How Agencies Can Explode Revenue With Messenger Marketing

[00:00:00] Stephanie Liu: Facebook messenger sees 1.4 billion users a month, and there are over 90 million businesses on the platform. And yet there’s just 300,000 messenger bots out there. When you realize that according to mobile monkey, that the cost per lead for Facebook messenger marketing is get this 30 to 50 times less than that, of a standard Facebook ad.

And you gotta wonder why aren’t more businesses leveraging messenger. Well friends, the answer is simple message and marketing can get complicated in a hurry with special tools, complex workflows and time needed to set up chatbots aren’t for the faint of heart, which means there’s tremendous opportunity here for you.

And your marketing agency. That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of agency accelerated

Welcome back to agency accelerated where we explore ways to grow and scale your agency with some of the most trusted brands and experts in the industry. I am Stephanie Lou and we’re live every other Wednesday at 2:00 PM. Eastern time. 11:00 AM Pacific time on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and of course, LinkedIn.

So make sure you head on over to agorapulse.com forward slash calendar and subscribe. So you don’t. Any of the episodes and remember stay until the very end, because you’ll get a chance to get your hands on an easy way to add more revenue to your marketing agency. All right. So here’s a quick question for you when you were younger.

Did you ever read those? Choose your own adventure books that let you decide every few pages on what you’re going to do next and then change the story according to your choices. Okay. Full transparency. I was the one that would make a choice and then see what the outcome was. And then if I didn’t like it, I would flip back like, okay, I’m going to switch my choice if you’ve ever done that.

Let me know. I. Building a solid bot can sometimes feel like you’re writing your very own, choose your own adventure book only it’s for messenger. And it’s more complicated, which is why I’m absolutely thrilled to have the trusted. The undisputed chat expert Kelly Noble Mirabella on the show with us today.

If you don’t know, Kelly is an internationally sought after messenger marketing trainer, consultant and builder. She’s the creator of baby got bought and the owner of stellar media marketing. She’s worked with such clients such as. Kerwin Rae and a Gora Paul and she’s helped countless professionals get their bot building to the next level.

Before discovering chat marketing. Kelly had an action-packed 14 year career in social media marketing. Let me tell you she knows her stuff, which attributes to her vast knowledge of not only digital marketing, but also running a successful bootstrapped. Over the last 14 years, Kelly has helped teach and mentor marketers, entrepreneurs, and professionals across various industries to use marketing tools and platforms, and also start and run new entrepreneurial adventures.

Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Kelly. You do that.

Yeah, I love the, choose your own adventure books. I recently got one for my daughter and she was just kind of like, what is this? What’s going on? Just wait for it. I think you have to find the right ones that are ready for some.

[00:03:42] Kelly Noble Mirabella: Oh, I love them so much though. And that is exactly how I look at messenger marketing is choose your own adventure books, but like you cheated and I would go both directions.

[00:03:52] Stephanie Liu: Yeah. Well, what would really happen if I did this and we wouldn’t have it if I did that, so it’s good. All right. So Kelly, let’s go ahead and set the stage for our agency. Accelerated crew, our community. What does messenger marketing entail for marketing agencies?

[00:04:07] Kelly Noble Mirabella: Wow. It’s a big question. So your marketing, I actually would not even call it so much messenger marketing as chat automation, because it’s much more than just messenger now.

Right now we have chat automation on Instagram. It’s on messenger, it’s on WhatsApp, telegram, like it’s all over the dang place. And it’s awesome. And there’s so many opportunities because every business. Kim have an application for chat marketing. And so I think that it’s just not fully adapted by agencies.

And I do think that it can be quite a lucrative service offering. And those agencies who have adopted the chat marketing and messenger marketing services have succeeded in very high levels. So there’s a lot of opportunity here. And especially as you mentioned, it can get very complicated very quickly.

So the average business. They don’t really want to do it themselves. They want an expert to come in and get it done right. The first time. Wait,

[00:05:05] Stephanie Liu: wait, did you just say that most businesses, they don’t want to do it themselves. They reached out to the experts. Yes, yes,

yes. I love it. All right. So where should a marketing agency that wants to add messenger marketing and automation services? Start by industry. Right because there’s various industries that could bring this on board. But in your experience with the clients that you’ve worked with, what are some examples?

[00:05:37] Kelly Noble Mirabella: Oh man, the use cases are off the charts. There’s just so many, but I’ll give you a couple that have been really successful using them in conjunction with event marketing has been shown to add additional revenue to the bottom line for people like Tony Robbins and other coaches like. We’re very high level, but also the small business coaches have been able to utilize it for event marketing, webinar, marketing, and getting more people to actually show up.

