How to Properly Plan Your AI Chatbot Content Strategy

Why Planning the AI Chatbot Content is Important?

Every project needs proper planning for higher success. AI chatbots are nothing less than a long-term project that needs very well-planned content for attracting and keeping customer attention and interest.

A lot of people are interested in chatbots especially with conversational AI because they can get information from them quickly and easily. Nearly 40% of internet users worldwide prefer interacting with chatbots to virtual agents. With major industries including retail and healthcare turning to digital technology, chatbots will continue increasing in popularity, according to Insider Intelligence.

Preparing the chatbot content is important because it can help to create a better experience for the users, be more efficient and useful to them, and help with marketing and sales.

There are some main elements that should be considered when preparing the AI chatbot content: planning conversational AI topics, training phrases, and answers, the content in the main menu and submenus, and the logic between the different elements.

Conversational AI is what your chatbot will say when it first greets a new user or when they ask it a question. The content in the main menu and submenus is the predefined information like cards, carousels, buttons, and others that users will click on and scroll to read. The logic is how the different chatbot elements are connected and what it will show to users when they click on a certain element, ask a question in the chatbot, or click on a link in social media / scan a QR code that leads to the chatbot.

If you want your chatbot content strategy to be successful, then you need to plan and implement all these elements in place before going live with your AI chatbot. If the content is not prepared well, then the user may be frustrated or annoyed by it and would go search for help or information somewhere else which will be a missed opportunity for your business. Preparing the content is a must.

There are hundreds of books available to read on the topics of conversational marketing, conversational commerce, conversational user experience, conversational user interface, and the usage of conversational AI – in all of them the AI chatbot is the main hero. In this blog post, we have collected some of the good practices to help you start your AI chatbot project content planning.

Good Practices for Building a Successful AI Chatbot Content Strategy

The chatbot content strategy is a process of building a chatbot’s brand personality. Doing that is important because it will help to create a more interactive and engaging experience. After all, your AI chatbot is only as good as the content it provides and how it is organized. One way to keep your content interesting is to make it as interactive as possible. Ask your audience questions and give them the opportunity to provide feedback in the chatbot. This will not only help to keep them engaged, but it will also give you insights into what they want and need from your chatbot. It’s also important to keep your content relevant. Make sure that you’re providing information that’s helpful to your audience and that they can actually use, and plan to exceed their expectations. Finally, make sure that you’re monitoring your chatbot’s performance. Keep an eye on how often it’s being used and what kinds of interactions it’s having with users. This will help you to refine and improve your content strategy over time. Here are our suggestions for building a successful AI chatbot content strategy:

Knowing your audience and the purpose of the chatbot

By knowing your audience and the purpose of your AI chatbot, it will be easier to decide what content to write for them for a better user experience. The 1^st step is to decide who your audience is. What are their demographics? What are their interests? What do they want to chat about? You can get this information by doing some market research, by using data from your existing customer base, or by analyzing the communication of your brand – in social media, by e-mail, through messengers, live chat, and over the phone. The 2^nd step is to know the purpose of your chatbot. What do you want it to achieve? Do you want it to generate leads? Increase sales? Provide customer support? Once you know the purpose of your chatbot, you can align your chatbot’s goals with your business goals. For example, Queen’s (one of the most popular brands in the juice segment in Bulgaria, by Tymbark) uses their chatbot as a purebred marketing tool to entertain users, so the content in the chatbot is related to giving a good fortune saying, asking fun questions, having games and sharing cool videos. Another AI chatbot, made on the Umni platform is the hotel AI chatbot of hotel complex Izgreva which is a customer support chatbot used also for sales. Its content is related to the hotel services and reservations and gives information to its users about the property, hotel surroundings and etc. Therefore the purpose of both chatbots is different, so their content is different which reflects in the tone of voice and other chatbot elements. When you know how your chatbot will be helpful to your business and who your audience is, you will better know what content to prepare to engage the chatbot users for a better experience.

Creating content that is engaging and relevant to the user with specific sections of the AI chatbot.

You shall have a plan for what content you will include in your AI chatbot – it should complement your site, not replace it, and should give useful information to the AI chatbot users – customers, partners, or employees. The content should be interesting to the end users. How to plan it? You shall research what your customers searched for on your site, on your social media, or other places till now and create a database with their most frequently asked questions, arranged by topics. You will need them for training the conversational AI module. Аdd the top topics as easy to find information in the predefined information sections in the chatbot. The content in the main menu or submenus and other sections in the bot should be not very long and boring, relevant to the purpose of the chatbot, and without any mistakes so customers take it seriously and to continue to read, click, scroll, and ask questions. Stick to Twitter-length texts that are straight to the point yet written humanly. Thus, you will make sure that your customers can find quickly what they are looking for and won’t go search for the alternatives of your competitors. The AI chatbot can have content related to the specifics of each industry and it is decided by the business itself. If you have a beauty salon, library, hotel, university, clinic, financial institution, or anything else – the content in the AI chatbot shall be planned and implemented to be useful to the specifics and searches of the customers. For example, the digital AI librarian Ellie of Varna Regional Library is trained to answer over 14,000 questions relevant to the field and takes care of 23% of the requests for re-assignment of borrowed literature, one of the most successful functionalities of the library AI chatbot. Another example is the hotel AI chatbot, also made on the Umni platform, of the 5-star hotel Casa di Fiore Spa & Medical whose personality is sweet and attracting. The hotel made an avatar for its chatbot – the cute Miss Fiore that greets customers, helps them with hotel reservations, and provides them with useful information. For just 8 months, Miss Fiore achieved to interact with over 48,000 users with over 358,000 interactions in the chatbot.

