Lessons

Lesson Info

Chat Bots, Messenger & Conversational Marketing

The newest oldest subject in all aspects of marketing and social that's out there and that's this idea of conversational marketing. Conversational marketing. How many of you, when I say conversational marketing, how many of you have heard that phrase in a business context? Look around the room, see how many hands are up. You have, you have as well. That was kind of like a non-committal, like I think I have. Very few. I believe that conversational marketing will be the next buzz word going through this year into the next year. We are very, very, very early here, but I think that this is absolutely where marketing is headed, because it's where it's been. And these things have a way of repeating themselves again and again and again. So kind of talking about, I'm gonna get to what I mean by conversational marketing in just a second, give you a definition, and then give you some very specific tactics for how you can deploy a conversational marketing effort in your own business. But let's ki...

nd of talk about where we are right now and some of the trends that I believe are driving this. As far back as 2011, which is a billion years ago in internet years, Gartner Research predicted that by 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human. Humans, toodles. The robots are coming, they're gonna take your jobs, and you're done. By 2020 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human. I think there's, I was going back trying to find some updated analysis and it turned out that in 2016 they doubled down on this. They came back and were reevaluating this and they said that by 2020 the average person will have more conversations with bots than with their spouse. Now depending on your feelings towards your spouse this could be great news. But I think it speaks to where we as a society are kind of headed, where we're beginning to talk more to robots. How many of you in this room have an Alexa or a Google Home or some other device like that? We're able to kind of speak out to the ether. Yeah, there's, I know my, I was going to Brazil, I was gonna speak at a conference in Brazil. And my daughter, Joyce, came to me and she said, "I have an idea." She's obviously very young. She's like, "I'm going to decorate the house "to look like Brazil, "so that you think you're already there "and you don't leave." Well, one, I'm like now I don't wanna leave, you made me feel like garbage. But I was like, after we got back and hugged and talked about it, I said, so what is Brazil look like? How do you know what Brazil even looks like? And she said, "Well, I don't, "I'll just ask Alexa." She was too young to write or type or probably even spell Brazil, but she knows that she could call it out and be able to figure it out. This interaction and this interactivity with bots is a big aspect of it. So when we talk about conversational marketing, that's what we're talking about. How do we leverage bots and on-page chat and even different, even email marketing, but email marketing is like real live conversation. How do we begin to leverage that and incorporate that into our overarching marketing strategy? I thought this study that Twilio did was interesting. 66% of consumers prefer to reach brands or be reached by brands via messaging over any other means. They would much rather communicate via these brands over chat, over Facebook Messenger. They would also prefer to be communicated by these brands over these means. This is where we're headed. We're more comfortable having conversations with robots than we are with human beings, at least at the outset. And this is a biggie, this is really, really cool. Commerce is beginning to happen through some of these apps and bots. So what you're seeing right here come up on this phone, you can do it, there it goes. This is actually a transaction occurring through a platform called Manychat. A transaction occurring, somebody's buying a T-shirt right there through Facebook Messenger. Now this is still new, this is still new. Almost nobody's out there actively making purchases through the Facebook Messenger app or through chat apps. We're still going to websites to make purchases. But let's not forget that was, that took a while to get there. I know I'm not the only one who's old enough to remember when the act of buying online was a little bit scary. You're like, are they gonna steal my information? Now we don't even think about it. We're like, yeah, buy online. But we really shouldn't be surprised that people are willing to make purchases through chat apps. Think of some of the filthy stuff you're sending your friends. This is were relationships are happening. This is where, some people, like some of the most intimate conversations happen through this media. Why should we be surprised that eventually commerce and business would wind up in these different channels as well? We should not be surprised. But I still believe that all of this automation that's occurring it's causing people to crave real live human interaction more than ever. Does anybody just kind of miss a little bit talking to humans? Don't we kind of just like want to talk to people every now and then? Like they're not all bad. I joke about strangers wanting to stab you and sell you drugs, but they're not all bad. There's some good ones out there. And when you got a problem you really wanna talk to somebody, you really wanna talk, you really wanna talk to a human. So interactions are occurring, conversation is happening, it's conversations that are being helped along, that are being supplemented by, yes, bots. But it's also conversations that are happening and people are wanting to happen with other human beings. The issue is they don't want them to happen here. Who gets really pissed off when their phone rings? Anybody else but me? It super, really annoys me when my phone rings. Like why are you doing that? Like my mom will call me and I love my mother very much, I'm like, I won't answer and be like why didn't you text me? This isn't supposed to ring. It's for outbound dialing for emergency purposes only. That's how phones work now. So it's not here, we don't like this, but it doesn't mean that interaction, that human interaction isn't occurring, it just isn't occurring here anymore, which salespeople don't like to admit. It's occurring through Facebook Messenger. It's occurring through chat apps, like Drift and Intercom, show you some different solutions that are out there. People wanting to have those conversations. It's occurring in WhatsApp, it's occurring via text, SMS messaging, it's also occurring, if you do it right, via good old-fashioned