategy, then, you’ll need to think of ways to carry the momentum and help the user learn more throughout the conversation.

Google Assistant does this well. For example, if I ask “What’s the biggest animal in the world?” the assistant will answer (it’s the blue whale), then offer related questions, like “What’s the smallest mammal?” or “What’s the biggest whale?” By suggesting questions related to the asked topic, the user can gain a comprehensive understanding of it through bite-sized messages. The conversational tree might reflect an outline you’d write for a blog, where one topic, point, or idea leads to the next.

Optimize Content Marketing with CTA’s

One thing that makes chatbots unique is that they’re perfect for calls to action. The question suggestions mentioned above are just one example of a call to action. With your bot, you can offer actual, actionable content to readers: suggest they sign a petition, ask them to tweet a quote or interesting fact, make it seamless to sign up for a newsletter for related updates—the possibilities are endless for improving your content marketing!

And because chatbots are awesome for providing personalized responses, your chatbot can reward users who engage and perform the actions that you request of them.

Improve the Chatbot Content Model with Chatbot Analytics

Once your bot has been published, the way users respond to it can inform future content in your overall content strategy. Assess the topics and questions people ask the bot, and revise your chatbot content accordingly. Moments where the bot runs into an error can suggest ideas or points that you’ve overlooked and might want to generate new chatbot content for. Chatbot analytics will help you optimize your content’s efficacy and shape the overall user experience.

By assessing conversation histories, you should judge how well the conversation flows from one idea to another. Does the user leave the conversation with questions unanswered? Did the conversation move in a way that made sense? Was the chatbot content successful in calling the user to act?

By keeping on top of chatbot analytics, you can ensure your chatbot content model functions as planned and pulls in a better ROI.