We’ve also done a lot of case studies around using it with live broadcasting. If you’re using Facebook live specifically, and now that Instagram. Instagram live automations. We can start testing that as well, but it’s actually help increase the distribution by 200 plus percent. The amount of distribution as normal restaurants have been killing it.

Chat marketing. Awesome. For restaurants, real estate. It’s just been a phenomenal. Especially with all the things going on with COVID and shut downs and the requirements that a lot of these companies have to have with tracking the chat. There’s a bot for that, right. There’s a way to make it better. So if you ever go to a restaurant and you probably have gone to a restaurant recently, you know, and if you did, you probably saw the QR code on the table and that’s.

A product of the pandemic, if you will, but it’s basically, we can just scan with our phones into wherever we want the QR to go. Well, a lot of times restaurants, you know, these businesses, they don’t really know how to make it the best. And so they’re sending you to a, maybe not so mobile optimized menu, maybe it’s a download PDF thing and that’s really not the best way.

It’s not the best customer service experience. Plus. Missing the huge opportunity of capturing your customer’s contact information, like their emails, which is really important in most businesses, I would say,

[00:07:25] Stephanie Liu: oh, wow. Especially with first party data.

[00:07:29] Kelly Noble Mirabella: Yeah, exactly. So we can scan, we can give them what they want.

So like in the restaurant example, we give them a menu and maybe offer them a free appetizer if they sign up and all they have to do is click some buttons and boom, you’ve got their email and you’ve got a way to follow up with.

[00:07:43] Stephanie Liu: I love it. I love it. So if you’re a marketing agency and you’re working in hospitality and tourism, if you’re doing events, anything really, as far as like onboarding clients and things of that sort, there’s so many ways that you can apply messenger marketing and automation.

And so this, this is seriously the episode for you. And I have to tell you anytime anyone ever asks me about messenger marketing, I’m like, I don’t know, talk to the actual. Here she is. We brought her on the show. So get your questions ready? Yeah,

[00:08:10] Kelly Noble Mirabella: yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Like I said, there’s so many ways to do it.

The best way I can break it down in the simplest form is to think of use cases in three buckets. If you will. Right. We have our, our cold audience lead generation. We’re going to get their email. We’re gonna get. Their phone number, et cetera. And then we have lead qualification. And so that’s really for taking them through pre-qualifying them and making it easier for your sales team to land that sell without giving up too many resources.

And then the third is more informational. And so this would be like your welcome messages or just handling. Messages that are coming in. If you’re not responding, if your clients aren’t responding to messages coming in from the various places where we get messages, you’re basically saying to your customers, you don’t matter.

I’m going to ignore you and that’s not what you want to do. So the chatbots can help

[00:09:01] Stephanie Liu: that. Dang. Oh, snap. Some, we felt that Dennis you’re like, wait a second. So, Kelly, what are the specific services and structure that a marketing agency can provide when it comes to chat marketing? Because we love the idea of the application for a bit.

Like how do you actually pitch it to a client?

[00:09:22] Kelly Noble Mirabella: So glad you asked, because I just finished teaming up with the Gora poles actually put together like the world. Easiest package of assets and resources to help you do exactly that it’s basically a step-by-step cheat sheet into how to audit a customer’s page or a potential customers Facebook page, or what have you to see which one of those buckets they fall into.

And then we actually give you the email templates that you can use to reach. And we give you the pitch deck. So my suggestion. Yeah, it’s go check it out, by the way. It’s free.

It’s totally free and Agorapulse is giving it away. So I think that there’s some links somewhere, but it’s amazing. And that’s where I would start if you’re an agency, because if you’ve never even touched a chat bot. Resources on what to do once you land the client and all the good stuff.

[00:10:14] Stephanie Liu: Oh, dang. All right.

Cool. So listen, if you’re just tuning in, we’re talking about how marketing agencies can help their clients with messenger marketing and automation. But first here’s a quick story about how one agency is helping their clients with social media. Overall, social media management is such a growing market.

Yes. What websites used to be during the.com era. It’s very challenging, especially for the small to medium sized business owners, because they really can’t do it on their own. And if they do want to do on their own, they can get very expensive. That’s a missing piece in today’s market. As the owner of a digital marketing agency, it became very challenging to be able to manage all these different accounts.

We were working easily 10 to 12 hour days. No. Able to spend time with our family. We started seeking out a social media platform. I know there’s the HubSpot there’s who’s sweet. Whatever I really noticed with each tool was that there was always something missing and we were looking for something that was all encompassing and we found a gore pulse.

