How To Market Your Business With Messenger: The New Social Media Message Marketing Channel

Social Media Marketers will tell you to develop your Facebook (Meta) pages based on your target audience and start running adverts to build brand awareness and hopefully drive some traffic to your website. This strategy is wrong!

Yes, you can target finally target your audience with their demographics, likes, and dislikes, but you cannot determine their position in a customer journey, i.e. their buying intent!

A much better way is to run adverts with a call to action via messenger and based on that response you can determine where they are in the buying cycle, automatically answer pre-sale questions, and complete the sale or place them into a retargeting audience.

The ROI is considerably better, as are the Open and Click-Through Rates (CTR).

Introduction to Messenger Marketing

How to integrate a Messenger ad campaign with your website

1. First of all you need to get yourself a bot to chat with your target audience. I have covered this in much detail in previous articles, but basically, you should first focus on social bots that you build for your website to automate existing tasks like support and so on.

2. Then consider building a bot with the same capabilities you have on your website. This will allow you to get to know your customers personally and identify them early in the purchasing process. For example, you might be able to say, “I don’t have a good user experience with our products, but I’d like to sign up and give you a try.” This will raise their interest and chances of conversion.

Why is Facebook Messenger Marketing better than Facebook Advertising?

Real-Time Targeting – A consumer’s willingness to buy or purchase a product is based on three key factors: intent, readiness to buy, and acquisition cost. Facebook marketing gives you the capability to measure all three elements.

Consumers on Facebook are already interested in your product or service. You simply need to put in your desired amount to show their interest, so they get a sense of how valuable your product or service is to them.

It is then just a matter of taking action, such as filling out a survey, filling out a form, or viewing an ad. Facebook Messenger marketing works in real-time, and the potential buyers have indicated their interest. The vast majority of visitors, new and old, will finish a mobile session within 3-4 seconds.

Messenger Marketing Strategy

The standard bot for messaging apps is Amazon’s Alexa. This bot responds to a spoken word and it can’t read a text message or answer a question. This is a unique opportunity to make your brand more human and connect with your customers via the medium that they are already using. As mentioned before,

Facebook Messenger has over a billion active users and that includes brands and businesses. So let’s assume that Facebook currently has a maximum of 2,500 business pages; that means if you have a business page on Facebook then there are over 30,000 businesses in your targeted audience!

If you have an A+ customer experience your followers will have faith in you and believe that your product is good, and they will be willing to give you feedback.

Why Messenger Marketing is a Better Alternative

Traditional advertisements don’t work on Messenger, because consumers don’t see them until they’re already motivated to click through to your website.

For instance, in my mind, there is no better place to advertise than on Instagram Stories because they’re posted on your own profile, yet don’t seem to interrupt people’s workflow.

You can insert ads into the follower’s timeline but, even then, many ignore them. Because of this, your CTR is extremely low and so are your conversions.

As a result, you have to spend more to build a higher number of followers and attract more likes. But on Messenger, there is a deeper engagement. On Instagram Stories, there is a 40% open rate and yet the conversion rate on Messenger ads is 95%.

What are the Benefits of Messenger Marketing?

Easy to track! Facebook Messenger ads are sent automatically to customers who have viewed your advert on your Facebook page.

For example, if a customer messages a txt number then it will be sent to their Facebook Messenger channel.

• Easy to measure. It is fairly easy to understand where the customers have come from and which channel they have interacted with your advert.
• PUT YOUR ADS OUT THERE! Within minutes you are reaching your customers and getting the word out about your latest stock or even a new special.
• Truly authentic! The customer conversations will be real and transparent. If your customer is sceptical of a product offer, they can simply ignore it and you will never see their response.

Facebook Messenger Engagement Rules

The first rule is that every message will appear in the inbox. Your message will not be displayed to your clients unless they have clicked on your ad to see it in their inbox.

Every time you send a message to your clients, you must send it to their inbox, they will see your message, and if they have not already seen it within the last 6 hours they will see a notification in their inbox.

If they click on that notification they will see the message.

If they click it, they will see a chat box that allows them to chat with you via Messenger.

If they say they don’t have time to chat, it’s up to you to decide whether to move on to the next message or see if they want to stay on and chat.

Messenger Marketing and GDPR

We all saw how Facebook, and now Twitter are dealing with the influx of GDPR and would not be surprised to see the same happen with Messenger. You will be well advised to have your customer data protection measures in place with regards to the handling of user data and to have adequate staff available to deal with any queries and complaints.

We would suggest that you contact the GDPR experts, or alternatively take advice from an experienced UK digital marketing company.

How to Retarget Your Audience

On Facebook, you can actually target your audience in a relatively objective way by targeting based on their state of mind i.e. their activity, content, and demographics.

On Messenger, however, your audience can be much more subjective. One mistake you can make is to run ads on Facebook targeting your audience based on how much time they spend on Facebook, rather than on Messenger.

Facebook groups are popular among Facebook users. So, in order to run an effective social media campaign in Messenger, you need to contact each group, and ask your targeted audience to reach out to you on Messenger.

Why? A recent Salesforce survey found that only 27% of people wanted to be contacted via Facebook (but a whopping 80% were on Facebook groups).

Facebook Messenger and Instagram Messenging a combined marketing service?

According to Instant Tools, “Facebook Messenger Marketing” by Cash and Coin Media Marketing uses Instagram to reach potential customers and achieve the best results for instant message advertising. The use of both Facebook and Instagram has many benefits, and can even be used in conjunction to target both users.

Yes, Instagram works best in the platform categories (product, style, fashion, automobiles, and etc.) but there is nothing stopping you from running Facebook ads and Instagram ads (with identical ad copy) and then running Instagram Ads on your Facebook pages.

This will allow you to run efficient Facebook advertising campaigns across all Facebook pages without having to pay for Facebook advertising on your Instagram page.

Don’t Know Where to Start?

We can work with your company to develop an effective Messenger chatbot – it all starts with a Messenger Workshop