If you’re in marketing, you’ve probably already read a thing or two about the Silicon Valley’s latest obsession: chatbots. Email has dominated ROI in digital marketing campaigns for the last decade — at the end of the day, you can’t beat the price free impressions. The best part is, since mailing lists are based on opt-ins, you already know the people that sign up are highly engaged.

For the most part, content is free to create — how frequently you send out email blasts and which types of content you create depend on how much time you choose to invest.

While email campaigns have been the standard in terms of ROI for years, any email marketer knows an open rate of ~25% and a CTR (clickthrough rate) of ~5% is something to be proud of. Just to be clear, that means three-quarters of your audience isn’t even interested enough to click.

Compare that to Facebook Messenger chatbots which tend to see open rates as high as 88% and you start to get the picture.

Chatbots Aren’t Designed to Kill Email Marketing

Chatbots aren’t supposed to replace email marketing campaigns (yet). They’re completely different. Chatbots are interactive — much more like a conversation than a speech — so for now, email is still better for long-form content.

While things like notifications, shipping confirmations, and even purchasing experiences are all better over chatbot, delivering large amounts of texts in a small chat window can be difficult.

That being said, if your target audience is under 45, it’s probably time to start thinking about reformatting the way you send out content. Like most things, it’s impossible to know definitively which platform is better for your business without trying both and measuring the response.

All of the Cool Kids Are Using Messenger these Days

Right now, 13-24 is the largest age group for messaging apps, followed by 25-44, and finally, 45+. Email app usage tends to increase with age, while younger audiences appear to be more accepting of the chatbot revolution.

Emails still cater better to older audiences that are more accustomed to traditional, web-based desktop experiences. With messaging apps have a very low adoption rate among older audiences, focusing on high-quality mailing campaigns that they’re already used to may be a better option.

That being said, chatbots are the way of the future in any other scenario.

The best approach for any content marketing campaign is to reach your audience where they’re already engaged, using a platform they’re already familiar with. For younger audiences, this means messaging apps.

If you’re looking to reach millennials and beyond, chatbots are unbeatable in terms of usability and overall customer engagement.

How Chatbots Compare to Mailing Lists

The Similarities

Both chatbots and mailing campaigns require users to opt-in before they can get notifications or see any materials from your campaign. Similar to signing up for a mailing list by entering your email, Facebook Messenger requires users to follow the page’s bot before they can receive any messages.

Users can unsubscribe from both at any time, and Messenger takes it a step further by allowing users to stop the conversation by deleting it.

Chatbots and mailing lists both rely heavily on clear CTAs, albeit in a completely different form. The goal of either of these opt-in based marketing channels is to get people to interact with your brand.

With an email campaign, you’re putting links in content and hoping users head to outbound destinations. Chatbots also use CTAs but have the advantage of allowing users to respond directly to the conversation itself, without having to navigate away from the page they’re on. In the fast-paced world millennials are used to, this results in significantly better open rates and higher overall engagement.

The Differences

We all have that one email subscription that just doesn’t stop bothering us — regardless of how many times you click unsubscribe.

Just because mailing lists are based on opt-ins doesn’t necessarily mean those people intended to sign up. One of the main reasons mailing lists have incredibly low CTRs and open rates is because people signed up unintentionally — either when making a purchase, registering for an account, or starting a trial.

On the other hand, Facebook Messenger has strict parameters regarding how bots can connect with users. People can only be contacted by a bot after clicking follow, sending the bot a message, or posting/commenting on the page associated with the bot.

Chatbot messages feel more personal, and they aren’t perceived as a commercial distraction. When crafting conversational content, variety is your friend. If you want to get amazing engagement, you can’t come off as spammy — be unexpected, and make your content feel personal.

It’s important to remember that chatbots are actually interactive — they shouldn’t be used to inundate customers with a monologue from your business.

Smartphones allow us to operate at light speed. As the world around us continues to speed up, our attention spans decrease. Users want quick, to-the-point interactions. Chatbots allow you to market your brand by providing something that’s actually useful to your customers.

How to Quadruple Your Engagement by Using a Chatbot

Only send out your best content. Messages are way more personal than emails. You’re likely going to cause the recipient to stop what they’re doing, so it’s important to make sure your content is worthy of an interruption.

Chatbots aren’t just another tool to broadcast content — they’re about changing the way people interact with your brand. Conversational UIs (user interfaces) enable businesses to streamline the customer experience in a new way.

If you’re not useful, your recipients are simply going to type “unsubscribe.”