email. We have, as marketers and business people, forgotten that email started as a one-to-one tool. We've shifted it to this pure broadcast type play, like here's how I, we call them email blasts. Like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you're welcome. What's wrong with just like having a conversation? You don't have to raise your hand on this one, but I know there are people in this room and I know that there are some of you who are watching online who every email broadcast that you send to your list comes from noreply@yourdomain. The very email address that you are sending from says do not reply, do not talk to us, we don't want to hear from you, right? And go and look at all the big brands, that's what they're doing. No reply, we don't wanna talk to you, we just want you to click this link and go buy some stuff. What's wrong with you? Go do that. And we're wondering why we crave human attention. So the crazy idea that I have is what would happen if we leverage social media and other channels to actually drive like real live human conversations? Wouldn't that be weird? What a crazy, novel idea. That's what conversational marketing is all about. That's why I said it's the newest oldest trend that's out there. And I truly believe that it's the most social of all the social media channels. So if you're gonna have a social plan, if you're gonna have a, if you're gonna look to build social in a really meaningful, strategic way into your business you gotta have conversational marketing as a part of it. Because if you're doing social right it's going to invite real live human engagement. You need to be ready for it, you need to figure out what you're gonna do when you get it. I believe the future belongs to companies who are willing to invest in real, one-to-one, human-to-human interactions. I've said, before I've owned a number of different businesses, some of them were really terrible businesses, some of them were great businesses, but I've owned businesses where we would sell makeup brushes, other ones we be selling knives to survival and preparedness enthusiasts. We actually sold the number one most confiscated knife at the Oakland Airport. You're welcome, America. That was me. We put like a quarter million of this particular very, very hidable knife on the street. My bad, okay. And also desalinization, water filters to desalinization plants. We've done it all. B-to-B, B-to-C, online, brink and mortar, service, product, we've done it all. Physical product, digital product, software. Sold all of it. At the end of every single transaction was always a human. It was amazing. Even when we were selling B-to-B there was a human there who had a very human concern. When the desalinization plants, when they ran out of our particular filter it shut the entire plant down, because our filter was the very first stage in a multi-stage filtration process of turning water into drinkable, potable, I'm sorry, turning sea water into drinkable, potable water. Our filter was pretty much the first stage in that process. If they didn't have enough of our filter the whole thing was shut down. Didn't matter, everything else could be perfect. So that procurement manager, that warehouse manager, they had a very real, human need, which meant if I can't get these filters when I need them I get fired and people don't get water. I'm not selling to a business, I'm selling to a person. And you know what, humans, when they have those kind of needs they wanna talk to other humans. So I don't care what type of business you're in, there is no B-to-B, there is no B-to-C, we're all in the H-to-H business, 100% of us. All of us are in the H-to-H business. You're a human, you should be writing as a human, talking as a human, inviting engagement like a human, and conversing with the humans when you get them. That's gonna be the ultimate differentiator in businesses moving forward. So here's kind of a taste of what we're gonna be covering. We're gonna talk about the core concepts of conversational sales and marketing and why this art has largely been lost. Why the traditional sales funnel model, how many of you have heard of the funnel, a sales funnel? Yeah. Why it's broken and why scale is not always the answer. Three tactics that marketing teams can implement to drive more qualified, inbound sales conversations. Yep, doing marketing to get people to talk to you. Not just doing marketing to get people to click on a link to buy a product or click on a link to fill out a form, so they get an automated follow-up path. Doing marketing that's designed to actually initiate conversation. Plus the five critical questions that almost always close the sale. So we're gonna get into some sales strategy as well. Who will benefit most from this particular class? Entrepreneurs and startup founders. If you're preparing to launch this is how you want to start selling. If you are launching a brand new business this is the best way to do it. You're able to test out a lot of offers and different copywriting ideas in isolation. It's fairly inexpensive and the data that you get from having actual real live conversations simply can't be beat. It's for marketers who believe their role extends beyond merely generating leads. It's for salespeople, similarly, who believe that chat and not the phone is the future of consultative selling. So if you have a sales team or if you have a salesperson it's not just about kicking them leads, what's even better is to kick them like real live conversation with a real live person who wants to talk right now. That used to be like inbound, hot transfer, we can do that now on the line. It's amazing. And agencies looking to add a new skillset to their menu of services. My goal is to help you engineer more high-converting sales conversations from the traffic and leads that you're already receiving. If we can get you more conversations I believe that we can get you more sales. I truly don't care what you are selling. And if you are not selling something where it is worth talking to your customer, if that's just not worth your time, if you're like what I'm selling, it's too inexpensive. What we're selling I can't, it's not worth getting on the phone and talking to somebody. That's not, then the problem there isn't not that your customers aren't valuable enough, the problem is that you're not delivering enough value to them that they can deliver enough value back to you. You need to figure out how you can deliver value over and above, so that you raise the average customer value of them. In other words, it's your fault. Sorry, I can tell you that, 'cause you're already here. We don't tell you that on the front end.