🤖 Chatbots
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Before we get started, I’ve got a milestone announcement.
A few days back, I got this mail from Product Hunt’s team.
TL;DR: Validated Ideas is now a finalist in the Product Hunt’s 2020 Golden Kitty Awards.
So thank you all for your continued support.
The company Landbot just closed $8M Series A funding yesterday
Landbot is a “no-code” chatbot builder and they had raised $2.2M before this round.
They have about 2200 paying customers and have 10X’d their recurring revenue since their seed round.
And as I looked into more news pieces about them, I started digging into their traffic numbers and marketing/growth efforts.
Long story short, I sense an opportunity for a small team of indie developers to pursue.
So let’s get started.
Domain Names
Landbot do not have a .com domain and I think it is a dis-advantage especially if they plan to get aggressive outside the Tech Twitter bubble.
If you are pursuing this idea, save yourself the hassle and get a .com domain.
You can get these short & memorable .com domain names for less than $12/year using our domain affiliate partner - BlueHost.
B2B Acquisition Strategy
It is ideal, you build the product with features specific to a particular domain (mostly B2B) while having a vanilla version that caters to other visitors of your website.
The domains with a strong demand according to the Co-founder of Landbot are:
Financial Services
Ecommerce
Marketing Agencies
So let’s look at these 3 options individually:
With financial services historically the adoption cycle is longer due to regulations and industry practices. I would not suggest this as a viable option.
E-commerce is a viable market and your success will largely depend on your cross integration capabilities with leading e-commerce enablers like Shopify, WooCommerce etc.
Marketing Agencies are large in number and their decision makers are relatively easier to get access to. I would ideally choose this market over others.
Marketing agencies are also great to get started because:
Majority are non-technical users so it is unlikely that they will build an alternative in-house tool.
Marketing agencies will sell your product for you to their clients and you’ll get access to multiple clients with every agency you sign up.
Marketing agencies need to upsell constantly to their clients, so they are more likely to adopt new features and give you quick product feedback.
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SEO Keywords
The SEO keywords shared in the report are based on current competition Landbot.io and Tidio.com.
There are 2 lists of Keywords here:
Intent based keywords
Context based keywords (LSI)
Intent based keywords are phrases that you’ll want to rank for on Google search. Keywords like “chatbot builder“, “chatbot creator” etc will fall under this category.
To get the most out of Intent based keywords use them in important places like titles, H1s and subheadings.
In short, build your web pages around these keywords.
Also, if you want to be more aggressive in acquiring customers, you can use “Intent keywords” in your PPC campaigns for search and GDN (Google Display Network) ads.
Download List of Intent Based Keywords
Context based keywords (LSI) on the other hand are used to indicate to search engines that a particular webpage is about a certain topic.
For example a page about website builders will likely have LSI keywords like ai, conversations, chat, NLP etc.
To get the most out of LSI keywords use them in your webpage’s body text. Keep the density of these keywords to about 1-2% of the total keywords on the page.
Long story short, add these keywords to your paragraphs and other less important locations.
Download List of Context Based Keywords
Blog Content Ideas
I would focus on tent pole content instead of short 300 word posts initially to build healthy backlinks to the site.
Also, when you are thinking of content creation think of how you can get people into the top of your funnel first and then get them to convert instead of making a sales pitch from the start. (AARRR Framework - resource)
If you manage to stay on top of your prospective customer’s mind, they will likely remember you when they are making a buying decision. So make sure that you get in front of them often even if the topics are not necessarily directly related to your core product.
Topics like differences between your product and your competition, useful integrations, chat UI design guides etc will work well with your audience.
Lastly, there is only so much you can write about “chatbot builders” so it is a good idea to expand your content marketing scope to include supplementary content that does not directly involve your product.
Download the List of Content Ideas
Quora Marketing (Short Q&As)
Apart from doing tent pole content, it is also important to establish authority on short form content.
This can be as simple as answering questions on Quora.com.
I’ve added this section for primarily 2 reasons.
There is significant Q&A interest from prospects.
A lot of long tail keyword opportunities.
Here are some nuances to keep in mind.
Start by answering 5-6 questions everyday and slowly increase the amount of answers.
Do not add links on your first few answers. Quora might end up shadow banning or even worse completely banning you. You can start adding the links gradually once you have been on the site for 2 weeks or more.
Add your job title preferably as “Co-founder” or “Entrepreneur” and add your domain name as your employer. Example, Steven Smith, Co-Founder at BotDelight.com.
Ignore “answer requests”; they usually have low ROI.
Give legitimate answers and avoid copy-pasting templated answers initially so that the system doesn’t flag you.
I’ve compiled a list of questions and their Quora links. Just click on them and start answering.
Download list of Quora Questions and their Links
Quick note: If you feel a question is being followed by a lot of people, then consider creating a resource for it on your blog.
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Influencers & Affiliates
When it comes to partnering with people, I’ve got only one suggestion for you.
Go after people who talk about landing page optimisation, online sales, growth hacking and the business of running a marketing agency.
The market for chatbots is growing and if you are able to convince these influencers that your platform is the easiest way to get chatbots setup then you might be able to win over their community.
You can also go after no-code influencers.
Work on a commission model which is much more feasible than a pay-per post model.
To motivate influencers, give them recurring commissions for at least 6 months to a year.
If you want to run an affiliate partner program, check out PartnerStack. They help run affiliate programs for growing online businesses and I find their platform the easiest to use.
FYI, this newsletter is an affiliate partner with PartnerStack. So do try them.
Download the list of Influencers
Hacking Growth
Like the last time, we will look at growth in 4 stages: Acquisition, activation, retention, revenue & referral.
Acquisition
Create a 10-day free bootcamp and launch the course on Product Hunt for anyone who wants to learn about building chatbots.
Host a “Chatbot for Work” conference. As of this writing, I couldn’t find an active one scheduled.
Run a competition for people to create the wackiest of chatbots and award the winner based on social media votes.
Activation
Create and share detailed tutorials for creating bots for specific use cases.
Take the Slack route and give the first 10000 messages on the bot for free to anyone who has created an account in the last week but has not used it.
Ask people to vote on other publicly visible chatbots on your platform and give them an option to clone it. This will get them involved since they are not starting from scratch.
Make useful chatbot templates and allow users to clone them.
Retention
Ask clients to connect their GA to your platform to unlock the extended free trial and when the trial is done, tell them how many leads they are missing out (based on their traffic) by not having a chatbot on their site.
Ask your clients’ visitors to login via their LinkedIn account instead of their email ID and phone number when they want to chat with a person. This will increase stickiness and improve response rates for your clients.
Encourage pausing the subscription instead of closing or have a 3 month pause period after which the service can automatically terminate. Your clients might change their mind in 3 months. It is easier if all the data and settings are still intact when they do want to come back.
Revenue
Offer 1 Zapier integration on the basic/free plan and unlimited integrations with the PRO plan.
Chatbots take time to show returns and monthly plans will see more churn so offer quarterly and yearly plans at a significant discount and monthly plans at a premium.
Keep the free trial for 90 days so that they can commit resources and become dependent on your product.
So that’s the report on Chatbot builders!
How did you find this validated idea? Let me know.
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