Ultimate Guide to Facebook Messenger Marketing

Facebook. Are you excited already? Well, you should be, considering these numbers:

• It has over 1.18 billion daily active users; that’s 5 times the population of US, and one-sixth of the global population.
• The average user spends close to 50 minutes a day with Facebook’s channels, considering Facebook Newsfeed, Messenger, WhatsApp, and others. That’s about 6% of the average human’s waking hours.
• Facebook is the major marketing platform for almost 50% marketers, as per a study conducted in 2016.

This guide is not, however, about Facebook marketing in general; we’re going to focus exclusively on Facebook Messenger and the terrific marketing opportunities it provides.

Why Bother With Facebook Messenger?

Did you know? Facebook Messenger has more than 1 billion average active users monthly. The number is only going to increase, considering Facebook launched the Messenger Platform in April 2016. This platform lets businesses easily build bots that can help automate a lot of their marketing conversations.

A recent HubSpot study estimated that almost 47% of users are interested in the idea of purchasing items from bots. 1800-Flowers, for instance, lets users place orders via its bot.

What All Can Marketers Achieve Using Facebook Messenger?

Over a billion messages are exchanged among people and Facebook Pages daily. You just need to do a Google search to find out success stories of brands that have achieved major improvements in response times, customer satisfaction metrics, and even sales, using Facebook Messenger with all its revolutionary automation potential. For starters, here are 4 amazing opportunities for marketers to make use of:

• Automate replies using Facebook Messenger bots to reach out to more people, and to improve the customer experience for those having questions for your brand.
• Automate messages using different content formats such as text, CT buttons, images, and links to automate highly focused, value adding, and goal oriented messages to customer replies.
• Send timely reminders to users to keep your brand in their mind space and to remind them of actions that will help your brand achieve its marketing goals.
• Use AI to quickly improve, automate, and enhance customer experiences with your brand’s Facebook Page.
• Leverage opportunities of targeted advertisements that make use of Messenger to drive conversions.
• Integrate highly automated chatbots using external sources to achieve complex automation through your sales funnel.

Let’s delve deeper into how you can go about achieving some of these objectives.

Targeted Advertising Using Messenger Ad Campaigns

As of now, there are 2 types of Messenger advertisements that marketers can use. First, advertisements that can direct users to Facebook Messenger. Second, advertisements that send advertisements to Messenger.

Send People to Messenger ads are visible in newsfeeds, and come with a CTA button that takes the user to Messenger along with a customizable welcome advertisement message. This gives marketers control in terms of directing users to Messenger, where they can control the conversation. I recommend you specify the call to action as ‘send message’ so that the user knows the next step to move ahead with the conversation.

‘Send Messages to People on Messenger’ advertisements work for people who’ve messaged your Facebook page earlier. You can specify a headline, text, link descriptions while setting up such ad campaigns.

Advanced Automation with Facebook Messenger Using Chatbots

Chatbots are computer programs that can simulate conversations with human users in natural language, and fine-tune responses by understanding context and intention of the conversation. Chatbots are superb, because:

• Many of them are available for free
• They don’t need you to do any coding
• They’re super user-friendly

Here are so many ways you can use chatbots (alone, or in conjugation with Facebook Messenger) to achieve marketing goals around:

• Payments
• Coupons
• Customer Support
• Personalized yet automated responses
• Product Search
• Content
• Demos

After you set up a chatbot, you can integrate Facebook Messenger with it. Invest time in planning the entire communication flow between the user and chatbot to meet your specific business goals. 

Wait, There’s More

Here are some more awesome marketing goals you can explore and achieve using Facebook Messenger and 3rd party services around it.

• Expanding your list of subscribers with Facebook Messenger is even better than conventional email marketing, because the prospect never has to leave the page, and there are is no email verification process.
• You can enhance your Facebook Messenger marketing using your blog; that’s by using hyperlinks in your blog content, clicking on which makes the reader a subscriber on Facebook Messenger.
• Using overlay widgets, you can place a pop up on any web property, creating a gateway that can bring people to Facebook Messenger with a single click.

Enough reading; now’s the time to get on board the Facebook Messenger juggernaut.