Special thanks

To David Humphrey blog.humphd.org, my superior of open source development. Because of this excellent person I am presently aware of the true nature of collective effort — it’s magnificent progression and continuous maturation.

What’s this article ?

This article is intended to give you insight about application of chatbot concept in business. The first draft of this was jotted during Google’s Dialogflow Certification pursuit, however, no implementation details were given.

You’re here because the idea of a new marketing campaign based chatbot for your company sounds thrilling.

You delve into research to discover that if you introduce a chatbot into your business, you’ll boost your salves, improve customer experience, and ultimately — grow your audience.

…and then you stumble upon this article;

Congratulations. This article covers:

• Planning

• Creation

• Promotion

Insightful content is intertwined with fancy quotes I personally picked.

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” — Napoleon Hill, Think&Grow Rich

TL:DR; Design your strategy

Layout preliminaries for your bot campaign.

Focus on fulfilling customer’s needs and fancies.

Sketch out a dialog flow for your bot, give it a name, personality, (iterate this step, or utilize ML).

Integrate your chatbot onto your landing page, connect to targeted advertisements and comment pages.

Finally, publish digest: send out news-sellers, Broadcasts, Posts, and whatever material you think will engage the customer’s mind and make your brand more recognizable

— Profit.

1. Plan

“First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.”

Define your goal

What is it you want this marketing campaign to achieve for your business ?

Include definitive metrics which your end goal can be measured against. Tracking your progress is essential for an ongoing process.

You should choose specific metrics, for example, number of subscribers or total sales. You may also choose something more abstract like brand recognition or overall rating of your products. There’re great analytics tools out there, Data Studio is the one I can vouch for.

Strategize

Having defined the ultimate goal of this campaign, let’s turn to the chatbot’s requirements. What are they specifically?

A chatbot can talk in different domain languages on various topics. It’s highly customizable, hence — able to not only provide information but also to make business decisions, take orders, and execute them.

Define what your customer is trying to solve. Start simply with what your potential customer may ask while engaging with your bot.

Let’s say, a business produces a versatile line of products, your customer is intrigued but undecisive or still contemplating . — This surely is a pain for the consumer that can be easily addressed or solved with-an eloquent recommendation from a chatbot.

Moreover, think about your customer’s native language, in a sense of multidimensionality. The more useful information can be fed through UI to improve UX, the better the results, right? Introduce GIFs, emojis for Generation Z (iGen) and Millennials to happily engage with . On the other hand, for X and Boomers — produce more thoughtful answers.

2. Create

*“20% Motion 80% Action” — *James Clear

Admittedly, this article is about motion, though. There’re services to implement your chatbot, however, I’ll continue with abstractions and concepts.

What is it a chatbot should do and how? You want it to be shipped ready for the in-world arena.

Map out Basic Flow of Events (Intents)

The ability to communicate with a potential customer within his comfort zone, like in Facebook Messenger, is a precious opportunity to build a good rapport.

Recognize this potential sale that your bot may bluntly ruin en mass with an improper wording, not being engaging enough, or, on the other hand, over-persuasively inducing advertisements of your product. It’s therefore of utmost importance to make out your bot’s personality and demeanour impeccable and morally correct.

A bot may:

1. Share interesting content to induce positive response

2. Build rapport based on quality interaction

3. Educate to enhance brand’s recognition

4. Be appreciated, naturally

The bot’s primary role, however, is **neither **of those. The primary objective is to save time and ease the prospect’s experience with the brand. Targeting these goals will, as a result, produce virtuous Flow of Events.

To map out the **Basic Flow of Events (Intents), **it’s really helpful to pick up your paper and pencil. You may also consider building dialog trees in X-Mind, Draw.io

Keep in mind several points:

1. **Appeal compassionate. **You are going to be having access to all the information from your customer’s Facebook profile. Benefit from that information by including a few personal touches that will target your customer’s interests.

2. **Make it easy and obvious **with making the interaction approachable and available within a click. Help your customer to use the bot with useful tips.

3. **Induce trustworthiness **by appealing barebones — *a bot *as it is. Do not try to mimic a real human agent, conversely — advertise your progressive AI-based bot. It will only spark more interest in people.

4. **Give a user time to read, think, and respond. **Some of the conventionalities of human behaviour need to be mimicked. A human wouldn’t send several lengthy messages immediately, it is impossible to type so quickly!

5. **Good UI is a preliminary requirement to excellent UX! **Think of buttons, elements of finger-tip interactions, showing content, giving suggestion cards, et cetera.

6. **Keep the flow of events (Intents) in a logical sequence and fallback gracefully. **Never leave a customer behind or ahead of the conversation. Think of a start-over button and follow-up additional information input.

7. **Streamline delivery. **ML is good, but a developer’s review will keep design flow and transcript analysis more accurate for future drafts.

3. Promote

Having laid out the groundwork, described strategies, and defined technical aspects of the bot, it’s now high time to roll it out into production. There are, as always, different ways of promoting and sharing your bot: you may experiment or hire analytics team to give you stats on your bot’s effectiveness.

Create engaging posts

Create great social media content to engage prospects. It is a common strategy, yet very effective.

Exemplary ideas:

1. **Run Q&A. **Employ a team member or a leader to communicate with your audience directly through video-conference streaming or alike. Develop compassion, show genuine interest.

2. Ask for opinions. Get the audience to share their opinion on your brand.

3. Setup giveaways or contests, offer discounts. Induce social comparisons: “Would it make me better ?” or “Do I want it ?” or “Would I recommend it ?” dialog.

4. Be sure to follow Facebook’s rules!

5. Repost user-generated content. Ask for and repost the videos and photos from your audience to build a sense of tribunal acceptance and acknowledgment. It is one of the driving forces inside any community.

Conclusion

Chatbots have exponential potentials in growth, innovation, and … disruption. This is the technology to leverage in times of mushroom-like growth of business startups and overall modernization.

Materials consulted and recommended to read

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and- generation-z-begins/ft_19–01–17_generations_2019/

https://dialogflow.com/support/change-log https://blog.chatfuel.com/grow-your-audience/

https://uxdesign.cc/wanna-build-a-superbot-that-can-do-anything-heres-how-d8eeeeef1882

https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow/docs/agents-prebuilt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bold_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_and_Grow_Rich