Episode 019

Shaina:                 All right guys, episode at 19 with Stormy Knight answered a lot of the questions that I have about chatbots because I keep hearing it. I keep knowing it’s a thing that I need to do, but I had so many questions and she schooled me big time. Like I learned so much at about 14 minutes. We just talked about like getting started with chatbots, the different options. How much AI do you want to use? I mean, do you have to like populate questions and answers or you can use AI? It was really, really interesting. Um, around 19 minutes she talked about how you can get 60 to 80% completion rate with chatbots. Like that’s a huge number. So I that part I was like, oh my gosh, my, my mind is blown. And then at around 25 and a half minutes, she talks about creating a hybrid solution because my question was like, okay, great, I can do like the automated answers.

Shaina:                 But then there are also times when people ask questions that I can’t auto put in there. The Ai’s not going to work with. So how do you have an actual human get integrated with your chatbot experience? So, um, I hope you really love this episode. I learned so much and I’m so excited to implement it and uh, yeah, enjoy. I’m Shaina, I love dogs. I trip a lot and I haven’t had a knack for making pretty sweet videos for businesses. But the more videos we made, the more questions I got about how video and other content can be leveraged to make a bigger impact in their marketing. I mean 44% of marketers say that producing content is their biggest challenge. Get content marketing is 62% less expensive than outbound and produces three times more leads. Now I know a lot but I certainly don’t know it all. So I made it my mission to talk with content kings, queens and bosses to learn as much as I could about crushing content marketing. And I’m taking you along with me. Welcome to the content coalition. Hello content coalition. Thank you for joining us for another episode. I am here with stormy night partner at net one o one. That one on one has been around for a really, really long time. Tell us about what you’ve been up to it since 1995.

Stormy:                Um, we are a Miller Kellogg from 1990 to 1995 of environmental products and mailers hard because you have to print and you have to mail and it’s expensive. And when they are talking about the Internet, I Ralph, you didn’t have to mail and print stuff. You can actually make some money doing this. And so I went out and by Laurel Learning shemale in 24 hours and I started teaching classes to small businesses about what they could be doing with the Internet and that’s where net one and one comes from. Uh, and then the first class that I had someone come up to me and said, can you do a website and figured I should learn how to do website. And that’s been, it’s been a long, strange trip since then.

Shaina:                 So now you guys specialize in what building an SEO is what, what do you guys do specifically now?

Stormy:                Primarily SEO. Some online marketing, some consulting, uh, people bring me in to take a look at, you know, where the roadblocks are and in the sales process, uh, you know, our, our call to actions working. What else do you suggest? That kind of work.

Shaina:                 Awesome. Awesome. So do you work with a lot of small businesses, medium sized businesses, large businesses,

Stormy:                Small to medium.

Shaina:                 Great.

Stormy:                I’m actually working with a large one large business right now and I’m reminded once again why I don’t like working in large businesses is everybody has to shuffle stuff around and they love to have meetings and do nothing and no actionable information at the end that I wasn’t billing you hourly.

Shaina:                 Right? And there’s so many cooks in the kitchen who needs to like sign off on everything and it’s, yeah,

Stormy:                it’s horrible. So.

Shaina:                 I get that.

Stormy:                I like to be at least that the touch point and be either the owner or the CEO or the marketing manager because that you can get people to make decisions on a single phone call. You can say, here’s the pros, here’s the cons, here’s the risks, here’s the rewards. What are we going to do? I didn’t get an answer and you can start working on.

Shaina:                 Awesome. Awesome. So what do you, with that being said with small businesses, what do you wish that they understood more about digital marketing?

Stormy:                You have to pay attention to the data saying that the phone is ringing is not a definitive answer to the question of how is it going,

Shaina:                 right, right. What’s happening with the call, why are they coming from how I yeah, exactly.

