How a Chatbot Can be a Powerful Interactive Marketing Solution

In today’s business world, where consumers are developing increased expectations with regard to a brand’s responsiveness, interactive marketing has emerged as a method that allows marketers to better meet these demands.

Interactive marketing is a one-to-one marketing engagement that is designed to react and change based on the actions of individual consumers. This ability to respond to the actions of customers and prospects is proving to offer significantly more effective outcomes that traditional direct marketing. In fact, interactive marketing can be as much as 12x more effective than more traditional marketing approaches.

While interactive marketing is not the same thing as online marketing, interactive marketing processes are enabled by Internet technology. Leveraging the ability to recall what the consumer has communicated makes interactions more dynamic and powerful.

Types of Interactive Marketing Solutions

For consumers, interactive marketing can provide unique opportunities for them to engage with their favorite brands and create awareness of their thoughts and ideas to these brands. The company can then leverage this information for its continual product, service, and overall brand development.

Some of the forms that interactive marketing can take include:

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing includes everything from optimizing your website to improve its performance in search results, to placing targeted advertisements within those results pages.

Social Media Marketing

Encompasses a brand’s marketing efforts to create consumer engagement on sites like Facebook, Twitter.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most powerful and cost-effective interactive marketing programs available today. Delivering notifications and offers to consumers via email has proven to be extremely effective for many companies.

Blogging

Creating short (often 500 words or fewer) but relevant and informative articles that your prospects and customers can find interesting and comment on can trigger engagement while establishing your brand as an authority in your industry.

Online Chat

Deploying chatbots (software programs developed to manage online chat communications with consumers) has emerged as a high-impact and cost-effective way to create one-to-one engagement with consumers without having to allocate employees to these efforts.

Chatbots as Interactive Marketing Solutions

Chatbots can live on your website or a social media platform or they can be used to drive interaction via text message or email marketing. A well-designed chatbot has the intelligence to understand a consumer’s needs or intent and steer the chat communication in a direction that will create the best opportunity to secure a call-to-action (CTA).

While chatbots are sometimes used to bring consumers to an actual decision and purchase, they are more commonly deployed to generate interest and gauge the seriousness of the prospect through qualification. The lead and associated information can then be turned over to a sales representative for follow up.

From a marketing management perspective, the fact that chatbots are available on a 24/7 basis with instant access to consumers and the ability to collect the data from each interaction makes chatbots an interactive marketing solution that is hard to ignore.

Contact us to learn more about chatbots as an interactive marketing solution for your programs.