Facebook Messenger Marketing: 5 Strategies to Better your Business Growth
Messaging applications have overtaken social media networks in terms of active users and engagement. The ease of use and short content exchange makes up for their huge user base and followership. Social media isn’t going anywhere but when it comes to building relationships and exchanging information, messaging apps take the lead.
In our digital times, consumer behaviour and ways to engage them are constantly changing. Businesses must adapt to this changing scenario to churn out the best results. Delivering the right content to your audience on the right platforms at the right time is the best practice.
Facebook Messenger is one of the leading messaging apps and notable business professionals around the globe use it for marketing purposes.
Throughout this article, I will explain the concept of Facebook Messenger marketing and how you can use it to capture more leads and potential buyers for your business.
What is Facebook Messenger Marketing?
Facebook Messenger marketing is when you leverage the Facebook Messenger chat platform to connect with your customers and build relationships. To implement Facebook Messenger marketing, one needs to integrate their chatbot with Facebook Messenger.
Yes, that’s correct. After you have connected your chatbot with Facebook Messenger, you can use different features and tactics to draw engagement and score leads for your business.
Now if you are thinking that building a chatbot is something extremely sophisticated or undoable, I would love to prove you wrong.
We live in digital times. You don’t need to be a full-fledged coder or development genius to create your own chatbot. There are readymade chatbot builder solutions in the market and you can get started with your chatbot in no time.
Why Facebook Messenger?
Firstly, there is no denying the fact that Facebook is the leading social network by some distance. Secondly, when it comes to messaging apps, Facebook Messenger is the second most widely used and popular messaging application after WhatsApp. And, Facebook is the parent company of WhatsApp.
Most popular global mobile messenger apps as of July 2019, based on the number of monthly active users (in millions)
Apparently, Facebook leads the social game and with an expected number of 2.48 billion people using Facebook Messenger app worldwide by 2021, integrating your chatbot with Facebook Messenger is not a bad idea at all.
Facebook Messenger acts as the perfect platform to connect a wide audience on a regular basis and convert them into leads and customers for your business.
5 Facebook Messenger Marketing Strategies to Implement Now
If you are going to start using Facebook Messenger for your marketing chores, it’s better to do your homework. Even if you are already using it, knowing the best practices for Facebook Messenger marketing won’t harm you at all.
Create Your Own Chatbot
Building a chatbot may seem intimidating to a lot of people including you but that isn’t really the case. Creating a chatbot was never easier and this is one of the prime reasons that conversational chatbots are the new marketing trend.
Size of the chatbot market worldwide, in 2016 and 2025 (in million U.S. dollars)
If you have an active Facebook account and a Facebook business page, you are good to proceed with building your own Facebook Messenger chatbot.
Connect your Facebook page with your chatbot builder, create greetings and stories for your subscribers, implement personalization, and finally test your bot.
These steps are just as simple and convenient as they seem with no catch. As soon as you complete these steps, your own chatbot will be ready to serve its purpose.
You can follow these steps to create a free messenger bot with no-coding.
Chat Widget
As the name suggests, a chat widget is a chat window which allows your website visitors to connect with you. The widget can be implemented on any page of your website including your homepage.
This allows users to directly message you from their browsers and eliminates the need for any messaging app.
If you haven’t been living under a rock recently, you are sure to have encountered one of these on some website for sure.
Here is an example. As soon as you press the “Continue as” button, the chatbot sequence starts and before you know it, you score a lead.
Just to clear out the confusion, messenger chat widgets are way better and advantageous than live chat. Cost-effectiveness, instant responses, and 24*7 availability of messenger chatbots give them an edge over live chat.
Some Messenger chat widget best practices are as follows:
- Your messenger bot should capture important information like customer’s email address, phone number, etc.
- Your customer must be presented with a plethora of options and the domain of choice should always be open for them while conversing with the bot.
- You should let your customer know that the human takeover option is always available to them.