Stormy:                Then they’re not really, they don’t have the, the equipment mentally change and understand what, what has happened and, or, or it was just a weird other thing happening that didn’t have anything to do with, you know, what the marketing was. So a small business people tend to fly by the seat of their pants a lot and they shouldn’t. Um, especially in digital because in digital you have to give her ability of actually seeing how things are going and it’s not really hard. Um, if you know basic math and a few, you know, checklist items to check on a regular basis, you can actually stay on top of things quite well. And I try and I’m an educated seller, meaning I need to have that person understand what it is they’re buying. When you sell SEO, you really are sewing something that’s rather ephemeral existent. Um, it leaves clues, but it’s only the clues that can be seen by other people who know what Seo is.

Stormy:                So I have to get them up to a certain level of knowledge to have them understand, I see that this has made a difference or perhaps I shouldn’t do that thing because that thing causes this problem. So the ability to, um, to go and look at data on a really basis, just like you would measure blood pressure on him once a week, monthly basis, or do a breast exam to make sure you’re not, you know, you don’t have cancer or heart disease in the same way, you should be looking at things either on our daily, weekly or monthly basis to say on top of what’s going on. And that’s it. And that’s an educated process that many times falls on deaf ears. That’s isn’t that true?

Shaina:                 Yeah, absolutely. I feel like with small businesses and even like with some larger businesses, like if things are going well, they don’t worry about tracking why it’s going well, right. Because, because why worry about it. But the problem is eventually things may slow and now you have no idea what the secret or the equation was or what was actually working and what wasn’t. So, so yeah, it’s, it’s the fact that sometimes people wait until, you know, it’s a little too late to start really tracking what’s going on.

Stormy:                Some people were really on top of it, but most small business people are so busy putting out fires, wearing hats that it is hard marketing people. I liked, I liked the size of a company that has a marketing manager because they feel that their paycheck is tied to them knowing what’s going on. So they tend to be a lot more responsive.

Shaina:                 Yeah, absolutely. So for those small businesses who are like, okay, yeah, I should probably get a grasp on this, what would be, I mean, how do they get started with digital marketing? Um, the way that they should with tracking everything.

Stormy:                Alec got Google analytics, number one. Yeah. Yeah. Usually I do run into people with do not have it installed, have never probably installed it and did not realize. Um, the second thing is to make sure they have Google like business in place. Um, because we need to let Google know who you are and what you do. Uh, I consider that the low hanging fruit of Seo. If you can get your Google my business page claimed and set up in a reasonable way, then a lot of the other SEO problems will be taken care of automatically. Um, making sure that there are technical issues, no technical issues. Um, those happening on their website. I’ve had clients say, I suddenly can’t, I’m not getting into this front lip site. And I go, okay, uh, and I go look in, they have it set up not to be crawled.

Shaina:                 Oh, okay.

Stormy:                So they have a web developer go in and do some work and living longer term, but during the crawl off and then they never turned it back on. So suddenly had changed. Um, I’ve seen all kinds of weird things that people do. Um, people, I have people go, I get no business for my website. I know. Okay, how much traffic do you get? Uh, I have no idea. Okay, well we don’t know if you have a traffic problem or if you have a conversion problem. So let’s figure that out first and then we can work up from there.

Shaina:                 Yeah, definitely. So there’s a lot of different work places that they can get started, but it’s like at least start knowing your numbers, you know,

Stormy:                knowing your numbers is the, is the first part of the game.

Shaina:                 Awesome. Right on. Okay. So one thing that I was super excited to talk to you about are chatbots, um, so could, because it’s something that I know, like I’m excited to learn more about. I don’t know nearly as much about it as I know that I want to or I should. Um, and I just, it’s, it’s boring. There’s a lot of chatter about chatbots is all over social and with, within the marketing community. So super high level. Can you just kind of go over what a chatbot is and why it can help a business or how it’s been helping businesses,currently.

Stormy:                We only would shout at, we sit there with the mobile device and we have a conversation with someone. A Chatbot is something that’s programmed to replicate a conversation based on the input by the person who initiates the conversation. So there’s, there’s human and then there’s a bar and then having a conversation. There’s two general flavors of chatbots. The first one is a choice based chatbot, meaning it’s kind of like the menu or build your own adventure book. Then you’re on a web page that you present a series of choices. That person makes that choice or more information is presented. There’s a new series of choices, more information is presented and they basically make choices about where they go on what information. The other one is AI based and AI based can be completely artificial intelligence, meaning from the, from the get go, the original car, original statement that the bottom aches, every choice is based on the input that the person puts in, in, in, in real language.

