The Next Big Thing? Chatbots
We’ve all been helped by the customer service chatbot or assistant dedicated to a specific task. But businesses who really want to make a splash in the chatbot space are turning their attention to chatbots as content delivery systems. Why should businesses focus on content in chatbots? With users focused on messaging instead of their social feeds, messaging platforms have the potential to become the next big channel for pushing content and marketing. This means brands hoping to stay relevant in their industries must be ready to adapt.
Why Use Chatbots for Content?
One of chatbots’ greatest features is that te are excellent for user personalization. While content traditionally revolved around search terms or trends for discoverability and relevancy, chatbots can provide users with relevant content through the vast amounts of data they get from the user.
“More personalized delivery makes your content more irresistible to users, helping to boost CTR and user satisfaction.”
Next, chatbots-as-content help you humanize your brand and connect with users in a casual way that feels natural to them. For example, you might create a friendly, funny character who serves as a brand ambassador. That said, simply having a good personality isn’t enough for a chatbot content strategy, though we’ll delve into how you can build excellent content chatbots below.
Design a Character Around User Need
“An effective content chatbot should find a novel way to support your brand or company’s goals and values — just like your existing product or service does.”
What problem does your brand aim to solve, and how can a chatbot support it? One amazing example is Casper’s Insomniabot-3000. Casper is a mattress brand that aims to give customers a great night of sleep, but those with insomnia will have trouble sleeping no matter their bed. Insomniabot-3000 makes things a little better by giving insomniacs someone to talk to late at night when their friends are all asleep, supporting the brand’s mission — helping those with low-quality sleep — in a creative and humorous way.
Augment the Experience You Already Deliver
This content strategy is perfect for brands in the entertainment industry. A content chatbot can bring an imagined world to life, allowing the user to put themselves within it. This can be done through discussions with a mascot or fictional character or through a game-like experience. One company that has pulled off both styles well is Activision, who has used chatbots for augmenting its popular Call of Duty videogame series.
The company’s first Call of Duty chatbot is one based on Lt. Reyes, the lead character of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Activision made a spectacle of the chatbot by hiding Easter eggs within the previous game, which directed users to the bot on Facebook. The chatbot received over 6 million messages on its first day, which directed users to an exclusive trailer for the upcoming game. Activision could have released the trailer and other content in a traditional way, but their Lt. Reyes chatbot instead blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality, providing a unique way for dedicated fans to engage with the world they had built.
Activision’s second chatbot in the series, which released in the week leading up to Infinite Warfare’s release, took the form of a guided tour via a choose-your-own-adventure style experience. Users chat with Alana, an in-universe tour guide, who directs them through the game’s futuristic take on the solar system with humorous results. This experience, different than the first in character and tone but used to augment and promote the same product, shows how you can refresh an experience and re-engage a userbase with chatbots.
Leverage Existing Content in a New Way
How do you ensure your evergreen content doesn’t get lost in the aether after it’s been promoted online? While you could rely on SEO alone, a solid alternative would be to push it to a user via a chatbot whenever it’s most relevant in conversation.
Because chatbots offer sophisticated personalization and instantaneous communication at any time, they’re a great way to help users discover content that might otherwise go unnoticed.
The important thing to remember here is when, where, why and how users will want or need your content. A wonderful example is the Food Network chatbot, which lets users easily search for and discover recipes form the Food Network website in several easy ways. Its most impressive feature is that users can ask for recipes recently featured on TV (pairing well with users’ viewing habits) or call up ingredient-based recipes while in the kitchen hands-free (via the Alexa skill).
Keep Up with Chatbot Analytics to See What’s Working
How do you know how effective your content chatbot is at engaging users? Just like tracking analytics for web content, you’ll want to keep up with conversational analytics to see what’s engaging users and what’s giving them problems. For example, by tracking the most-used phrases or words in your conversations, you can discover what topics matter most to your users — and when. From there, you can more effectively design your content strategy across all platforms.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 351,974+ people.
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