- Your customer must be aware that besides the chat widget, the current bot conversation can be picked up anytime from anywhere on the Messenger app for desktop and mobile.
- Always greet your customer by their first name.
Comment Guard
This feature acts as a lead scoring machine for your Messenger marketing mechanism. Comment guard serves the purpose of a Facebook post autoresponder.
Whenever someone comments on your organic or promoted posts on Facebook, they will be sent a Facebook message automatically.
To explain this better, let’s go through some screenshots.
The above is a Facebook post from an eCommerce brand, Natural Gear Camouflage which invites users to comment on the post and receive coupon codes for it.
This screenshot depicts as soon as someone comments on the post, an automatic reply is sent to them in Messenger. This doesn’t guarantee you a lead yet as there hasn’t been any interaction from the user.
But as soon as the user sends you a message, you have their information as well as the permission to send them messages. Consequently, you have earned yourself a potential lead.
If you can create interactive Facebook posts with a lot of engagement potential and use comment guard wisely, you are bound to have a long list of solid leads.
Including a comment guard to your most engaging posts, promoting such high-engagement posts, and generating posts with comment guards in focus are some tactics to extract the most out of the comment guard feature.
Chat Blasts
Facebook Messenger chat blasting is when you send a message to all of your list members on Messenger collectively. It’s very much similar to email blasts where a single email is sent to a large number of recipients.
Messenger chat blasts prove to be more fruitful as compared to email blasts with better open and response rates and with the rise of personalization, the latter has become an obsolete email marketing technique.
One prerequisite for implementing chat blasts is to apply for subscription messaging and get approved.
To apply for Facebook Subscription Messaging, you need to follow these steps on your Facebook page:
- Navigate to “Settings.” Then to “Messenger Platform.”
- Scroll down to “Advanced Messaging Features.”
- When you see “Subscription Messaging”, Click on “Request.”
You need to refrain from sharing promotional content via subscription messaging. And this lays the foundation of your request being approved or turned down by the moderators at Facebook.
The idea is to send and share content only with the consent of your subscribers. Once the user opts-in, you can use chat blasting to great effect. Keeping your list members engaged and in the loop of things is a handy perk of chat blasting.
Click-To-Messenger Ads
If you have some interactive content to promote, a click to messenger ad would serve the purpose optimally. These ads appear in the regular Facebook News Feed and open the direct conversation gateway.
According to Facebook, ads that click to Messenger are Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger Inbox ads that send people into a conversation with your business in Messenger. Businesses can use ads that click to Messenger to start conversations at scale, leveraging Facebook targeting to find customers relevant to their business.
Here is an example:
As you would notice, the call-to-action in these ads is “Send Message”. Some reasons as to why these ads are preferred over the regular Facebook ad types:
- Generally, users have some presale queries which they need to be answered before purchase. This ad type allows you to satisfy the curiosity of your potential customers.
- All users who engage with your bot on Messenger will become budding leads to be nurtured.
- These ads provide an effective and interactive way to engage with your audience.
Click-to-messenger ads are a bit on the expensive side. Despite this, in the past few years, the usage of these ads has increased a lot. Slowly but surely, marketers are understanding the need for connecting with audiences in a more direct and conversational way.
All in all, Facebook messenger marketing is incomplete without the implementation of click-to-messenger ads. I recommend understanding its use for your business and implementing them accordingly.
Over to You
With the rise and rise of chatbots, Facebook Messenger marketing is not going to slow down anytime soon. Conversational marketing and commerce is the future. Reaching out to audiences across the right channels will determine the success of our marketing strategies in the days to come.
Messaging applications are one such channel and Facebook Messenger leads the way. Using Facebook Messenger for your marketing chores is a no-brainer. Businesses executing messenger marketing now will have a headstart over the others.
Now that you know all about this marketing trend and its best practices, it’s time for you to test the same and reap some great results. If you have already been using it, which of the above strategies works best for your business? Is there any strategy that I missed?
Please have your say. I am listening.
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