It posts automatically, but not just to one social media channel, the multiple, and it really transformed. creative to what it is today. We’re able to accomplish what we needed and allows our social media managers to work anywhere. Any time I spend a lot of time meeting with our individual clients, helping them manage and strategize.

So being able to on the fly, take a look at the posting schedule that we set up has been great, but it has allowed us to also show our clients. And ROI because one of the most challenging things with social media management is putting dollar figures to what we’re doing. It has charts and graphs to be able to show those things, whether I’m working with my copywriters.

So my video editors or my graphic designers, or go on post is really great because it helps us work with many different moving parts. The biggest thing was social media in order to do it well, it takes time. And when it takes time, it takes away from your family, your vacations, and the ability to be able to.

Just relax. It has really helped me give the best service I can to my clients and provide the best solution to managing a social media account. Because as business owners, we all need time for ourselves and that’s what Gora poles allows us to do.

Thousands of agencies grow and scale their business head on over to Bitly slash ad agency revenue for a free webinar to go ahead and get started. So having said that let’s get back to messenger marketing because you know that I absolutely love talking to Kelly. So Kelly, come on back. Where are you?

Boom, boom, boom.

[00:13:09] Kelly Noble Mirabella: Hey, I had to run in

[00:13:13] Stephanie Liu: you’re like, wait a second, grab some water. Do all the things cool. I love it. I know that there are some built in messenger functions, but for more robust campaigns, right. We need to use a third party tool. So what are your recommended tools for managing messenger marketing?

Whether it’s for chat, bots monitoring or just anything even above. Sure. So

[00:13:35] Kelly Noble Mirabella: there’s a lot of tools out there for building chatbots. I have basically three preferences myself. I use many chat for the bulk of my chat marketing automation builds, and then industry specific. If we go into more restaurant, then I use a tool called tap the table.

Specifically built for the restaurant industry. It includes integrations for the POS and just it’s built for that specific use case. And then there’s a tool called Phoebe, which is actually a really easy setup tool. Talk about low-hanging fruit and that is also specific for restaurants and it basically just uses artificial Intel.

To answer all the most common questions that come in through Instagram, Facebook, and Google my business. So those are the three, but for the kind of more general or all, all the niches, if you will, then I would go many chat

[00:14:24] Stephanie Liu: personally. Awesome. Oh my gosh. I was like, okay, we need to put this in the show notes and all the things.

Cause she just rattled them off second, this and that. Like I’m familiar with tap the table, but the, the AI powered one. Maybe, yeah,

[00:14:38] Kelly Noble Mirabella: that one’s a really great tool for really anyone and even restaurants that can just plug it in and start using it. But all of those tools also have agency plans. So if you’re an agency, you can sign up as an agency partner and they have special perks.

If you will, as an agent. And can we

[00:14:54] Stephanie Liu: drop your name? Can we be like, oh, okay. Yeah, drop my name.

[00:14:58] Kelly Noble Mirabella: Let them go. I spent you come on now. I’ll take care. They’ll take care of you, especially Ryan Baggett. Who’s the owner over at top of the table. He’s one of my membership members. So I know

[00:15:09] Stephanie Liu: that’s good. It’s always nice to have those resources that you can lean on and just be like, just say my name and they’ll take good care of you.

Like, Hey, we heard about you tap the table from Kelly mobile Mira mellow. When she was on agency accelerated.

[00:15:24] Kelly Noble Mirabella: Exactly famous.

[00:15:28] Stephanie Liu: So how to agencies determine and find their ideal client for tech marketing? You kind of talked a little bit about this with that kit you were mentioning, but what are some tidbits to that?

So the

kit

[00:15:39] Kelly Noble Mirabella: is built for more of an. Of your Facebook page, where you could say, okay, this is a potential client. Let’s go through and see some key elements that makes this person a good fit for specific types of chat bot build. So I definitely recommend you go and grab that outside of that. I think the best thing you can do is look at it from the angle of who are my current customers and what problems do they have and can we solve those problems better?

With chat automation, most likely, almost every client is going to need at least an informational bot. And that’s just, again, instead of ignoring your audience, at least have some way of properly addressing the audience that is messaging you, that you might not be so quick to get back to. And so those automations are super duper helpful, and then you can go from there to, okay.

Do we have people who need to build their email list? Who maybe they’re selling high-tech. Products. And that’s taking a toll on the sales team to have to like qualify them and realize 50% of the people are not even qualified. Well, these are all things that chat automations can help with. So I would absolutely start with where you are now.

Look at the current customer base that you have and see where you can help them and then build up some case studies on how. That has helped your clients, that you can then approach other companies and say, here’s what we’ve done for our clients. And here is what we can do.

