Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
Why Small Business Owners Should Use Messenger Marketing
- August 14, 2019
- , 8:29 am
Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion users and only 100,000 or so messenger bots are being used by businesses.
It’s not even close to being saturated and we doubt your competitors are even using it as a way to market to people.
They’re most likely focusing their efforts on email marketing – the old school way.
Not you, though.
You’re one step ahead of the rest of the industry and want to make hay while the sun still shines.
As with every digital marketing channel that comes along – it becomes saturated so quickly that all that’s left are a few scraps and a couple of black eyes.
Oh, by the way, we practice what we preach here at The Good Marketer:
That’s a messenger bot which we added to our website that took about 5 minutes of work from a company called drift.com.
WHAT IS MESSENGER MARKETING?
Messenger marketing is the use of Facebook’s own messaging service that enables businesses to start conversations with potential or existing customers for the purpose of building a relationship.
WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MESSENGER MARKETING AND OTHER FORMS OF MARKETING?
Unlike other marketing channels such as email, paid ads or T.V advertising, messenger marketing is focused on developing a relationship with the customer on a much more personal level; instead of the business bombarding customers with ads, messenger marketing focuses on a two-way interaction – both business and customer.
The purpose of messenger marketing is to nurture the relationship and treat like a conversation you would have if you were in a face-to-face sales interaction at say a trade show.
For example, at a trade show, the conversation may follow as:
Potential prospect is walking around looking at the multiple businesses who are there for the day
- Prospect sees your stall and that you’re giving a presentation, sharing useful information or handing out flyers
- As the prospect is listening to your presentation, s/he finds a particular bit of information that can help provide a possible solution to their problem
- After the talk, the prospect comes up and asks you a few questions about a particular point you brought up in your talk and you proceed to answer their question and provide useful answers that may make the prospects life a little easier
- The prospect leaves their name and number and asks for you to get in touch to discuss this further in a week or so time
- The next day you send over an email saying it was great to speak to them and that they may find this article helpful with their problem
- You follow the call up with the prospect and ask them if they’ve looked over the material you sent them via email
- The prospect found your article extremely helpful and they are beginning to trust you enough that they are happy to start a trial with you and see how it goes with the intention of signing up to your premium package if the trial goes well
This is a simple and straight-forward approach to how a sale is made and you will often find that the sales cycle is never this easy as a business owner.
Have you had a sales cycle carry on for a year or longer? Your product may cost a lot of money or time to implement so your prospect is hesitant about making any rash decisions.
Or, you find the prospect does all of the above but then last-minute pull’s out and says it’s not for them only to come back a couple of months later and buy your highest-priced package?
Messenger marketing keeps the flame alight even if it is about to burn out and keeps your foot in the door.
Gone are the days of hard-selling and pressuring the customer to buy from you without any need of a conversation to happen.
WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MESSENGER MARKETING AND OTHER FORMS OF MARKETING?
As we briefly mentioned earlier in the article, messenger marketing is still fairly new and not many businesses are using it for marketing yet.
With this comes a whole host of benefits that are resultant of an unsaturated market such as:
- Higher open rate
Higher click-through rate
This can be an annoyance when running ads of any kind for marketing purposes – low open + click-through rates.
People get too used to the familiar sight of a sales email or a Facebook ad and just scroll past or delete. However, when you see a message pop-up in your Facebook messages – are you not at least curious to open it and see what’s on the other side?
Other benefits of messenger marketing are:
A more personalised experience for the customer
Better data collection and analyse
Automates certain tasks
Quicker response time
Payment made easier
Even though when you use messenger marketing you will likely be automating messages and responses to customers, it is still more personalised than email marketing because it is interactive with the customer.
When you send out an email, even if you have segmented your audience, it will still not be able to match the personalisation that can be achieved with messenger marketing.
The data you collect on customers will also far exceed the data you can collect in the other marketing channels. This is particularly true for qualitative data because you can let the customer type out their own questions and answers.
Collecting strong qualitative data gives a business such a great advantage as it is like being a fly on the wall listening in on the conversation – make use of it.
Automation is the name of the game if you want to scale your business also. Of course, it is always worthwhile to do certain tasks manually possibly to increase your customer knowledge, but on the whole, if you can automate, then do it.
You can automate the conversation with your prospect/customer by mapping out what you need to know from the customer, what information they need to get from you and building out from that point so that your messenger bot can take charge of the conversation while you’re fulfilling other tasks.
And because you are automating the conversation, the response time is quicker and will keep the customer engaged before they forget about your business and never come back again.
Payment can sometimes be the biggest pain-point for a business and customer for that matter when buying a product/service online. By including a payment option within your messenger, you can process payments centrally via the platform operator using payment data.
CONCLUSION
If you want to learn more about messenger marketing then we encourage you to visit the following links:
And if you want to speak to ourselves about how you can apply messenger marketing to your own business then get in touch and speak to one of our team today by scheduling a FREE 30-minute no-obligation call.
