How to Drive Organic Traffic With Bots

Want more website visitors? Wondering how Messenger bots can help?

To explore how to bots can drive organic traffic to your website, I interview Natasha Takahashi.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Natasha Takahashi, a chatbot expert and founder of the School of Bots, a community for marketers seeking to master bots. She also hosts the There's a Bot For That live show, and she has a range of courses including Chatbot Agency Accelerator.

Natasha explains how to integrate chatbots into your social media and email marketing.

You'll also discover tips for growing your bot subscriber list and engaging with subscribers effectively.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Messenger Bots That Drive Website Traffic
Natasha's Story
In 2016, after working as a marketer for tech startups and with a few clients of her own, Natasha was planning to launch a social media marketing agency with her co-founder, Kyle Willis. To stay on top of everything happening in social media marketing, she watched F8 (Facebook's developer conference) remotely, where they announced Facebook Messenger bots.

At the conference, Facebook showed enterprise examples, but right away, Natasha wanted to start testing whether Messenger bots would be effective for her clients, which were small- and mid-sized businesses. She thought if she could learn to market with bots really well, she might be able to make her new agency stand out.

After about 4 or 5 months, Natasha's bot marketing was going well for her clients. As is common with bot marketing, her clients had high open and click rates. They also had good conversion and retention rates. Since getting started with bots 2 years ago, Natasha and her agency have built about 100 bots.

Today, in addition to her chatbot agency, Natasha and Kyle run School of Bots, which launched in January 2018. They created it as a resource for chatbot marketing and strategy, with free articles, videos, and interviews with thought leaders. Their goal is to provide up-to-date content in a niche that changes quickly.

At the same time, Natasha and Kyle launched the Chatbot Agency Accelerator, which teaches people how to build their chatbot agencies and add chatbots to their offerings. Although they didn't push this program, it's taken off. They've grown the community, and Natasha has been doing a lot of speaking engagements.

Listen to the show to hear Natasha share what some of her hopes were as she became an entrepreneur.
Why Use Messenger Bots?
Natasha thinks right now is the perfect time to build a bot for your company or clients because, with all of the buzz about bots, people know about them but may not fully understand them.

Although WhatsApp surpassed Messenger in terms of number of users, Natasha still recommends focusing on Messenger because its users still send more messages per month than WhatsApp users do. Also, Facebook Messenger works with chatbot platforms like ManyChat and Chatfuel, which are designed for non-coders and make it easy to create a chatbot and get results.

Right now, other platforms like Slack, Skype, Telegram, and WhatsApp are still just like email in terms of how you can use them to market to users.

Messenger chatbots are also a great way to drive traffic to your website now that the Facebook algorithm no longer prioritizes social posting. With a chatbot, no algorithm is controlling what people see; you can control the conversation between your page and the user. Thus, driving traffic with a chatbot is much easier than it is with a regular post to your Facebook page or even an email.

Listen to the show to hear my thoughts about chatbots versus email.