[00:16:59] Stephanie Liu: I love that. I love having those case studies where you can say, this is what we’ve done for our clients.

This is what we can do for you, or even just kind of, and you do a lateral chunk as far as this is what we’ve done for this particular industry. Let’s say the restaurant industry, and this is how it could apply to your next event or whatever, and just get really creative because sometimes I find with clients, they’re like, this is what we’ve always done.

This is what our industry has always done. But when they work with someone like you, who has worked across various industries, now you’re opening them up to like more innovation, bigger ideas, creativity out of the box. Yeah, there you go. Cool. So agency accelerated friends, we’re getting close to wrapping things up.

I know Kelly. I’m like, whoa, we’re just so fast. We’re hitting the ground running. Here’s one question that we had from George Demanis our good question is what’s the most important update to chat marketing to come out recently? I mean, because let’s be honest, there’s so many things that have happened, but what’s the one where you’re like, oh, Did you hear

[00:18:00] Kelly Noble Mirabella: available?

Yeah. Um, just recently launched is a scram automations, which has been around for about three months now, but just last week they released a new update where Instagram live now has an automation where you can, people can type a key word in. And it will send a message. So it’s been Instagram, I’m telling you what Instagram is killing it for people right now.

And with the automations, there’s just so many amazing things that we can do. So I would say the Instagram push has been the biggest change. I can’t tell you what it is, but in first quarter of next year, many chat is rolling out a like insane solution for messenger marketing that you’re going to want to be a part of.

That’s going to solve so many problems. Allowed to tell you is I’ll just tease that.

[00:18:49] Stephanie Liu: Oh man. I was just, I was just speaking to our producer. I was like, you know, I’ve had this many chat account for a long time because when I, when I worked with you for creating the chatbot for getting live viewers to show up and what.

Yeah, it is easy to use a chat bot. And then, because I was multi streaming across various platforms, it kind of got confusing for people when to chat. So I stopped using it. So I was like, maybe I’ll cancel mini chat, but now you’ve got like dangling this carrot. I’m just like, ah,

[00:19:18] Kelly Noble Mirabella: I just sneak, peeked it in my private membership. And it’s the only place I was allowed to talk about it. And they were like,

[00:19:28] Stephanie Liu: I just want to jump in right now and like shake your, you were like,

[00:19:31] Kelly Noble Mirabella: man, you just would be so mad at me if I said it. So I’m not going to say it. Yeah.

[00:19:36] Stephanie Liu: But you know what, honestly, I am, I’m really excited about the Instagram live shopping and the integration with chatbot stuff. Because what I am finding is that as with any live stream and as with any live shopping event, you don’t just go here’s the one live shopping event.

Right. And expect people to why, like you have to nurture that relationship and build it and figure out what their wants are, what their needs are specifically, anything as you lead up to like your big Bonanza, right? Your big holiday life shopping season or whatever it is. I think the, the chat marketing piece of it’s going to be really exciting and friends, by the way, I’m working on a really, really.

Awesome project. I tapped Kelly, cause I’ll say, Hey friend, just want to let you know. So if you see anything cool popping up, let me know. And she’s like, no, that’s not possible. And then like right before this, she was like, wait a second stuff. And I was

[00:20:29] Kelly Noble Mirabella: like,

[00:20:32] Stephanie Liu: yeah, it’s cool. All right. So here’s another question and Kelly from Christmas.

Chris is asking Kelly, where do you see messenger marketing heading in the future? I see it

[00:20:42] Kelly Noble Mirabella: integrating more seamlessly with different tools to create more of an Omni experience. Whereas when kind of the early, early days of messenger, it was like, we’re going to use chatbots to fix, do everything we’re going to.

Email, we’re going to do it for everything. And now it’s like, let’s be smart and let’s actually use it as this really key function that helps support or enhance our marketing strategies overall. And so that’s where I see the benefits of chat marketing. I also see much more integration in the real world.

And by that, I mean, the use cases of those QR codes of those NFCS yeah. NFC, right? The near field communication. I always get them confused with the NFTs or whatever that. Thanks. Not those the near-field communications, which are like you are codes, but you just basically tap the, or get close to, and it will create this experience.

I think that augmented experience is going to be big. And I think chat marketing is going to be a big piece of that.

[00:21:41] Stephanie Liu: Recently, I went to, um, a star wars. It was it’s it’s like we have the San Diego symphony here in San Diego. They’ll actually play the star wars soundtrack as they’re playing the movie. I was like, wouldn’t it be so cool if there was, as we were waiting for the orchestra to prepare or after, you know, we come back from intermission.

