Imagine, if every visitor was assigned a guide to master the journey of your website like Luke Skywalker’s Yoda? That day has arrived. Welcome to the guided website journey — where a personal guide greets your visitor and helps them to move through your brand experience — on their terms, confidently.
At Molly Duggan, we questioned whether or not this could be achieved using a Drift chatbot as an automated extension of your team to help drive qualified and quality conversations with the visitors to your website. The answer is a definite yes — and there is much more.
Creating an experience that is valuable to your visitor requires planning. It’s built on a solid understanding of your brand beginning with your strategic goals, key messages, and an authentic brand personality — while never forgetting your brand promise.
Successful companies consider all stakeholders in building their brand. The Marketing group crafts the messaging, Sales formulate the right questions, and Business Strategy sets the overarching goals. Once you have a solid brand strategy, you can begin to chart your Conversational Marketing course.
Once you have a solid brand strategy you can begin to chart your Conversational Marketing course.” — Molly Duggan
Conversational Marketing begins with a scripted playbook that supports your customer experience through the various branches of the journey. Each customer typology has a different need and goal. What is consistent across all typologies is that each typology wants an experience that provides value.
In thinking about the customer journey, consider that there are four main types of experiences that we are most interested in supporting: the visitor that is Engaging, Qualifying, Purchasing, or Recommending. Depending on a customers’ stage in their journey, the visitor may experience your website in any one or all four of these stages.
There are many different types of visitors that travel through your website. Identifying customer typologies helps you to understand better how different visitors experience your site. Typologies are then placed along fictional customer journeys to help identify areas of opportunity.
“Interviews should be conducted regarding the customer experience, and by using this data, major customer typologies are identified. Ideally, you and your team should have identified each fictional journey before creating a playbook.” — Molly Duggan
Can A Bot Be Like Yoda?
It is these customer journeys that inform your playbooks — and also where Yoda enters the scene; aka your Conversational Marketing bot, such as Drift.
In his wisdom, Yoda anticipates the needs of Luke providing information and support at the moment Luke needs it to succeed.
Like Luke in Star Wars, your customer is the hero of your story. And who would Luke be without Yoda? Yoda is essential to the story, guiding Luke to ensure that he fulfills his mission and transforms into the hero.
How can you anticipate your visitor’s needs along their journey?
Like Yoda, anticipating your customers’ needs is at the heart of the playbook. We can begin by understanding that a playbook is a framework for the brand story you are laying out for your customer. Stories help us explain complicated concepts. Stories also spark our imaginations and generate new ideas.
To engage your customer, you will need to form a shared understanding of what is important to them and adapt your vocabulary to match your audience.
- Are they interested only in how much the product or service costs?
- Do they have a strict timeline?
These are concerns that you will want to understand upfront to ease the mind of your visitor as quickly as possible. Understanding what their needs and frustrations are when coming to your site will help you to make sure you touch on every need and frustration for each type of person on the site.
Asking clarifying questions is essential.
- What drives them to your website?
- Do they use a service like yours currently?
A compelling story needs hard facts to back up the narrative. It also helps you to minimize doubt in the areas where your visitor might have a concern. We can begin by asking what each visitor will need when they arrive on your website. Addressing that need and then fulfilling that need will differentiate the experience they have on your website vs. your competitors’ website. Using Conversational Marketing, we fulfill the visitors’ needs by providing straightforward answers to questions or by delivering rich media such as videos, ebooks and white papers directly into the dialogue window.
Pairing your brand story and journey map with a strategic playbook allows your audience to gauge the overall value that you provide quickly making the conversion from visitor to a customer that much easier. Continuing to do this on every segment of your site offers a frictionless experience throughout your website.
If you love the idea of deploying a Drift Conversational Chatbot, but would like some help — reach out to our team of expert Conversation Orchestrators for either brand help or the expertise to create Drift Playbooks that make a hero out of you and your visitors.
May the 4th be with you. 🙂
