7 Chatbot Discovery Hacks
How to Quickly Improve Discoverability for Your Bot
For bot developers, discoverability is one of the biggest pain points. So how can you get potential customers or clients to discover your business, brand, products, or services?
Sure, you could run a basic, traditional marketing campaign in local print media. Or maybe utilize the free ad space provided through social media platforms. You can even make the most of word-of-mouth referrals. There’s nothing wrong with those efforts, but now that search engine optimization (SEO) is at the forefront of nearly every marketing strategy, people can easily find the right business, service, or technology with a search engine and specific keywords.
They can find bots this way, too! You need to ensure that customers and clients — whether current or potential — can easily discover your bot. Let’s begin!
1. Use .BOT to support discoverability
.BOT is the future of SEO for chatbots. Search engines, like Google and Yahoo, are already starting to treat chatbots differently. By using the .BOT domain, you’re telling search engine results pages (SERPs) that this is a bot. As the chatbot space evolves and as users begin to search the word bot, domains that end in .BOT will have a huge SEO advantage. As a result, we strongly recommend using this extension
2. Make the most of listing sites, communities, and partnerships
Use bot-listing sites to ensure that potential users looking for a bot like yours (or one that could work in conjunction with another service) can easily find it. Popular listing sites include Product Hunt and BotList, list your bot and all of its features so it can easily be found. Narrow down your criteria for potential users to those who are trying to find the specific types of services provided by your bot.
Connect with large communities that already have followings. If you can connect your bot with various groups, like alumni associations, political parties, or even fans and followers of musicians, sports teams, and artists, you open your bot up to a world of prospective customers and clients.
Reach out to companies, businesses, organizations, and websites that might be interested in partnering with you for your bot’s services. Let’s say your bot is capable of recommending the best art exhibitions to see in a given city, based on specific preferences. You could potentially partner with museums and galleries in that city — or even with related local magazines and tourist publications.
3. Build your bot to be inherently social
Design and build your bot specifically for a unique or targeted demographic, social group, or audience that could really benefit from its functions and services. Not only does this help to fill a specific social niche, but it could also help your bot to go viral. Imagine if a single, unique audience turned your bot into a social phenomenon, just by passing it along through their circles. It can happen, and you can help to make sure that it does by targeting and meeting the needs of a specific group.
4. Allow your bot to post viral and shareable content
When something strongly resonates with a specific audience on social media it is more likely to go viral. You can set your bot up for this kind of success by creating useful, viral, and shareable content frequently and consistently. Users are more inclined to explore its functions and services, ultimately increasing the chances that your bot builds a following.
5. Create a persona for your bot
Make your bot stand out by creating an all-out persona for it. Give it a name, its own personality, and specific functions that potential customers and clients can get to know, as they would a real person. Match the bot’s name to your domain name, directory description and publishing channels. A persona that customers can interact with invites users to establish a personal relationship with your bot. Even just a few human-like characteristics can increase your bot’s ability to stand out above its competitors.
How does this make a difference? The more engaging your bot is, the more time users will spend with it. Platforms notice retention. And, in their bot stores, they feature bots that have high retention rates and user numbers.
6. Incentivize your audience
Keep your users engaged and draw more of them to your bot’s functions and services by providing exciting incentives, like a reward for sharing the bot on social media or in email or for recommending it to a friend. This bonus can come in many different forms, from monetary rewards to points, free gifts, or experiences. For example, the Swelly bot used Messenger Extensions to let any two people compare choices (clothing options, for example). This feature naturally showcased the product and increased growth because people were sharing the bot with their friends via the extension.
The key to incentives is that they drive growth in a way that showcases your main value proposition and helps users to achieve their goals.
7. Discover tools
Facebook Discovery is still new, and earning a top ranking in this tool is a possibility. After turning it on, the first step is to make sure that your bot is submitted and that you have the correct keywords associated with your bot. Next, make sure that it comes up in Facebook Discovery search when you search for it by name or associated keywords. Then focus on gaining daily active users who spend a good amount of time using your bot. When you succeed at that, there is a good chance that Facebook will feature you and that your user number will skyrocket. This is how the Chatbots Life Chatbot gained 100,000 users in one week!
Bonus Tips:
Don’t leave the old marketing ways behind
Don’t forget about the usual ways of doing things. How would you normally market an app, a website, or even a store? Whatever your answer, be sure to incorporate those same ideas into your bot marketing plan. Do what it takes to get the word out there and to build buzz around your bot, just like you would for a more conventional product or service. Give your bot every chance in the world to succeed.
Do it all with .BOT
As we mentioned earlier, be sure to use .BOT to get it all started. This domain registry service allows companies to easily register domains for their bots and to integrate them into their current workflow. Plus, .BOT can give your bot an SEO boost and can help improve your bot’s discoverability.
Ready to get your .BOT domain? Check out our Step by Step .BOT Tutorial Here
Or Give it a try, and see for yourself!
