How to Get to 1 Million Users for your Chatbot

Based on Personal Experience & Working with the Top Chatbot Companies

Over the past few months, I have worked with many of the top bot companies. Companies like Swelly, OutBrain, and NearGroup just to name a few and in the process I have seen first hand what works and what does not. Note that each of these companies has hit a major nerve and are the leaders in the Chatbot Space.

You Must Have a Good Product

First and foremost you must have a good product. In fact, unless you have a good product and product market fit, all marketing energies will inevitably have been a waste. By far the biggest contributor to product market fit is having the right use case. Your chatbot should leverage the power of the platform and solve a real world problem or be entertaining as hell.

Do I Have Product Market Fit?

Considering how different one product or market may be from the next, it is hard to give a broad definition. As a result here are a few rules of thumb. Generally, I know I have PMF when most of the following occurs:

1. Initial Traction: In the beginning you’re trying to find customers and at some point the tables should turn. When customers seek you out, and this traction becomes automatic, you can turn your focus from product to scaling.
2. Engagement: Your customers are engaging with your solution and solving their problem(s).
3. Word of Mouth: Customers are sharing their experiences and your getting even more customers.
4. Customer Dependency: Your customer would not want to solve this problem without your solution. If you took your product away, and at least 40% of you customer are very disappointed, you have dependency.
5. Velocity: It takes less time to achieve bigger results. For example, it took Dashbots.io nearly 8month to get to 1billion messages; however it will take them only 1 month to get to 2 billion messages.
6. Conversion Rates: You start converting a higher percentage of customers/users. Your funnel becomes more effective.
7. Higher Order Rates: Your order rates increase in dollar amount and customers are willing to spend more.
8. Revenue: Your revenue is increasing, your churn is decreasing. Your LTV ratio is going up.

Most of the time, if you’re hitting a nerve in the market, the market will let you know. For example, NearGroup is getting 6 Million Messages per day!

Viral Loops

Viral loops are one of the most effective and cheap ways to get traction. With NearGroup we experimented with a number of viral loops and eventually we hit paydirt. What does paydirt look like? In our case 45k–60K users per month.

5 Viral Loop Strategies

1. Give and Get More: Reward users by giving them additional upgrades and benefits. Dropbox did just this.
2. Social Rewarding: Some products make socialization a core part of the product. In these cases, sharing is a natural extension. Candy Crush, Farmville, Sim City, Words with Friends are all good examples.
3. Monetary Incentive: The strategy of Give & Receiving a Financial Reward helped companies like Uber get millions of customers.
4. Take the Higher Ground: Do-Gooder and Inspirational Products/Stories get the most amount of shares. Appeal to people’s ideal self image and watch them share.
5. Your Content: Consider the power of Memes, Infographics, Videos, and their power to spread. Let your content speak for you.

Measuring Success

To know if your loop is working, you need K to be greater than 1. Here is a quick look at the formula:

K = i*%

i = #of invites sent by new customer

% = conversion rate

For example if each new user shares your bot with 15 friends and then 10% of them become new customers we will have the following: 15*10% = 1.5

k= 1.5

Niche Target Marketing

Once you have PMF it is time to start scaling! The better the product and market the more you can do in less time.

Where to Start?

Focus on your Most Successful Users/Customers. You know the guys/girls that spend hours using your product and profile them. You should have a psychological profile that describes who they are, where they live, what they like, what motivates them, and why they use your product. Getting to ‘WHY’ is crucial.

Next, you want to get details on where they are hanging out, what they are reading and affiliate categories. This will give you a good idea of where to market!

Don’t Guess on these Profiles! Getting this information is as easy as looking at Facebook Ad Manager

Once you know ‘Who’ you are targeting, ‘Where’ they are online, and ‘Why’ they like your product it becomes much easier. You can the use FB lookalike audiences and target people just like them. Also make sure to target them via: FB Ads, Blogs, Online Communities, SEO, Word of Mouth, Influencers and more.

Future of Content

One of the cheapest ways to market is by looking at trends. Every few years, new marketing channels pop up and give marketers an amazing opportunity.

