The Next Health + Wellness Trend? Chatbots
You’ve amassed a steady social following. You’re continually posting your most powerful and engaging photos, updates, and stories. You’re building your follower base by advertising across social platforms.
But as you grow your audience, it’s become increasingly difficult to reach individual followers on a deeper, more personal level. You can’t respond to every comment, and you can’t message each person independently. So how do you forge personal relationships with your followers — without forsaking all of your time and energy to do so?
This is question is particularly relevant for health and wellness influencers. Because health and wellness are so personal — because they concern the way people look, feel, and exist in the world — the experts in the field are more than just #inspiration. People want their mind and body influencers to be their life coaches, trainers, nutritionists, and their therapists. They want you to provide leadership and significance for their entire health and wellness journey.
People want their mind and body influencers to be their life coaches, trainers, nutritionists, and their therapists.
Moreover, the nature of social media, particularly Instagram, means your posts and your stories show up in people’s feeds alongside their real-life friends and family. Consequently, people feel an intimate connection with you. They watch your everyday life — at the gym, getting a coffee, playing with your dog — the same way they watch real-life friends.
That’s why every health and wellness influencer should be employing a chatbot.
It might seem counterintuitive, but a well-programmed chatbot can enable you to have more personal, more meaningful conversations with your followers. It can also help you maintain authenticity as your brand and your audience grow. A chatbot provides you with a direct, human-to-human line to your followers. That means you can message people anytime about pertinent products, deals, content, or appearances — and they can message you back.
It also means you can train people and hold them accountable for changing their health and lifestyle right on the platforms they already frequent. People check Facebook an average of 14 times a day, which means they’re much more likely to check in with a Facebook bot than a clunky app they’ll never open. And since chat it two-way and AI-supported, you can provide more personalized, bespoke coaching based on people’s individual needs.
Furthermore, the more people interact with the chatbot, the more data the bot collects on them, which means you can offer targeted product offerings, deals, and content. You can learn, for example, what people’s gym habits are or what they cooked for dinner last night. If you know they live in midtown Manhattan and they practice yoga twice a week, you can inform them about your yoga line’s popup in Chelsea, or send them a link to your upcoming retreat in Bali — and you can suggest direct flights from JFK.
Most importantly, chatbots make people feel like they’re speaking directly with you. However, it’s crucial you make it clear that your bot is AI-powered and not actually you speaking. 73% of users who have a bad experience with a chatbot won’t interact with that bot again.
A chatbot can also help you acquire new followers — they boast 90% open rates, after all, and they can provide you with access to a vast new audience. Facebook Messenger bots, for example, can connect you with the 1.2 billion people active on Messenger. That can mean a huge bump to your sales and revenue.
Just ask influential fitness and nutritional expert Danette May. Since May deployed a chatbot last year, she says she’s significantly improved her customer support, generated tens of thousands of new leads, and increased revenue 10x over her previous Facebook strategy.
We’re calling it first: chatbots are the future of marketing for health and wellness influencers.
Have you deployed a chatbot to engage your health + wellness followers? Comment and let us know about it!
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