Stormy:                Um, and obviously there’s a huge difference in the price of those two things. Uh, the choices, uh, making a choice based, but it’s not going to be ridiculously expensive, but you do have to prethink about what that conversation structure is and what the information is going to be. So basically you’re paying for a small amount of coding and some thinking by people. Um, when you get into Ai base, then you’re open to the, the, the infinite possibilities of what someone could put into a bond. Um, and as we all know, there’s no such thing as idiot proof. So it takes a great deal, a great deal of thinking to, to train the artificial intelligence to understand here’s all the things that may be coming at you and here’s all the different things that should be happening as part of that conversation. So those tend to be on the higher, on the higher end.

Stormy:                And then there’s the, there’s hybrids, there’s, we want you to walk through this structure, but if you throw something at us, we’re going to respond in a certain way. And then there’s the other aspect, which is you can have that bought access information external to itself. So I want to, um, I want to book a room in a hotel through a Bot, then I have to, that Bot has to be able to access in real time what the current inventory of rooms and whenever data is related to those rooms, such as what is the view from the 14th floor of rooming 12, 20 [inaudible], um, that, that has programming that goes above and beyond the chatbot itself. And, and the integration with what may be an enterprise level amount of data. So from a technical standpoint, that’s what that is. Um, since more than half of all search and most websites get more than 50% of their traffic from mobile.

Stormy:                Uh, then the person who’s looking at a website or a person who’s looking at it, Facebook advertisement is going to be on a mobile device and they are trained by couple of wind dogs to be comfortable with chef because they probably were doing it five minutes ago. So if they have an option to get the information that they need or have the conversation that they watch or get an answer to a yes, no question without a live human being involved, it is not necessarily something that’s negative. Matter of fact, it’s quite positive because they may say, you know, what are your, how? How late are you open tonight? The answer maybe until 6:00 PM, oh great, I’ve got an hour and a half. Fine. I’m done with that. Instead of, you know, going to a browser during our surge, going through the page, tried, I do more information about us. There’s a multistep process because you have built a structure in that is not open ended with a chatbot either through smart structural design or artificial intelligence can do that really quickly. Um, and you know, if Chan 30 10 to 30 seconds to get an answer to a question that you want, assuming everything is, you know, well built and well thought out.

Shaina:                 How long does it, Amy, obviously there’s all these different factors that play into building out a chatbot, right? Um, on at like if it sounds personally overwhelming to me, which is probably why I haven’t really looked into it initially, but what is the process really like if somebody is like, okay, I really need to get started on this. Let’s just say they’re not going to hire a team to go do the full fledged AI version of it and they want to do, um, like the multiple choice basically that takes them through the build your own story if you will. Like are there tools that people can utilize and do it themselves or are there agencies that they need to contact? Like, what would the steps be to get that rolling?

Stormy:                You’re doing something really, really simple. Like let’s just say you know, you’re in your, any basic brick and mortar business and um, you know, you’re the local Yoga studio or your dentist or your restaurant or whatever it is. Um, there are a number of fairly simple programs out mobile monkeys. One of them that I think someone, I don’t want to assume that someone who doesn’t have a coating brag background will, we’ll be able to zero to 60 on that. But someone who does have any kind of coding background or it’s done html or understands the mind map or that kind of stuff could probably build their own. Um, especially since most of the simple ones, check fuel mini chat and have templates so you can basically take your template. I mean that’s how I learned to do it was um, I started out with mobile banking and then I went to chat to you and now we’re using active chat because it has the capability of connecting to outside data sources that are better than the other three that I mentioned previously.

Stormy:                But basically it was, you know, put a block over here and hello. And they do this and then pillar and then they all leave together and go through basically a decision tree process. Uh, and you have a Bot. Um, now the hardest thing is what do you want this thing to do? Um, do you want them to be able to send you an email? Great. Um, do you want them to be able to, uh, put something a little bit harder? Do you want to show inventory? Yup. Harder than that. Um, but if you’re trying to make presentation, uh, and you’re trying to get someone to contact you, it’s fairly simple because it isn’t going to take a huge amount of logic and if they can function like a lead generation form if you want, uh, and on, on that same idea of the lead generation form, if you’re running Facebook advertising and you’re building this in messenger, which almost all of the chatbots use Facebook messenger as the communication platform.

