Episode Summary
A chatbot has become an indispensable marketing tool for SaaS and software companies. And it can benefit your business in many different ways, from engaging your customers to helping you gain a better understanding of their pain points and needs.
But still, most companies fail to employ chatbots effectively. As a result, their chatbots come off as too pushy, incomplete, or irritating. You can easily avoid these rookie mistakes and use chatbots to your advantage.
In this episode of the Content Logistics podcast, our host Camille Trent welcomes Brendan Hufford, the Founder of Growth Sprints, the former Growth Content Marketer at Active Campaign. Camille and Brendan get into the best chatbot openers, how to set them up to achieve your business goals and who can benefit the most from implementing chatbots.
Guest Profile
- Name: Brendan Hufford
- What he does: He's the Founder of Growth Sprints, a company that helps Saas companies increase revenue from Google through short, focused marketing sprints.
- Company: Growth Sprints
- Noteworthy: Brendan is also the Founder of SEO For The Rest Of Us and the former Growth Content Marketer at Active Campaign.
Key Insights
- Who can benefit from chatbots the most? There are many ways to use chatbots to your advantage, but who can benefit from this program the most? In this episode, Camille and Brendan talk about different ways to leverage chatbots for your business. "If you want more demo requests, leads, signups, whatever, this is who it's for. But additionally, it's anybody who wants more activation and anybody who wants more retention. If I know you're a user of our app or our technology, and you come to the website, I can serve you with different resources that increase your level of activating on the product. But, if you're already a paying user, I want to keep you. I want to retain you. So let's have our chatbot be more helpful for that. Let's target those people."
- The best chatbot openers. Innovation is key in marketing. You have to be strategic and creative in your efforts. The same goes for chatbots. You can go for the outdated chatbot tactics everyone is using, or you can think outside of the box and try these effective chatbot openers that Brendan has to share. "Everything else is going to focus, not just on the support aspect of it, but constantly feeding them. Every time they come back to the website, feeding them more resources, how to increase, align their incentives with our incentives. [...] I think in a long enough timeline, everybody in SEO just becomes a product marketer, so a lot of this is product marketing type of stuff. Do you feel the same with content, especially in B2B? It just kind of becomes a product. The Venn diagram overlap just becomes a circle over time."
- Use the psychology of curiosity to engage your customers. Brendan talks about a powerful concept that he came across called The Psychology of Curiosity. This framework focuses on curiosity levers that can help you drive your customers to engage with your chatbot. "So the first one is to ask a curiosity-inducing question. 'Did you know?' Or, 'Hey, can I ask you a quick question? Do you want to hear a startling fact?' That's a great opener. The next one is to start a sequence of events and then don't finish. [...] The third one is just to do something unexpected. There's a lot of times that we take ourselves seriously, and we think we're data-driven marketers and everything, but I think sometimes you can get a lot out of just doing something interesting or unexpected."
Episode Highlights
Set up attention-grabbing chatbots
“I want to catch people’s attention. Now you can set these chatbots up to not just immediately blast people as soon as they hit the website. They came there for a reason so let them read. Let’s let them read four lines of the content before we hit them up with a slider and a pop-up in a chatbot. […]
What I lead with is this line that I say, ”Do you want to hear a startling fact?” Everybody wants to hear a startling fact. And what you hit them with is a fact that leads them to, even if they’re unaware of the problem or if they’re problem aware, which typically most people, I mean, everybody is either unaware or problem aware. Hit them with that fact that’s industry-specific, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, there’s a problem to be solved.'”
You can use chatbots to hire and attract top talent
“The only thing in your company, and trust me on this, the only thing in your company, more valuable than a customer, is your next hire. And we, for some reason, don’t put effort into hiring and attracting top talent as we do into a customer.
The cost of a bad hire is catastrophic. But a bad customer, they just churn; it’s okay. Why don’t we start putting our chatbots on your hiring page, on your careers page? That’s a game-changer for a lot of companies, especially if you have one marketer or five marketers or one content person. Support your HR team, support the teams that are hiring by having an awesome chatbot on that page that makes people feel valued and seen.”
Do something unexpected with your chatbot
“There’s a lot of times that we take ourselves seriously and we think, we’re data-driven marketers and everything, but I think like sometimes you can get a lot out of just doing something interesting or unexpected. At Active Campaign, there’s a great question like, ‘Would you ever write a one-word email subject line?’ Well, that would be unexpected.”