Christophe Collet, CEO at S4M
Today mobile users are spending more and more time in few daily apps and it’s clear that messaging apps continue to dominate mobile usage. Certain activities are now completely done in apps. For example instant messaging and communication apps dominate 94% of user’s time spent in this activity. This presents a huge opportunity for brands to leverage messaging platforms and engage with consumers directly from mobile advertising campaigns.
Marketers can reach mobile users across different digital channels and bring the user straightaway into a chatbot and kickstart a conversation – opening the doors to a revolutionary mobile user experience. Chatbots are powerful assets for mobile advertisers to respond and appeal instantly to their consumers, all within a messaging environment. In today’s on-demand economy, consumers expect to have information at their fingertips. Increasingly, shoppers are adopting a self-service approach where they will reach for their smartphones when looking up product information of brand services. Brands need to be well positioned if they don’t want to disappoint.
Texting and chatting on mobile is second nature for today’s smartphone owners and brands can now leverage this to deliver revolutionary personalised service. Advertisers can reach a wide range of audiences efficiently with a promise of instant service from a mobile ad. Imagine the endless possibilities of targeting mobile users while in their favourite apps or websites and directing them into a discovery-driven or service-driven chatbot to close the deal.
This is a gamechanger poised to be a true disruption and alternative to mobile search. Instead of waiting for consumers to search for their a new couch, brands can propose a personalised product while the user is checking the weather or reading the news. Users should no longer have to search all over the internet just to find that ideal new couch. They simply have to kickstart a chat with a robot to get a list of personalised product results.
What’s more? Chatbots bring to the table huge sets of new and actionable data for marketers. The question remains treating these data to interpret and predict what your consumers will do next. Once activated, chatbot conversations can remain continuous so brands can know what shoppers will they need and want. Engaging users at such a highly personalised level will allow brands to communicate in a more authentic and relevant way on mobile than ever before.
Mobile conversational advertising with chatbots is already being adopted today. Whole Foods has launched a discovery-driven chatbot that proposes different recipes for dinner based on emojis from users. A second type of chatbots are service-drive chatbots, like the one launched by Domino’s. The chatbot takes pizza orders directly from the Messenger app.
MMA UK Blog 