You’re not trying to design a single message or a piece of content, you’re trying to design a natural conversation — a dialogue. Use chatbots to reimagine the way you notify and interact with your customers.

Snapchat has always been a bit of a mystery to most digital marketers. Despite having over 178 million DAU in an extremely desirable age range, Snapchat’s lack of analytics and tracking capabilities has always been a bit of a roadblock to most marketers.

While the LA-based ephemeral content platform may not have the reach or tracking power of Facebook and Instagram, but its users are undeniably loyal. With over 3 billion snaps sent every day, it’s probably not a surprise that Snapchat has the highest penetration into the 12-17 age demographic out of any current social media platform. 7/10 Snapchatters are millennials, and the average user sends over 20 snaps to their friends each day.

Geofilters are excellent at engaging younger users with your brand in a way that feels fun and authentic. If you’re a marketer, it’s important to capitalize on Geofilters before they become yet another part of the oversaturated social media landscape. Build a strong presence on Snapchat early on while its users still appreciate engaging content.

Geofilters Spread like Wildfire

It’s easy to rack up video views on Facebook with a $20 campaign, but are you really leaving a lasting impact on anyone? We all know Facebook isn’t the most engaged platform — for the most part, its campaigns are a numbers game.

Geofilters are different. Instead of forced impressions, users interact with filters organically as they edit and publish their own content. Everyone has access to your filter within a given geofence, but the real magic happens when these users start to send snaps to their friends and post stories using your filter.

If a user takes a photo using your filter and publishes on his or her story, you’ve immediately activated their entire following with a single snap. Not only is it highly targetable based on location, but to the end user, it doesn’t feel like a blatant advertisement.

Users are significantly more likely to engage with your brand because, at the end of the day, you’re not the one serving the ad. The key to a viral Snapchat filter is to make something people want to play with — be funny, be engaging, and make the filter about the user, not your brand.

How to Make a Great Filter

“Content is king, but context is god” — Gary Vaynerchuk

The most important aspect of any Snapchat Geofilter is context. Pick an event, capitalize on a current trend, or build something specific to the user’s location — just craft a narrative that actually makes sense.

Nobody is going to want to share your filter with their friends if it doesn’t tell a story that is relevant to the photo they’re taking. It’s vital to think about where your filter is going to be displayed and what types of photos users are going to be sending around.

It’s also important to consider the overall environment. Photos captured in a dark area will fare better with light graphics, but if it’s the middle of the day, white text might get lost in the sky. Make sure your visuals pop but don’t be overly intrusive.

Always leave a clear area for users’ faces. Keep your graphics on the top, bottom, and sides of the screen — users are sending photos to their friends — if you create something engaging, you might get lucky enough to hitch along for the ride.

Measure twice, submit once. Test your Geofilter on your own snaps before sending it in for review. Make sure everything fits and you can still see faces on multiple device sizes/aspect ratios. If you decide to include your logo, it definitely shouldn’t be the focus of your filter.

Technical specifications:

Lock in Your Location and Get Started

After you finish submitting your Geofilter’s creative, you’ll be asked to select a date range and location for your campaign. For events, it’s a good idea to get the ball rolling a few days before people start showing up — you’ll generate hype and improve your odds of reaching more people.

On the other hand, for a product launch, the strategy might be a little different. Like any marketing tactic, you should never start a Geofilter without first establishing a clear goal for your campaign.

Once you’ve picked a date range, search for the area you’re targeting and use the pins to draw a Geofence around it. It’s good practice to make the fence a little larger than the actual area you’re targeting because mobile devices aren’t 100% accurate at tracking users’ locations.

It’s better to have your filter overextend and spill over into other areas than it is to have users at your event not be able to access it. The minimum is 20,000 square feet, and the maximum is 5,000,000 square feet — everything is priced by the hour. Snapchat gives you a spend in the upper right corner depending on the duration of your campaign and the size of your geofence.

For the most part, there are three overarching goals when using Snapchat filters to market your brand: make your content shareable, give your brand context, and get people to remember your brand in a unique way. Geofilters on Snapchat may not be very trackable, but they can do wonders in terms of getting people to engage with your brand in a way that’s genuinely fun. Geofilters let you leverage hundreds of micro-influencers with as little as five dollars.

5 Marketing Techniques for Businesses on Tight Budgets

While most celebrity startups from the Silicon Valley will make you think otherwise, most businesses don’t have unlimited funding. After designing, testing, and eventually building a product, hiring a team, and perhaps finding a location, it’s easy for marketing to get cast aside as an afterthought.