Shaina:                 Really. Okay.

Stormy:                Um, and I, I can get into one into why in a couple of minutes about why you would want to do that. But if you’re, if you’re running advertising for the longest time, if you set people external to the Facebook gated community, to your website, to a landing page, Hey, you gotta lead, Yay. And then Facebook said, no, we don’t want you to leave our little gated community here. Um, we’re going to push your ads down, but we want people to go to messenger. So send them to Messenger. And previously, uh, the messenger tools at Facebook were so rudimentary that that was not a good option. But if you have a chop check bottom, any kind, you can have the ad that says here’s the cool incentive item that you’ve been lasting because we demographically profiled you and we know you want this thing and you go to it and it says, oh, super great that you came here.

Stormy:                Um, is your email address stormy@netoneonone.com in your ears because they’re pulling that data out of Facebook? Is your telephone number, blah, blah, blah. If you’ve opened that up to the public, you can see it. If not, then we’ll ask the question, what is your telephone number? What is your real name that’s coming from Facebook? Because we all know that a lot of people sign up for mailing lists with fake email addresses in fake names. Yeah. Um, and now here’s your incentive item. Thank you so much. And you have, you have real tight real data on a real back end. You know what offer was given to that particular person because you can pass that information through back to the database. Uh, that’s being maintained by whatever chatbot platform you’re both time. And so that you know that they like blue tee shirts and not red tee shirts because they looked at both ads and clicked on the one that was for blue.

Stormy:                So you can, you can pull in a lot of marketing information. You can get real data on the people you can lead, qualify them. If you’re in an industry that requires, you know, you’ve got to have $50,000 to invest in our, uh, you know, in our fund. So you can literally ask the question, do you have to $2,000 to ingest? The answer’s yes. Then you, you throw that over to your sales Rep. And if your answer is no, well, here’s a pdf on how to save more money and invest over a period of time. So they’re not saying, you know, you’re a loser. You’re giving them a real reason to continue to have a relationship with you. Um, and anything that you can break down in a marketing relationship, you can ask a real question because psychologically humans are wired if they’re asked a question to answer.

Stormy:                So when you throw someone over to, uh, to a landing page, let’s see, um, and you have that little pull down menu and it says, do you have for $2,000 to invest in our fund? Well, great. There’s not, there’s not going to be no interaction there and there’s no going to be no sense that I need to fill out the other 12 fields that you asked me to fill out. But you can ask all questions in a check back because you’re only asking one at a time, right? So you’re going to get much higher completion rates and lead Gen rates on that initial contact than you would ever get sending anyone’s a landing page. I mean, if you send someone to a landing page and you get a 4%, I’m going to fill out this form, even if it’s short, even if the incentive is really kind of cool, uh, you’re doing something really right.

Stormy:                Um, if you send someone who is been, uh, triggered is through at paid advertising, something they saw on a website, some other reason that they got to the chatbot, you can get 60 to 80% completion rates.

Shaina:                 Really?

Stormy:                Yes. There’s a lot of things going on here psychologically with people that it’s just a natural extension as long as you don’t weird them out or throw them into a dead end that they can’t get out of. Um, we’re used to talking to her friends and then having these, you know, halfway conversations and then later picking it up some other time. And that’s another reason, one of many reasons why Facebook makes sense. Because if I’m at work and I see something and I go, oh, I really like to get that thing, and I started that conversation and now, oh it’s five o’clock I get to get out of here and then I go home and I open up my tablet, my Facebook thing is still going to be in the middle of that conversation and I can finish it. It’s not, it’s not like, oh yeah, I went to that landing page and I fill it halfway, but I want to wear that. And then I mean, as we all know, if someone’s left the website, the chances of getting it right back are slim tonight.

Shaina:                 Super random question on something said a bit back. What would be an example of something that creeps them out? Have you seen anything interesting?