Defining the chatbot’s personality

When defining how your AI chatbot will look like to its users such as its avatar, greeting messages, and tone of voice, you will be on the first step of how users will accept it to continue their journey, to read the useful information you provided. The greeting message, the name, the avatar, the brand colors, and the tone of voice are the very first things that the customers will encounter when they are in your AI chatbot on your site, so they should be eye-catching. The greeting message: you should mention that this is a chatbot for transparency of communication (EU requirement to conversational AI chatbots) and to set up proper expectations in the users – what customers to expect, in a few sentences, engaging and relevant to the main purpose of the AI chatbot. The name: think of something that customers will remember – Miss Fiore, Izgrevcho, Beautko, Dr. Ross, Ellie – there are all names of our customers’ chatbots. The Big Guys also have names for their AI chatbots like Siri of Apple, Alexa of Amazon, Rose of the hotel Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, etc. People remember easily catchy names with characters. Be creative! The avatar is also part of the chatbot’s personality and content – it can be a brand image, a 3D avatar, a gif, a fictional character, or anything else related to the business and the chatbot’s purpose. The tone of voice is how you communicate with customers and how the chatbot must communicate with them – more formal or informal, telling funny jokes, being with witty characters, etc. Be sure to be how you want your customers to appreciate the chatbot as part of your business strategy and brand. The AI chatbot on your website could be the first touch point of your customers with your brand, so it shall be like your best employee.

Ensuring that the AI chatbot is trained in many topics

Plan to include small talk, business information, and the most frequently asked questions by your customers, partners, or employees  (it depends on who will be using your AI chatbot). We already talked about how to properly train conversational AI to work in favor of the business. Here we will mention that if the AI chatbot is well and fully trained on the business topics, it will provide the most useful information to its users instantly 24/7, and will keep them loyal to your brand. The content of the conversational AI module also depends on the business – what information it shall deliver to its customers. It should be constantly updated to be relevant and give more value. The answers of the conversational AI should not be very long and bore users because the people’s interest can be lost easily – try to write them at your best. Keep in mind also to not give one-word answers like “yes“ or „no”, or too short, or too general answers but on contrary, try to give additional alternatives and useful information – an opportunity to exceed users’ expectations, so customers would have a great experience with your brand and recommend it after all.

Your chatbot can be a great success if you take the time to design and implement it correctly.  Developing a chatbot can be a great way to improve customer service, launch marketing campaigns, increase sales and meet other business goals so follow these tips to make its content a success:

1. Keep it simple

Your AI chatbot should be easy to use and understand. This means keeping the conversation flow simple, avoiding jargon, grammatical mistakes, or too long and not relevant information. People love to read simple and understandable content so try to write it that way that a kid would get it. Avoid writing content that sounds too selling, pushy, or advertising.

2. Be responsive

Make sure your AI chatbot is able to respond quickly to customer queries, which means having it visible on your website and available to reach with a click r QR code scanning from various online and offline locations. The chatbots made on the Umni platform are created originally for websites, with easy-to-train conversational AI module, and have links and QR codes to forms and information sections easily generated, so it only depends on the business that creates its chatbot to create attractive content for it and train it well.

3. Be accurate

Your AI chatbot should provide accurate information to customers. This means having up-to-date information about your brand, products, and services. This also means to constantly check the AI chatbot, train, maintain and upgrade it according to customer behavior, and update old information to give more value to the users and provide better experience.

4. Always check twice

Before adding new content to your chatbot, make sure to check it thoroughly. This includes checking for mistakes, missed information, meaning, different conversation scenarios and customer queries. After adding new content, also check that all buttons and links are working properly. By doing this, you ensure that you won’t have a bad digital reputation and your customers will rely on you for long.

5. Make sure it follows the branding rules of your company

Make your chatbot recognizable by using the brand colors, the set of emojis, and images your company uses in other communication channels like social media, blog posts, messengers, e-mail marketing, and others. Keep the images of good quality, complementing the text content and assisting customers in understanding the provided information or attracting their attention to it, yet keep it small size so it will show fast on the user’s phone or desktop.

6. Can you add a drop of innovation?

Can you add AR or VR to your chatbot? What about some gamification to keep the chatbot fun and interactive? The AI chatbot on your website upgrades the website as content and experience, but it is also a live communication tool and media on its own that can have its own unique and memorable flavor.

Engaging and well-written content and more helpful content are the keys to every successful marketing strategy that includes AI chatbot on the site. Following a well-structured content plan and knowing every little detail of it when implementing it is for sure the path to growth and success. When all of the listed practices are used in favor of the AI chatbot and the business implementing it, for sure the business, its customers, and employees will benefit from it. Following them will help you create a successful chatbot content strategy that will engage and convert your audience at its best.

If you are still not sure how to start your AI chatbot journey, here is a blog post on how to prepare for such project. Always feel free to contact us for individual consultation for your business and go follow our LinkedIn account for more updates about the chatbot world – we are constantly posting new and helpful information.