Advertising in Facebook Messenger as a New Sales Channel

Every company wants to develop and improve customer service to communicate with their clients and potentials effectively. Messengers seem to become a prospective sales channel, so let’s find out more about Facebook Messenger, the types of ads available, and how they work in this expert article.

Starting Point

In 2017, messengers were one of the most discussed topics among digital marketers. According to the Facebook data, the monthly audience of the Messenger app reached 1.2 billion users in April 2017. Now, there are about 20 million pages that exchange messages every month, and the number of active bots has already reached 100,000.

In Ukraine, after banning Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki social media, Facebook’s audience grew by 1.5 million users, and the number of active users reached 8.3 million. And more people are to join Facebook in the near future.

By constantly developing and updating the advertising formats, Facebook is changing the way business interacts with customers. At the end of 2016, its update provided the opportunity to work with advertisements in Messenger, and later, Instagram also replenished with new advertising formats.

Types of Advertisements in Facebook Messenger

Destination

Advertisements are shown in the Facebook news feed. When you click on them, a new message is sent to Messenger. It duplicates the text from the ad and includes a welcome message. These ads cannot be used to demonstrate your content to users who do not have Messenger installed.

This kind of advertisements can be shown on Instagram if you specified ‘Instagram feed’ as a placement in the settings. The principle of operation is the same as advertising on Facebook, and by clicking on the ad, the user will go to Messenger.

Placement

Such an advertisement is not shown in the news feed, it is immediately sent as a personal message in Messenger. Only those users with whom you used to communicate in Messenger will receive it. Such ads work well with the advertising type described above and help you get a higher exposure. Facebook takes money for displaying this ad, regardless whether the user opened the message sent or not.

Banners in Messenger

This type of ad is still in beta testing. The idea is simple: users see ad banners in the main Messenger window, under the list of recent contacts, as shown below.

You can use Facebook Messenger for business without placing paid advertisements. All you need to do is to create a post with text and image by selecting ‘Receive messages’ in the settings. Keep in mind that you can only interact with those users who have previously contacted you or else you should consider creating a promotion.

To respond to the queries of your target audience, you can link your chatbot to the Messenger. This eliminates the need for technical support at the first stages of the campaign. To implement this option, you can use one of the many available services and platforms that will help you with automation, such as ManyChat, Chatfuel, and others.

Having a chatbot, you can motivate your target audience to ask questions, subscribe to community events, and learn more about your services and products. By engaging your target audience in Messenger, you can later use it as one of the targeting types.

What Are the Benefits?

The main advantage of using Facebook Messenger Ads is that you can create an automatic funnel of lead generation. Try one of the ideas below:

1. 1. For customers who visited your website and did not complete the targeted action, create a remarketing campaign in Facebook Messenger by destination.
2. 2. In the ad, provide a call to action.
3. 3. When signing into Messenger, notify your customers about current offers, new products, and services.
4. 4. It is possible to connect Facebook Messenger as a placement.
5. 5. Target the audience that has already written to you and visited the “Thank you” page on the site.
6. 6. Send customers a sponsorship message with an additional offer that encourages a relevant upsell or cross-sell sales.

How This Works

As an example, let’s consider an advertising campaign that popular Ukrainian psychologist Dmitriy Karpachev launched on Facebook.

The mechanism of interaction with the users was the following:

1. 1. In the Facebook news feed, a user was shown an ad on Messenger that offered to register for a free webinar “How to Find a Mutual Language with Your Child?”.
2. 2. After clicking ‘Register’ in Messenger, a user received a message with a ‘Participate’ call-to-action button.
3. 3. The chatbot informed about the registration and provided the date and time of the webinar.
4. 4. In the morning of the appointed day, the user received a reminder about the upcoming event and a link to connect.
5. 5. A few minutes before the start of the webinar, the system sent another message with an invitation to connect.

In the aforementioned case, two types of advertisements were used: destination ads (steps 1, 2, 3) and placement ads (steps 4, 5) or free messaging using the API Send/Receive methods.

Important: When using the API Send/Receive methods and integrating the sending of messages using chatbots, you have the opportunity to reply to the user’s message within 24 hours for free, like during an ordinary conversation. One message is also provided for re-sending to inactive users after 24 hours.

Conclusion

The messengers are no longer used exclusively as a tool for communication. They became promising placements for businesses, where a huge number of their potential customers spend time.

The ability to test various formats of advertisements, texts, call-to-actions, and images also allows you to adjust the promotion strategy and achieve your goals.

When setting up an advertisement in Messenger, you will need to not only determine the target audience for the campaign in advance but also to install Facebook Pixel on the landing pages. This is a snippet of JS code used to optimize advertising, retargeting, and conversion tracking. For further, explanation on how to advertise in Facebook Messenger, contact us, and we will be happy to answer your questions. 

About the Authors

Vitaliy Galkin

Head of the IT department at Promodo