Category: Blogs

What Is A Chat Bot?

A Chat Bot is a virtual assistant which communicates through text messages, chat forms on your website, or instant messenger platforms like Facebook Messenger, helping you get closer to your customers.

Gartner forecasts that by 2020, over 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human.

What Can A Chat Bot Do For Your Business?

Improve customer service.

Chat Bots are an excellent option for businesses who don’t want their customers to have to wait for an operator to answer — “Stay on the line, your call is very important to us,” is always irritating, right? – and for businesses who don’t want their customers to have to scroll through endless pages of FAQ’s to find what they need.

Streamline the shopping process.

It only takes a moment for a customer to type what they are looking for, and the Chat Bot can send the information directly to your sales department. The Chat Bot will also remember your customer’s preferences and will use this information when they return.

Personalize communication.

A Chat Bot can answer your customer’s specific questions instead of displaying a long list of information. This is important because the more attention a customer gets the greater their desire will be to buy something from you.

Improve response rates.

A massive 90% of questions sent to Facebook business pages remain unanswered. A Chat Bot will respond to 100% of messages, making your business more appealing to customers, and converting more of your visitors into buyers.

Automate repetitive tasks.

Most customers want to get answers to the same questions — When are you open? Where are you based? Do you deliver? A Chat Bot can reduce your workload by saving time on answering the same questions over and over again.

Using Chat Bots To Drive Sales

Chat Bots are not just a way of making your life easier – they are a way of driving sales to your business, through Messenger Ads.

Facebook Messenger is the fourth most downloaded App on the app store, and has 1.3 billion users, who send 8 billion messages every month.

There are two key reasons for running messenger ads:

1. The customer might have a “sales objection,” which they need answering before they are willing to purchase.

A lot of people won’t pick up the phone and ask the question these days and will instead just abandon the sale. Messenger is an informal way to start a conversation and overcome their objection to purchasing.

2. Once a customer interacts with your bot they are counted as a messenger subscriber, which is similar to getting an email lead.

Just as capturing an email allows you to send regular newsletters to your customers, getting a customer into your chat flow allows you to send them promotional messages via messenger.

Chat Bot Tips: creating a great Chat Bot experience

Give your chat bot a persona.

Use customer personas to understand the behaviour of particular user groups, and what they expect from your website and your business. Create a personality, which not only resonates well with these groups but is also engaging and fun.

Use waiting time.

Waiting adds an additional “human factor” to the conversation. When people talk to each other, the response time can be very random; people don’t always respond exactly upon receiving a message. Waiting time can also ensure that the user has time to process the information that the chat bot provided.

Perform A/B tests.

Create multiple versions of the bot and measure the results to see which elements work best.

Avoid a wall of text. 

As with blog posts, seeing huge blocks of text can be overwhelming. Test your messaging app on as many devices as possible, check the messages on different screen sizes, and use emojis every now and then to break up the text that your customers see.

Ready to start using Chat Bots to automate your business?

We can create the perfect chat bot to save you time, increase your customer engagement and help you to generate more sales and leads for your business. Contact Just Think today and let’s get started!

 

Outdoor/OOH advertising, such as billboards and bus stop posters, are considered a traditional media platform. However, in the last few years, outdoor advertising has come on leaps and bounds and is now more technologically advanced and interactive than ever. So, just what are the benefits?

Fast Cover Build: a heavy weight campaign would provide high cover build in week 1 reaching 80% of the audience and by week two is giving the frequency of the campaign

Contextual Placement: being located in the right place at the right time – people connect with visual advertising

It’s always on! Outdoor messages are present 24/7, so whatever the time of day or night, the message is seen by the audience.

In recent years, more and more brands are pushing the boundaries between outdoor advertising and social media, especially twitter. The two can be used together to encourage interaction and engagement and use a # to display messages or images from the public on relevant screens, buildings and OOH mediums. Examples of this can be seen in places such as Times Square, Trafalgar Square and also at events such as festivals, football matches and gigs where live twitter feeds are displayed to encourage interaction with relevant brands/events. Some brands are also running competitions on social media where competition entry winners’ photographs can be published on billboards and other OOH mediums.

Outdoor advertising has often been perceived as a more laid back or passive approach to marketing, but with new advances and interactive features, it is becoming more dynamic and advanced than ever before.

To discuss Out Of Home Advertising for your business, contact Just Think today!

Introduction
Search engines don’t always see a web page the same as we do, a bells and whistles page built with Flash might look amazing to you and me, but there will be no information for the search engine robots to index and it is unlikely to feature as high as you want, in search results.
A great website needs to be structured for both humans and search engines alike and here are some steps you can take to make sure your website is search friendly.

