Without a doubt, Messenger Marketing, chatbots, bot building, Facebook Messenger bots – and all the buzzwords in between — have been the topic of the year for marketers and business owners.
How do you build a chatbot?
How do you deliver the most value to your audience on Facebook Messenger?
How do you generate more subscribers and start more conversations?
We’ve asked six Messenger Marketing experts (and all around brilliant business owners and marketers) to debunk the biggest misconceptions in the market while at Conversations Conference 2018, check out their answers below:
If you think you’re spending your time building a chatbot, you’re already thinking the wrong way. The biggest misconception around Messenger Marketing is this just about chatbots and automation. In reality, you’re designing conversations. What makes this such an accessible and different marketing channel is that you get to think about the conversations you want to have face-to-face with your audience, and use a tool to create those — at scale.
The biggest misconception is that Messenger Marketing can be intrusive to people’s lives. Many say people don’t want to receive messages from brands, where in reality, according to a Facebook-commissioned study by Nielsen, 56 percent of people surveyed would rather message a business than call customer service, and 67 percent expect to message businesses even more over the next two years. (Learn more here.)
Most people underestimate the potential of Messenger. They don’t see it as a new marketing channel to weave into their overall Marketing and Sales Strategy. They see it as a separate, experimental entity, and that almost ensures the experiment will not be successful, or truly contribute to increased business success. Many people see Messenger Marketing simply as chatbots: fun ways to communicate with their audience.
That it’s an advertising channel. It isn’t. Marketing and advertising are two different things. Messenger Marketing is all about developing 1:1 relationships, and doing so at scale, in a way that feels personal. Spamming someones Facebook inbox is NOT the right way to do it. Instead, you should be nurturing relationships.
Many people think that Messenger Marketing works well in isolation… and it does. But when leveraged with the power of multi-step multimedia follow-up, it becomes extremely powerful. Virtually any business can use Messenger to create contingencies in their follow-up when people fall off from email and use messenger to re-engage them.
If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines because you’re not sure if Messenger Marketing is “right” for you or “worth the hassle,” tell us about it in the ManyChat community. Let’s get to the bottom of these misconceptions!
There’s no time like the present for diving into Messenger Marketing and building your first ManyChat chatbot! Create your free account here.
Originally published: Jun 28, 2019, 2:47 PM, Updated: Jun 28, 2019, 2:47 PM
Max Gibbons
ManyChat's resident Video Content Marketing Manager, Max whiles away his free time chopping wood, fixing motorbikes, and hanging with his awesome family.
