The BanterX Blog

“A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want.”

David Whyte

As a brand, when was the last time you had this kind of a conversation with your consumer?

Marketing and Advertising today are monologues.  One-way interactions, where the content is driven by a team that believes that they are saying what their consumer base wants to hear.  But the feedback mechanism here is binary – People either buy your product or they don’t. This is more likely driven by the quality of the product and the purpose it serves, or the value of the discounts offered.  A huge boost in sales as a result of a fancy ad campaign doesn’t necessarily imply that the content was highly engaging.

At BanterX, we believe that this needs to evolve.  Brand communication should be more about dialogue and engagement.  Conversations are the first step towards building a long and fruitful relationship with your consumers.  Conversations build engagement, and engagement builds relationships. Brands should focus at least a part of their marketing efforts towards creating a base of evangelists, and not just customers.

It is probably this thought that drove the rise of several conversational marketing platforms.  Chatbots are the in-thing, and every brand wants one. However, these chatbots so far are just extensions of the customer support mechanism – available 24/7 to answer user queries that it was trained to answer, or an automated inside-sales person – available 24/7 to handle inbound user queries, profile them, and populate a lead list that could then be followed up on by a human.

While these advancements are great, and automation has drastically improved productivity, there is one glaring issue: All of these solutions are reactive.  The brands are only responding to conversations that are user-driven. There’s no way for a brand to initiate a dialogue with the user.

A lot of times, brands have so much more to offer than can be contained in traditional marketing messaging.  What we really need to see are proactive conversations that are brand-led; that allow them to showcase their offering to consumers, ask them the right questions, and surface the information that is most relevant to them.

BanterX is helping brands do exactly this.  Conversational experiences built on our platform have seen engagement rates of around 55%.  This is significantly higher than any traditional form of marketing communication. Almost 40% of the consumers who engaged with these conversations continued on to convert.

This is because the inherently interactive nature of the conversational format enables brands to make the product discovery process less of a chore and more of a fun experience.  The result is that with just one conversation, consumers can find exactly what they need, much faster than a traditional keyword search. By engaging in dialogue, consumers also get the feeling that the brand is listening to what they want.  This helps brands build a stronger connect with their consumers – you are helping them find the information they need rather than pushing information about what you want to sell them.

To know how BanterX can help your brand converse with, engage and convert consumers, visit www.banterx.com and have a conversation with us at hello@banterx.com

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. – Alan Kay.

We agreed, went right ahead, and invented the first conversational ad platform and christened it BanterX.  Before we talk about BanterX, it’s important to talk about why we decided to build it.

How did we get here?

To being from, well, the beginning, or October 27, 1994 to be precise, banners began as an interesting way to make ads stand out from the rest of the content on web pages.  It’s been a long winding journey since then, with pop-up ads in the late 1990s, paid search in the early 2000’s, hyper targeting in the mid 2000’s with Facebook jumping on board the advertising bandwagon, and most recently, courtesy Buzzfeed and its peers, native ads.  An entire technology ecosystem of tools and services has evolved with the objective of adding efficiency to online advertising. As a result, digital ad spends have scaled, and continue to scale significantly.

So what do we need to change?

More people prefer to consume content online today, and almost all online media is advertising-supported.  The downside to this is that the pricing of ad space has taken a hit, leading to several publishers running more ads than is acceptable by the user on a web page.  More importantly, the use of user data, without their approval and acceptance began to face resistance, as awareness and irritation grew. The lack of contextual relevance, and the increased reliance on ‘retargeting’ has resulted in an advertising ecosystem that is advertiser-centric – unfortunately leading consumers to feel that advertising in general is just intrusive and a distraction.

Where do we go from here?

While there is no doubt that ad spends have grown massively, it is time to move towards the future.

A future, where advertising is more consumer-centric – where users are in control of the data they generate online, a two-way communication model rather than a spray and pray approach, and finally, a far better creative approach to engage contextually with real personalization than push images and videos backed by so-called “user data”.

Advertising campaign strategies should evolve from cookies and keywords to context and intent based targeting.  We should sell jackets to people asking if it will snow next week, or if it’s going to be cold in a particular city.  Not on a news website because someone used the same computer to check out a jacket on an e-commerce site a few days ago.

The consumer should be able to tell you If she is interested or not.  We should move to an opt-in model from the current opt-out standard.  If there is real contextual relevance and the content adds value, more consumers will prefer to opt-in.

How will BanterX contribute to this future?

BanterX is a web-based self-serve platform that enables conversational advertising on chatbots.  Although we are starting with chatbots on messaging platforms, BanterX will grow to make ‘touch” and voice seamless across all media and platforms.

We’ve built the platform keeping the user at the center of everything including a dialog builder that helps you write great interactions for all possible responses, a matching engine to ensure contextual relevance of the chatbot and the product/brand and a reporting engine to help optimize the conversations and conversions.

The platform has a pricing model based on interactions and engagements or in industry jargon Cost Per Interaction(CPI) and Cost per Engagement(CPE).

Check out www.banterx.com for more information about the platform and sign up today for early access.