But how can you scale your business without generating new leads? Unless you’re at the top of your industry, chances are, you’re not going to get much inbound interest without first stirring the pot.

Not all successful marketing campaigns have to involve a multi-million dollar ad spend.

High-quality customer acquisition doesn’t always come at a high cost, and more importantly, high cost definitely doesn’t mean high conversion. Many of the highest converting advertising techniques like email lists and referral programs are extremely cheap (or free) to build.

Here are four marketing techniques to help you stand out regardless of your business’s marketing budget.

 

Content, Content, Content…

From Balenciaga’s Instagram to InvisionApp’s world-class design blog, Muzli, content marketing is the foundation of almost every advertising campaign we see on a day-to-day basis. Shareable content is the key to increasing your number of inbound leads. Social media, blogs, mailing lists, and all other types of shareable content are tools to generate interest surrounding your brand.

If you want to create content that gets social media users excited, you need to cater to the interests of your target audience. Hubspot’s marketing blog is the perfect example. For those of you that don’t know, Hubspot is a marketing software company famous for their CRM and social media planning apps.

They know their target customers are social media marketers and small businesses trying to take marketing into their own hands, so they create a ton of free marketing guides on their blog.

Not only does this provide a world of value for their customers, but it also demonstrates the company’s proficiency in digital marketing.

Blogs aren’t all about five step guides and good writing. Hubspot incorporates engaging videos and infographics into their blog posts to increase their sharability. At a glance, a 1000 word wall of text can be pretty intimidating. On the flip side, a one-page infographic accessible and easy to glance at.

If you want to leverage content to boost your online presence, it’s vital to give users something they want to share.

Content is the fuel to social media’s fire—having a larger following doesn’t matter unless you have something valuable to broadcast. If users don’t find your content engaging, they’re not going to share it—it’s that simple. Working on crafting quality content is paramount for any advertising channel.

 

Take Advantage of Online Review Websites (FB, Google, Yelp)

For brick and mortar businesses, reputation is everything—that’s why companies like Yelp, Google, and now Facebook have all started to hone in on user-generated reviews.

The best part? People heading searching for businesses on Google or visiting your profile on Yelp are inherently interested in what you have to offer. Inbound interest is exponentially more powerful than any outbound advertisement.

Despite the fact that it’s free to build a profile on Yelp, Google, Facebook, and just about any other review platform, there’s a shocking number of businesses that skip out on the organic search interest by leaving their pages unclaimed.

When someone is scrolling through five listings at a time on their phone, you have just a few seconds to capture their attention. Building a beautiful profile ensures you’ll stand out to the people most interested in your business.

Post bright, beautiful images, and use strong copy to engage users as soon as they land on your profile.

Both Facebook and Yelp allow businesses to create check-in deals for potential customers to increase conversions and generate more user reviews. If you see entertaining reviews with a good rating, sharing them on your social channels is a great way to add credibility and engage with the community.

 

Focus on Your Social Profiles

Jake Kassan and Kramer LePlante built a $90M watch empire advertising almost exclusively on Instagram. MVMT Watches currently has the ability to broadcast to over 950K highly targeted users with a single post—for free.

In terms of audience and reach, there’s really no reason to look anywhere other than social media for most of your marketing efforts.

If you take matters into your own hands, growing your following is largely free. While you may want to invest in some photo or video gear depending on what platform you choose, there’s no cost to publish content or reach followers.

Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn all serve extremely different purposes in terms of what audience they capture and how their users engage with content.

While Instagram is great for reaching millennials and going viral with photo/video content, LinkedIn is a lot better for text posts and B2B deals.

With over a billion users, Facebook sits somewhere nicely in the middle. The audience isn’t as young as Instagram, but there are a lot more types of content at your disposal.

MVMT has found particular success with the “modern nomad” and posts photos centered around the adventure lifestyle. Figure out where your target audience is and investigate what types of content they’re already engaging with. On social media, listening to your audience is equally as important as what you say.

 

Get Others to Post About Your Business

Whether it’s a shoutout from an influencer or a column on the front of the local newspaper, nothing beats free publicity.

Getting others to post about your business builds your customer referral network and increases social proof.

Giving back to the community, hosting events, or even offering discounts to those who post about your business are great ways to make a lasting impression.

In most situations, it’s a win-win; you do something good for the community, you look good doing it, and in the end, you get a ton of visibility.

Competitions on social media are another popular tactic for getting people to post about your business. Users want to see content from other users. However, people aren’t going to post about your business unless there’s some value in it for them—always offer incentives for using your hashtag, posting your product, and referring friends.