January, 2021 | Cognitive Virtual Assistants for businesses

No Matter how good your restaurant does in business, there is always a desire to improve sales. Many times restaurants try to come up with innovative ideas to capture their market and retain their customers. Amongst others the most common ones are rewards and upselling strategies. The rewards or referral programs are more direct. Convincing your customers to buy more or even convincing them to buy when they didn’t plan doing so needs some skill.

Having well trained table staff is one key requirement for this because they are the ones in direct contact with your customers at their tables and they must be able to build a good rapport with your customers in order to convince them to try out a new dish, a restaurant special or an add on at a discounted price. But all this can only happen when there are customers at your table. The recent shift in things has reduced this scenario of people wanting to visit a restaurant. Improving sales while people stay at home and order take outs is rather challenging than persuading them face to face.

This is where modern technologies of marketing step in. Cutting edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Ect. have been taking over the market of digital marketing, proving that a shift in the older methods are inevitable. Although these names sound complicated they can come up with super simple solutions for your marketing needs. Chatbots are one such example.

Research shows that 80% of all the companies across the world are planning on implementing chatbots into their business in 2021. They are expected to reduce customer engagement costs by 30% and business costs by 8 billion by 2022. Chatbots are influencing the market so much that User Experience (UX) is now being called Chatbot User Experience (CUX).
For more information on the latest trends in Digital Marketing click here.

Although chatbots can perform a variety of tasks ranging from running campaigns, answering customer queries, personalizing communication, automating repetitive tasks and so many other complicated things, they can also be used to automate simple tasks like SMS marketing. This automation comes in handy especially for small and medium sized businesses (SMB).

Voicy.AI is a company that has been helping SMB’s with marketing and customer engagement with its two way SMS marketing app. The app is a conversational platform (Chatbot) that enables a dialogue between your business and your customers. The platform has been helping businesses with marketing and customer engagement. It lets you run a marketing campaign, lets your customers respond to it, generates orders directly when downloaded from your Point Of Sale system (POS) and more.

Amongst all the other features of the app one of the most interesting feature one is the ‘Sell Now’ feature. Let us talk in detail about what this feature does

Say you own a restaurant that wants to promote a special offer for the weekend. Since it is a rainy day you don’t have a lot of customers to dine in and so you decided to run a marketing campaign instead to generate some take out orders.

You open the Voicy Two Way SMS app and send your marketing message about your special offer to all your customers.Here, in the message you include a line that says ‘ Respond with YES if you want to place an order ’. Since our app already has access to your customer list you can simply run the campaign with one click. Your customers receive the message within minutes.

Being a Two Way SMS Platform, the app lets your customers chat with your business. Since the offer you are running tonight is an irresistible one, most of your customers decided to respond with a ‘YES’ to your message, thereby generating orders immediately in your POS. Some may even chat with the app to get more menu items and place an order for more, thereby helping you upsell.

For more information on product and pricing check out the links below :

Check out our Conversational self service Two way SMS application with a 14 day free trial :

Sign-Up with Google: https://www.voicy.ai/sms-marketing/

Install from QuickBooks app store : http://apps.intuit.com/smsagent

Install from Clover app market : http://www.clover.com/appmarket/apps/VXAPP798TJ388

Install from Yext app Directory : http://voicy.info/dialog/yext/authorize

Install from Weebly app center : https://www.weebly.com/es/app-center/sms-marketing-bot

Install from Hubspot app marketplace : https://ecosystem.hubspot.com/marketplace/apps/marketing/lead-generation/myhubspotapp-204588

Install from constant contact app store :https://voicy.info/dialog/constantcontact/authorize

All though New Years mean the end of the holiday season, they also symbolize hope of a fresh start. The year 2020 will always be remembered in history as the year of Covid – 19. So many businesses were shut down. However, a right marketing strategy is all you might need to jumpstart all the things that were lost.

All the larger conglomerates have probably already started their marketing around the new year. In reality marketing is not about the money one can invest, it is about the ideas that can get the attention of your consumers for your product/service.

Ex. Instead of uploading a 200 page catalogue on their own website IKEA transitioned a printable version of it in Pinterest. It also included a product questionnaire with the shoppable version of the catalogue which helped them with understanding the user’s interests and purchase patterns. .

This is just one example of how budget friendly marketing ideas can change the game for you.

If you are constrained on your marketing budget, there are a few simple steps that you can follow to extract effective results that can ensure you good ROI

For first and foremost thing that needs to be done for any marketing to be done is to come up with a marketing plan. Design a marketing plan that will clearly help you understand your target market, the best way to reach them and the best way to persuade them to buy your product. Make sure you develop a year long plan that gives you an idea on what must be done for the entire year.

Create your own website. Having a website has become one of the most important criterias for a business to be considered as legitimate in recent times. Although as an SMB you can’t hire a professional agency to this for you, there are a lot of user-friendly websites like WIX and WordPress that help you build a basic website on your own.

Make sure your website is mobile friendly and has been optimized for SEO. If the technicalities of this task freak you out, then getting some help from a local agency can help you resolve the issue with minimal expenditure.

Adapt newer marketing techniques. Technologies like Machine learning, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence are the next generation of marketing. If you are worried about the expensiveness, then Voicy.AI can provide you readily available affordable chatbots that can help you with marketing and customer engagement.

For more information on Modern Marketing Technologies click here.

The next thing that comes in line is your social media presence. Improve your social media presence. Have a year long social advertising plan. If you don’t have one, then start making one. Get a social scheduling tool that will line up your marketing content in a pre-planned manner with quality matter. Some of the best social scheduling tools are Social Pilot, SEMrush, Planable.io. and others

Increase your followers on your social platforms. Keep your social channel platforms up to date. Having a presence on Linkedin will certainly improve the value of your business and dismiss any doubts of genuinity that the users might have.

You could get in touch with local media outlets like TV, Radio and others. The reporters and producers are in constant search for “Experts” in many fields. Offer yourself as an expert in the area. If you can get through then it can be free advertising for you.

Soliciting your online reviews has become an increasingly important practice in recent times. Work on a plan that will help you reuse these reviews that your customers leave you. This practice will eventually help you with better positioning with your search engines.

Whether you chose to do all of these or just pick and choose the ones that work best for you, adopting a practice and working on a year round plan for your marketing will always yield the best of results.