If there was like a QR code that we could, you know, quiz each other or do certain things. And I was like, oh, that’d be cool to have. That’d be a ton of fun Kelly, a question for you. And I think you kind of touched on this as a rule. You pretty much teased it, but how should agencies really priced their messenger marketing services?

[00:22:17] Kelly Noble Mirabella: Yeah, that’s such a big question. When you should price it higher than you are pricing it. I’ll tell you that right now. Oh gosh. It totally depends on. The bill. There’s just so many use cases. And I think that there are different pricing methods. So you could do like an upfront pricing. You could do a retainer pricing, you could do residual pricing, you could do licensing fees, you could do templates that you license out.

So there’s a lot of different ways for me personally, I usually train my students to do an upfront price with a retainer to maintain. And so I would say anything over a thousand dollars. I wouldn’t do anything less than a thousand dollars. And I really try to encourage my. Students do the same, but it’s so across the board that I would really have to.

Here, what the project is, but most people are not charging enough.

[00:23:05] Stephanie Liu: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. I think with

I think when it’s ever something that’s relatively new, you know, they second guess themselves as far as how they should price things, but really when you’re spending the time and resources to really understand all the nuances that come with chat, marketing, like messenger marketing and automation, the fact is is that.

Your experience is what makes you an expert. And so the more that you practice and you build and you work with different clients and different industries, then it makes it worthwhile. Like you’re paying for that person’s knowledge. It’s not just click, click done, but really understanding like for you, like having 14 years running your own business, but knowing that okay.

For what purpose, if this chat bot right. For what this right. Why are we doing it? Yeah. Cause at some point you’re really wondering, well, how does this fit into your overarching marketing strategy? Has this really going to enhance that experience? And when you ask the right questions that. I mean your clients at that point, be like, wow, you’re asking really intuitive questions.

This is why, because you bring value. Cool. So Kelly CME is asking us a question and Sammy is saying, are we going to see any updates on WhatsApp’s automation in the near future? WhatsApp

[00:24:23] Kelly Noble Mirabella: is currently an open beta with many chat. It is available. And you can sign up to get into it. I have not connected because I’m not a big WhatsApp user.

I know that there’s a lot of restrictions with WhatsApp and I know you can’t use it with WhatsApp groups at this time. And that is a, you know, Metta company restriction, not necessarily the right. Yeah. I had to think I work in this world, so I better know what I’m talking about. So yeah, I would say, you know, as of right now, it is available, there are things that you can do.

As far as like any major updates since they released it, not really be honest. Got

[00:25:01] Stephanie Liu: it. Got it. Well, that’s good to know. I feel like when everyone’s asking you all these like future things, because your background is, you know, very celestial body, I’m like, Ooh girl, you need to have like a crystal ball to, and just be like, what’s happening.

And then maybe even like a fog machine and it’s like,

[00:25:23] Kelly Noble Mirabella: Maybe some magical things or comment

[00:25:26] Stephanie Liu: best of 20, 21 and recap things to look forward to in 22, they’ll be like your whole theme for four. What was it? A blog miss?

[00:25:35] Kelly Noble Mirabella: Oh man. Blockbuster’s crazy. Love

[00:25:37] Stephanie Liu: it. All right, Kelly, it’s always so much fun talking to you, right? I learned so much. I love geeking out with you.

Where can I find out more about Kelly? Well

[00:25:47] Kelly Noble Mirabella: y’all are in luck because I am actually found everywhere. First of all, at stellar 24 7 at Stella for twice on every social network. This is

[00:25:57] Stephanie Liu: why I love Kelly so much. She’s got like that energy and she has this thing where it’s like, I’m going to teach you something that’s really going to impact your lives and really influence you, your income, your bottom line, all the different things.

And

so having said that that’s all that we have today for this. Don’t worry. We have even more incredible shows coming up in our next episode, we’ll be talking to the incredible Kate from wave.video. Who’s going to give us another way to expand our agency services and revenue by offering engaging video content creation, because let’s face it.

People love videos. And if you even have a core, a pulse, you could go into your report to see what kind of posts type people are most engaging with. And I bet you it’s going to be. So next season, we’ll feature guests from Adobe and Ogilvy and so much more. So if you’re one of those folks where you like to know what the big brand agencies are doing, definitely go ahead and tune in.

Remember to subscribe to the calendar@agorapulse.com forward slash calendar. If you want to be sure to catch our live episodes, right. And if you enjoy podcasts listening, remember you always have that option agency accelerated is available on all podcast channels, including apple, Spotify, and Amazon. So.

Leave a review and let us know what you think last but not least take advantage of our free webinar on how to add agency revenue by adding social media services, head on over to Bitly Ford slash ad agency revenue. And then I’ll see you and your agency accelerating.