Stormy:                Well, there’s, there’s a, a general summon in, in building chocolates that you’re supposed to stay, that you are a chat box because if you don’t, if you put too much personality on it and it gets a little too informal and I’ll do a little, you know, little strain, I mean, it’s one in marriage with your branding is it matters if it’s, you know, fun and different or if you’re, you know, looking for a $500,000 investment in F in a money market fund, um, a money market fund should have a fairly business structured thing. I’ve seen inappropriate things. Um, you know, because somebody designed, it goes, Hey, let’s do fun gifts. It’s like, you know, poop emojis in a business saying, you know, that that gets kind of weird and, and I think we should err on the side of, of, you know, light but not weird. Almost weird is your brand.

Shaina:                 I will. Yeah. I mean to each their own, I guess. Right. If we were all the same, it’d be boring, but let’s also not go like go that far left. Um, okay. So now that we’ve talked about the Facebook messenger platform, like you said, over a couple of staff that are pretty staggering. So a lot of people are doing this. It was, it’s, it shows 40 million monthly active businesses use Facebook messenger and that 20 billion messages exchanged every month between people and businesses. Um, and then you said both of those data points came from the Facebook f eight conference. Um, that’s a lot. That’s a lot of businesses and people and like actual chats that have been going back and forth. So this is nothing new apparently, right?

Stormy:                No, it’s not new. Um, if you have a Facebook business page, by default, when you do all your settings and you’re, you know, you’re setting up the Facebook page, they’re going to want you to interface with their, oh, here, here’s some questions that you can have answered. Well, if you don’t do anything, they put some of the default ones up, right? So people will, it’ll, it’ll say, what are your hours? And you’re like, did you send it off? I mean as I play with different companies and seeing how they’re solving things, more than half of the time when I use the default Facebook chat, I never hear back from them because they didn’t know they were supposed to check.

Shaina:                 Gotcha.

Stormy:                Um, but if you see something that says usually responds instantly that it means that there’s a chatbot because responding instantly is only something that chatbots do as opposed to if a live human goes an hour and a half later and goes, oh yeah, somebody left a message in Facebook.

Shaina:                 Right. So we have chat on our site like most businesses do. It’s not integrated with Facebook. Is that something with messenger that we can, that that’s still integrates with whatever chat you have on your site? Like are you able to implement messenger on your site as your chatbot and be able to communicate or how to, is it just Facebook that you can utilize it?

Stormy:                All of the platforms of build on Facebook, which there’s probably two or three days and now the two big players or many chat and chat fuel. Okay. I mean the mobile monkeys like coming up third, um, once you build it on Facebook, you can put it on her website.

Shaina:                 Okay, great.

Stormy:                So that go back and forth works. The plat, the reason you want that platform is that you’re not in, in the, in the isolated place of your website. You’re actually in this other place where every time they go to talk to somebody, they’re going to see it. There’s that, there’s that benefit. Now a lot of other companies like drip, which is a mailing mailing program, uh, I believe convert kit does, um, inner calm, all of the customer support things have some kind of check on the website. And if that is where you need to be in terms of, uh, you know, sending it into a support desk or something like that and, and really messenger is not the place where you’re going to have that conversation, then yes, that’s that. You know, you’ve got it on your website, but if you want it to be an integrated part of a conversation between your company and consumers, then you know, there’s like a billion and a half consumers on Facebook. So there’s that benefit.

Shaina:                 Right? Is there a way to hybrid it so it’s not simply the automated chat and that if they do have a question that you still want to be able to answer more thoroughly, they’re able to get those answers from actual human,

Stormy:                Yes. You want to have that and yes, all of the platforms have some way of passing off. Um, and it has to be, it has to be optimized or customized for each one of those possibilities. Um, the simplest of course would be, I’m sorry I can’t answer this question, but I’ve sent an email to my master and they will get back to you. There’s that, that’s the, that’s the simplest and easiest to implement. And in many cases, if you’re a small business sense, the only one that makes any sense. Um, but if you have dedicated support staff or if you have, uh, a marketing manager or someone who could be radically get on the line in real time, then you can send a notification through their computer that says someone is on messenger waiting for a response. Right? And then you can do that. And then certain hours of the day to the messages. I, I’m, I’ve contacted my master and there will be on messenger as soon as possible. And then certain hours of the day it is, no one’s in the, no one’s available right now. You know that all live someone’s live here chat thing. Um, and, but no one’s here and we can’t answer in real time but we’ll get back to you tomorrow or something like that.