In 2009 this opportunity was SEO, then it was Social Media Marketing, and most recently Influencers. Right now it is about Native Content: FB Live Videos, Native Articles and soon it will be Bots. Always look for new and upcoming marketing channels and medium shifts.

Influencer Marketing

If you think about it, Influencers are really targeted distribution channels. A top niche influencer may have millions or even hundreds of millions of followers. Each tweet, like, share, pin, is worth a lot of money. At it’s highest, Influencers marketing had an average return of $6.5 for every dollar spent! In recent years, followers have become more accustomed to seeing ads and the numbers have come down, however it is still an effective way to promote.

How Swelly Leverages Influencers

One of Swelly’s biggest drivers is influencer marketing. It is worked so well, that they are currently the most popular bot with over 2.5 million users. They focus on context and use mostly Instagram and Youtube to get users. Take a look at how well they are executing this.

A few things to take note:

1. Context: Find a way where both the influencer and their followers can directly benefit from your product. For example, Swelly lets followers follow influencers and vote on their pics. This in turn becomes a powerful and useful tool for influencers.
2. Tell a Story: Whenever there is a choice, always tell a story using the most engaging form of content possible. For example Videos > Pictures> Tweets.
3. Permanency: Most influencers sell tweets or posts or shoutouts on a timed basis. For example, you get 1hr shoutout for $100 on an account that has 2 million followers. This can be a great way to test a campaign, but after you see it working, try to focus on more permanent content.

Virality & SEO

Last but not least, if you tell a great story using a very loud megaphone you have a bigger chance of going viral. This is one of the great benefits of influencer marketing, their followers will also share your content.

Tipping Point

Many consider 17% a major tipping point because at this point you are entering the early majority part of the market. If you can win over the early majority, it’s highly likely that you’ll be able to win over the rest of your target market.

The hidden Power of Shares

Getting Free Traffic: SEO

I have had my fair share of SEO success. In my first business venture, I was able to quickly dominate local seo for my business. To give you an idea of what this domination looked like, my business showed up up to 13 times on the first page of google for all my target keywords! That’s domination and lead to millions of dollars in sales.

Recently, I have been able to replicate a similar success. Chatbots Life has gone from 500/visitors per month in September to over 100,000/visitors per month in January! To boot, we are on the first or second page of Google for most of our top keywords and a number of our articles are on the first page of Google.

How we dominated SEO

Ideally, you need a new and upcoming market that has little competition. Chatbot’s were the perfect opportunity in 2015–16 and the execution was pretty good too :)

Here are a few high level tips:

1. Buy Old Link Rich Domains: Ranking a new domain is very difficult. As a result many marketers buy old domains that have a domain rank of 20+ with hundreds of good backlinks. This is a shortcut worth taking.
2. Focus on Long Tail Keywords: Long tailed keywords are both easier to convert better and to rank for. This makes going after them a no brainer.
3. More than one way to rank: Generally Google does not like to display the same domain for the same keyword phrase multiple times. You can do it 2–3 times, but 13 is nearly impossible. So how to do it? Use other domains and social networks to rank your content.
4. Write high quality articles often: This is the key! Ranking is great, but ultimately you need customers. If you’re writing solves their problems, then trust will be built and from that a relationship!
5. Google News: If you’re publishing crazy amounts of content on a niche topic, then your odds of getting picked up by Google News go up. I target 3 articles per day.
6. Links Still Matter: Getting high profile sites to link to you in a natural way is key and it still matters.
7. Guest Blogging: This is a great way to get your name out there and get traffic to your blog. I still do this :) and if you want to guest blog for chatbots life, let us know here.
8. Content Partnerships: I syndicate content and create relationships with other companies in my space, you should do this as well.

Network with Similar Bots

Find bots with complimentary value propositions and consider working together. Make your own bot 2 bot Connections! If your main business goal is providing a service, using InterBot can be a great way to get leads from other complimentary bots.

I am putting together a spreadsheet of bot companies that are interesting in connecting with other companies for Bot to Bot networking. You can join and get list here.

Leveraging your Success

Once you start having traction and success it will begin to multiply. For example if Google notices that your site it getting a lot of traffic, it will rank you higher. If Facebook notices that your bot has really high engagement, it will feature your chatbot more often. And if other platforms notice your success they too will want to feature you!