Not so long ago, the blocking of Telegram in Russia ended, and now companies have the opportunity to actively use this messenger again to promote products and services. In today's article we will talk about how useful Telegram chats can be as a marketing tool, consider examples of their use and mistakes that should be avoided.
So why does a marketer need Telegram chats?
Reason # 1: Community building
One of the common ways to use group chats on Telegram is to develop communities around a business or its products. Typically, such communities allow you to seriously increase audience engagement. Community group chats work great for segments like games or online media or services, for example.
An example is a chat for authors of the Yandex.Zen service:
Reason # 2: Customer support
The number of Telegram users in Russia already exceeds 30 million people, which means. If the company does not allow all these people to get advice in a convenient way, there is a great chance that they will go to competitors who communicate where it is convenient for the buyer.
From this point of view, having a support chat is quite a marketing tool for increasing user loyalty and retention. There are many ways to provide live chat support:
- connecting a chat bot to answer standard questions;
- dedicated manager;
- chat integrated with CRM system.
As you can see, Telegram support can be organized both for e-commerce businesses and for complex products and services. For example, IT-integrator IT-Sum has implemented a support chat integrated with Bitrix24 - as a result, all requests from customers go to the corporate portal, where they are assigned a priority of execution, and managers can control the work on them.
Image: ITSumma
Reason # 3: Active sales
Since chats can be used to build communities and provide support, it makes sense that they can also sell. Similarly, you can use both a chatbot and the work of managers with varying degrees of automation.
Chats for active sales are used, for example, by electronics sellers. In addition, there are chatbots for ordering food delivery from restaurants:
Reason # 4: Establishing Industry Leadership
Another long-term, but very important task that can be solved using chats in Telegram is the formation of the company's image as a leader in the industry. If a company owns a chat room in which leading industry experts communicate, important questions are raised, both colleagues and customer representatives are present, this is an excellent tool for promoting initiatives born by the team.
Such communications have a positive effect on the development of the entire industry, and at the same time, the company that organized such a platform for communication is logically perceived by everyone as its leader. Examples of similar industry chats can be found in many areas, one of them is information security :
What mistakes to avoid
While Telegram chats can be an extremely useful marketing tool, it won't work on its own. Here are some of the common mistakes that many marketers make.
Mistake # 1: the audience won't get it on its own
It is important to understand that Telegram is a platform that is convenient for many of your potential customers. But this does not mean that they themselves will somehow find out about your chat and start using it. Here you have to spend time and effort.
There are quite a few ways to draw attention to your channel, bot or chat:
- advertising in industry channels and groups;
- using corporate information resources - from email newsletters and links in signatures to social networks;
- external platforms - online media, influencer accounts in your industry.
In any case, you need to understand from the very beginning that the initial recruitment of an audience will take time and require investment.
Mistake # 2: no discussion moderation
The second mistake is to assume that once you have an audience, chatting will work just fine on its own. This is not true. The more people there are, the more spam, rudeness and conflict situations will be. Tracking all of this manually will be quite difficult. To solve the problem, so-called moderator bots are usually used. Here is one of the most advanced bots in terms of functionality.
Such tools allow:
- Automatically check for new users - the participant will have to click on a button to start a message (greatly reduces the amount of spam).
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#3:
In the absence of any analytical capabilities in the Telegram platform itself, chat owners have to look for opportunities to find additional information about users. This is necessary in order to understand how exactly to manage the development of the chat, which topics "go" better, and which cause negative.
This is where specialized bots come to the rescue, including analytical functions in the bot moderator from the example above. It allows you to analyze your chat history, identify the most active participants, the most popular topics, etc.
Conclusion
Telegram is an effective marketing tool that allows you to solve many problems from building communities, support and sales to building the image of an industry leader.
After the restrictions on the work of the messenger in Russia are lifted, the effectiveness of chats will increase even more, but it is important to understand how to use this tool. Competent planning of the chat development, competent moderation and analytics will allow you to achieve really good results.