Shaina:                 Awesome. Well I feel like I just got like a full fledge education on how to get this stuff set up. I’m from super excited to go start playing with it now cause we had, you know, like I said we have the chat feature and it’s literally on call. Like if somebody messages us on chat, somebody in repurpose houses responding to it and, and they’re basically like sitting there on call. And a lot of the times you’re right, it’s the same question and that can be automated no problem. But it would be nice for that to populate if they were to open messenger Facebook and see like that conversation that they already had. I mean it’s just another touch point really with your brand to them. So I’m, I’m excited to start diving into that. Thank you so much. Is there anything, um, about the chatbots that you feel like we haven’t touched on that people should know?

Stormy:                My members that in the same way that you as a person who’s chatting with a friend, crude sound image could send a pdf, gets in an audio file, consider video file cruise, and um, you know, anything, anything that is in a digital format, you can make incentive items that are of value to people and deliver them through this platform. Awesome. That’s, that’s an important thing. So, and like you said, if you go back to messenger two days from now and you go, oh, that’s right, I have that pdf on how to, you know, kind of fluff up my period or whatever it was that you contacted them before. It’s there in Messenger. It’s not like I had to keep track of it somehow.

Shaina:                 Awesome. Very, very cool. Well then what is something that anybody who’s listening or watching can implement in the next 48 hours via chatbots or you know, whatever else you’re thinking. Um, that doesn’t require like a full team of people that will actually kind of get them a step ahead of where they are today.

Stormy:                If you have Facebook messenger on your phone, there is on the bottom and one of the navigation points is discover and discover is things that Facebook recommends on Messenger. And in almost all cases, probably 80 to 90% of the cases, those are chatbots. And so the big national companies, uh, have spent a lot of time and money and programming to create really awesome chatbots. So as an example, you go to the whole foods, um, chatbot and they said, what do you want to cook? And then you go, I want to cook big plant or whatever it is. And then it will pull up a bunch of different recipes, which are part of the marketing content that whole foods has, but they’re, they’re making it in another more interesting way. And you can also order 1-800-FLOWERS through chatbot. You can do a lot of different things, but that discover, if you look at the, it does the little thing I’ve responds in instantly or responds in a day or whatever the off the averages.

Stormy:                But if you see the ones that are instant, then you can go in and just play with them and as, and as soon as you get a sense of, oh this is what this could actually accomplish, then you, you have a much more broad understanding of what you could be radically accomplish your business. There’s lots of fun ideas in there that to see what re really high end and really expensive tools can do. Sure, okay I can take this, I take this down a couple notches and I could really accomplish something. Like you said, answer those consistent questions that either come up on the phone and divert resources internally. Um, you know, you’re, you’re burning away at your writing and then all of a sudden someone you sends you a message, a direct message, and then you see that it’s something that you’ve answered 150,000 times. So why am I answering this again? So what, when you have those pain points and you say to yourself, well that’s just the way the world works. No, it doesn’t have to work that way. Chatbot can actually solve those kinds of problems.

Shaina:                 That’s awesome. Well thank you so much for spending time and chatting. Chatbots. This has been awesome. Um, if people want to check out, you know, net one o one and you are what, you’re up to a how can they find you online?

Stormy:                Net101.com.

Shaina:                 Awesome. Right on. Well thank you so much again for coming on the show. I’m super happy that we got a chance to chat and a guys, thanks for watching and listening and we will see you guys next week. Thank you so much for checking out this episode of the content coalition. Now, whether you’re listening or watching, make sure that you subscribe to the Youtube Channel and to whatever platform you’re listening to it on, because you’re not going to want to miss out on the incredible things that I’m learning with these amazing content marketing pros. So make sure you subscribe and we will talk to you next week.