1) Content
Most of the content needs to be in HTML text because search engines robots can read text a lot easier than images, JavaScript or Flash, which will be ignored. Of course, nobody wants a website which is just words, it looks boring and is unlikely to capture the user’s attention, anyone involved in SEO or digital marketing will tell you images, videos etc are important for a great website and the tips below will allow you to use visuals while still being found by the search engines.

1. Include text on the pages that contain Flash or Java plug-ins.
2. Add crawlable or navigation links to search boxes
3. Upload transcripts or closed captions to video content in order to make them searchable
4. Assign “alt attributes” to images this provides the search engine bots with a text description of the images which they can recognise.
5. Use HTML5 instead of Flash

Another important feature of your content is that it needs to be unique. Google loves original content they want to provide the user with the best experience, which means giving choice, variety and relevant information. Duplicate content doesn’t do this and you may be penalised.

Duplicate content within your own site can be caused by a number of things including;

• Session IDs
• Tracking parameters
• Scrapers
• Comment pagination
• Printer friendly pages
• Www and non-www websites

This might all sound a bit complicated for the average person, however, one way you can establish whether you have duplicate content is by using Google Webmaster Tools. If you do, there are ways of removing it which you can discuss with your web designer.

2) Title Tags

Title tags are one of the most important elements of SEO and it is essential to get them right if you want your website to be search friendly. The mission is to create a title that captures the user’s attention but also makes the search engines take notice.

A title tag should be under 60 characters so the user can see it in its entirety and understand what the content is about, it should also contain your main keyword which is usually at the beginning and if possible a benefit, which could be just giving the user information

Here is are 2 title tags from the same company leading to different pages of the site, both have the main keyword, a benefit, which is this case is a choice and they tell both the user and the search engine the same thing.

3) Sitemaps

A Sitemap is a great way to have all your web pages indexed by the search engines. It is an XML file that lists every URL your website has, with additional metadata about each one. Every website and blog should have a sitemap because it informs the search engines of any changes to your pages.

It enables the search engine crawlers to follow links to all your pages, meaning you need to rely less on external links bringing them to your site. Implementing a sitemap involves 3 steps Firstly, you need to generate the sitemap, some sitemap generators include

XML Sitemaps

WordPress Sitemap Plugin

Small SEO Tools

You then need to upload it to your website and finally notify Google about it, by adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account. This useful guide tells you how.

Rich Snippets

These days when conducting a search online, users are often presented with ratings, reviews, locations, and pictures relating to a particular site, this is done by implementing rich snippets. Rich snippets are structured data mark ups that web designers add to the HTML that help the search engines to understand the information contained in a particular web page

It’s the difference between this:

or this:

Which would you click on?

Now transfer this to almost any business, a pretty picture, good reviews, and detailed information, plumbers, for instance, could mark up free estimates, their location, membership of trusted associations, all things that would make a user more likely to click onto their site.

Google’s aim is to provide their users with the most relevant search results possible and using Schema markup will help them deliver this. Studies have found that pages using schema markup rank better than pages without schema.org integrations by around four positions

Despite a relatively low number of websites using this tool, Google presents schema-derived markups in around 36% of results. So, if they can read your page clearly this information will be passed on to the user. This will result in your page ranking higher in the SERPs. A Win Win situation!

Remove Hidden Text

In the past, some dodgy webmasters were known to use hidden text to stuff keywords onto their pages and increase their ranking, when people keyed in those words the site would be shown in the results, even though it might have nothing to do with the user’s query.

Google quickly put a stop to this and programmed its algorithms to penalise websites where hidden text was found. Great, you might think, cracking down on “Black Hat” tactics has got to be good, right?

Well, yes, it is, but unfortunately some sites may inadvertently have hidden text especially if you use a free web host which includes adverts on your site or perhaps you have text informing people using a specific browser that they won’t be able to access certain features of the site, because this can’t be viewed by users on other browsers it is classed as hidden text, maybe you have some content written in a similar colour to the background, a drop down menu for navigation or use third party scripts, any of these also be perceived as hidden text.

Your website will suffer dramatically if Google detects any hidden text and can even be removed completely, so it is essential you review your website regularly you can do this by holding down the “a” and “control” key on your keyboard or selecting “edit” and then from the menu in your browser. then clicking on “select all”

Conclusion

The 5 tips above may well be the tip of the ice berg as far as search engine optimization is concerned but everybody has to start somewhere. The 5 points in question are part of the starting block we undertake at SearchRise – A leading Newcastle SEO agency and we do this for every client we board. These are the basics, once you’ve got this right you can concentrate on the more familiar aspects of SEO such as local map listings, short and long-tail keywords, fast loading times and social media. Search engine optimisation can be a lengthy process and should really be undertaken by an expert to make sure it’s done right and your website does the job it was created for. Bring in more business!