Near Future Trend: Bots and Ads
As we’re closing 2016, chatbots have become a big technological development for all of the brands. Since the number of chatbots are increasing, marketers started using this channel effectively. Furthermore, there’s one thing we’ll talk about chatbots in 2017: Ads on Bots.
No doubt that chatbots are making our lives easier. Also there’s one reason brands will be interested in creating and using them for their marketing channels. It’s pretty simple that the goal is to make ads much more exciting, to make them appear as though they’ve come from an actual human being. The goal is to make ads much more interesting, so that people feel like they are dealing with an actual person, and not with a large corporation. The ultimate objective is to make people trust the ads, so that they actually listen to the message and take the right action – which is to buy the product.
Marketing today is very different from how it was in the early 2000s. Back then, SEO and SEM completely dominated the marketing processes.Then, since 2010, we saw social media advertising, propelled by Facebook ads, come into its own. Now we’ve been witness to mobile marketing. Traditional forms of online marketing have reached a point where they have stopped growing. Users are not downloading as many mobile apps, for example, as they used to in the past. However, now messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Apple iMessage, WeChat, etc. are very popular. They have created a new marketing channel, where there is less competition and not as much ad fatigue as elsewhere on the web.
And now ads?
Chatbots are poised to benefit from this more than any other ad format, because of their ability to approximate human speech very closely. They provide advertisers and marketers with a huge advantage. There are a number of surveys that show that consumers trust word-of-mouth recommendations, more so than radio, TV or internet ads. Bots come very close to approximating such word-of-mouth recommendations. There are tremendous opportunities for companies such as Facebook, Apple and Google to take advantage of the enormous potential of chatbots by selling sponsored messages based on machine learning and natural language processing to businesses.
Now, these messages are still not fully developed as marketing tools. As of now, chatbot ads are probably still a couple of years away. They do have a tremendous potential. There’s every chance that in the future, marketers will be able to place ads on chatbots in a seamless and non-obtrusive manner, to give their target audience the impression that a friend or an acquaintance helps them.When you’re looking for a pair of shoes or a restaurant, you will get recommendations from chatbots, impersonating a smart and funny Millennial woman. That would probably be more effective at convincing you to part with your cash than a boring display ad or newspaper ad.
Here are four ways by which chatbots can very well transform marketing as we know it:
#1: There is a lot of curiosity about them:
Certainly, chatbot ads are more effective than pay-per-click ads or video ads at grabbing attention of your target audience. For one, they are new, while there is no novelty left any longer in PPC campaigns and video marketing. So you can expect your audience to spend more time with a chatbot, talking to the character, starting and restarting the conversation, playing out different scenarios, to see how the character would react to different situations. There’s a lot of excitement about any new technology, and bots are as interesting and engaging as they get.
#2: Chatbots are great at winning your audience’s trust:
Bots are very effective at building rapport with an audience, much more so than other forms of online marketing. People love it when an ad wants to talk to them and reacts to their comments or statements, in unexpected ways. This is something that excites people, wins their trust and makes them happy.
#3: The bots are really effective at mining for information:
There’s nothing more precious than data in the internet world. Companies do everything possible to get information from their audience. But when they conduct surveys or ask for information, this can often appear to be intrusive. Bots are different, they can ask you for information in such a friendly way that you won’t mind answering. And by this we mean questions such as “Which political party do you support?”, “What do you like about the new Nike commercial?” etc.
#4: Bots gives more personalized experiences:
The targets of the chatbots are obvious, they use machine learning to personalize a conversation based on the individual. They suggest products which gives services on the individual’s taste, while respecting their privacy.
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