We worked closely with Elizabeth Oberg, the rockstar Senior Marketing Manager at TRUX, to answer the big questions that would ultimately lead to the chatbots' success.
Step 1: 5 Simple Questions
We begin building the blueprint by asking 5 simple questions:
- What? What are visitors looking at right now? What page are they on and what content are they seeing?
- Who? Who is visiting the website and what do we know about them (are they anonymous, return visitors, a targeted customer? etc.)
- Where? Where is the visiting coming from? Are they from organic search, paid social, or email nurturing campaigns?
- Why? Are they on your site for answers to specific questions? Do they need support? Are they wanting a Demo of a SaaS product?
- When? As for when, that one is easy— it's when the buyer indicates their desire to engage when they start the conversation!
Step 2: Identify the targets - What do users need from you in the buying process?
We began by looking at the 3 main personas they were trying to identify. Once the personas were identified, we considered what they would need from TRUX, where they were in the buying cycle, and what they needed. That way the conversations would make sense to the user and where they were on their journey.
With TRUX, we decided to focus on 3 main targets or personas.
One is to the dump truck Drivers. These individuals are seeking to get more jobs by connecting to opportunities in the marketplace posted by contractors.
The second target is—you guessed it—Contractors. These folks are seeking out available drivers to fulfill jobs. They may also be in search of a transportation and logistics management solution for their existing fleet. Or, as in most cases, a combination of both.
Our final persona is Material Producers. TRUX helps these companies by increasing their plant efficiency and allowing smarter digital dispatching.
By honing in on the needs of these personas, we could get to the root of their pain points in our conversations and get them what they needed quickly.
Step 3: Identify organizational needs - What does TRUX need to qualify leads?
As we developed our game plan, we made sure to keep the end in mind. In this case, our goals revolved predominantly around scheduled meetings with sales reps. Keeping this front-of-mind enabled us to build the best messaging and flow of the conversation.
With conversational marketing, it's important to keep data collection on a need-to-know basis to qualify them and avoid asking extraneous questions. It's a balance of give-and-take.
For TRUX, we determined that they need to know whether a lead is a Driver or a Contractor for routing purposes. If they are a contractor, they also need to know how many trucks that contractor needs on a daily basis. After the bot gathers this and some basic contact info, TRUX has all they need to run an efficient sales process with that lead.
Choosing the bots to start with the highest impact.
We began the development of the playbooks—or chatflows—by deciding on the first 3 personas and placements to target:
1. “Homepage Bot” - Lives on the homepage, wide applications, multiple personas.
2. “Get Trucks - Facebook” - For the Contractor persona, engages social media users.
3. “Get Jobs - Facebook” - For the Driver persona, engages social media users.
Starting a conversational marketing strategy can be daunting. But by taking just a few to launch, it made it much easier to digest for the TRUX TEAM.
Editor's Note: I highly recommend this approach for anyone starting a conversational marketing strategy. You can't eat the whole cow in one bite!
The "Homepage Bot" is fairly easy to understand. This goes on the homepage of their website; but, until we start building more, we set this bot to launch on all pages unless told otherwise. Having this general-type conversation to cover the high-level questions helps route a visitor through a path that they chose. This encourages helps the visitor to get used to engaging with the bot throughout the site.
The other two chatbots we decided to develop were based on Facebook campaigns and resided on landing pages to capture visitors. The messaging was naturally very targeted and the goal was clear - to schedule a meeting.
All of this was necessary to deliver a personalized user experience to each visitor and creating opportunities for meetings to be scheduled at lightning-fast speeds without ignoring all of the qualifications they felt were necessary.
