Supercharging social media

Social media is increasingly a breeding ground for brand success. Izzybots employs solutions that automate engagement across a broad spectrum of platforms. NZBusiness caught up with its CEO and co-founder Josh Lewthwaite.

Josh Lewthwaite is a man who admits he lives by his passions; which is largely why he has experienced such an interesting career. At age 15 Josh was this country’s youngest ever qualified tennis coach. He’s been a DJ at major festivals and events, and his first corporate role saw him successfully lead sales for an internal communication software company across APAC, the Middle East and Europe.

Izzybots began life in 2018 as a side-hustle to his day job, and it quickly grew. In early 2020, mid-pandemic, the company secured ecommerce, website and digital specialist Zeald as a partner.

Josh and his team recognised that brands spend a lot of time and money building their social media presence. But once they’ve accumulated all those hard-earnt comments, messages and story tags, they don’t do anything with them.

“This is a missed opportunity for further success via social media platform leverage,” Josh says, “which presented a big market opportunity for Izzybots.”

Finding the right product market fit took time. Josh says they spent a lot of that time in ‘discovery and development’ mode, but the upshot of all that effort is that they now work with some of New Zealand’s biggest brands across sport, music and retail – clients such as One NZ Warriors, the Silver Ferns, Six60, Hallensteins and BurgerFuel.

Another key challenge for Izzybots has been around educating the market about the existence of this technology and marketing capability.

“As an example, even leading marketing experts we’ve met with haven’t known the full capability within Messenger, where you can turn audience engagement into valuable experiences and action, and achieve market-leading open rates,” says Josh.

Taking customers on a journey

Since chatbots came on the scene, associated technology and trends have grown exponentially, and today Izzybots is all about total social media solutions.

“Brands invest heavily into building a social media following but don’t capitalise on that investment by taking the next step and engaging with their followers,” explains Josh. “That’s where we come in. We capture and convert opportunities by responding to every engagement and taking customers on a journey through continued and responsive interaction.”

It’s a mistake to limit automated engagement to just chatbots, he says. “Instead, brands should be asking how automation across social media can drive success.”

Along with inbox management automation, an Izzybot can directly message everyone who positively comments on your business’s social media content, so you never waste an engagement.

“We build entire subscriber bases on Messenger that achieve near 100 percent open rates and click-through rates as high as 91.2 percent, says Josh. “This has helped us deliver industry-leading campaigns. For Australian music sensation Alison Wonderland, we converted 7,800-plus comments into 5,973 pre-saves, and for Kiwi music artist/producer Montell2099 87 percent of commenters then provided us with their email addresses.”

The dos and don’ts of chatbots

Josh’s advice on chatbot experiences centres on five key points:

• Context is everything. “A conversation should always be context-led – if someone is vegetarian, you’re not going to talk to them about meat.

“Does your audience want sales, service, entertainment? Find the balance between providing what the person wants at that exact time based on where they’ve come from, and driving conversions for your business.”

• Provide an option to speak to someone. “Almost everyone I know has found themselves stuck in a conversation with a chatbot. A key mistake is thinking a chatbot will replace live chat. It won’t. If someone wants to talk to a person, have that available in the most achievable way for your business.”
• Don’t try to trick your audience. “A bot is not a person. People often know that it’s a bot, and trying to trick them into thinking it’s a person is high risk. It doesn’t go down well, and it’s very hard to achieve.”
• Prepare a safety net. “I can almost guarantee that your chatbot won’t be prepared to answer everything people will ask. Have a safety net in place that will catch every misunderstood conversation and redirect people to what they likely want.”
• A bad chatbot is worse than having nothing. “People’s brand perception is based on their emotion toward you at different touchpoints. Being stuck and frustrated about a chat with a chatbot creates strong negative emotion towards you; far worse than someone being told it might be best to email you.”

Proudest achievements

Looking back on the progress of Izzybots, Josh takes pride in the fact that he turned a new idea into a global company with clients in Australia and New Zealand and as far afield as the UK and US.

“Bringing on board clients and brands I’ve admired since I was a kid, such as One New Zealand Warriors, has meant so much,” he adds.

Josh says the campaign he’s proudest of is a mental health check-in Izzybots did with an iwi community. “We checked in with each person in the iwi every few days to see how they were finding lockdown and notified an administrator when someone needed help. “I’ll remember the positive feedback we had from the iwi for a very long time,” he says.

On a more personal note, helping his mum through her last few years living with cancer, as well as helping his family, all while keeping Izzybots on course, is undoubtedly another reason to be proud.

The way forward

In just five years Izzybots has progressed quickly. Now, as well as continuing to grow the business locally and across APAC countries, the plan is to expand further into the United States, and Josh will base himself in Los Angeles to oversee the brand’s growth in that market.

“While expanding overseas is our next big move, we also plan to overlay our learning in New Zealand, too,” says Josh. “Expectations, needs, and service varies greatly across different markets, so there’s always something to learn, develop, and cross-deliver to benefit all our clients.”

AI tech will certainly feature in future growth too, he believes. “AI is moving faster than I think anyone anticipated and it’s only set to increase. At Izzybots we’ve been using AI tech for some time and we’re experiencing big capability improvements as a result. So this an area we will continue to focus on in 2024.

“In terms of big goals, we want to connect and work with sports teams in all major US sports leagues – namely NFL, NBR, MLS and MLB – as well as the English Premier League in the UK.”

The aim is to also work with major US music artists, a market which is gaining momentum quickly, says Josh. “We want to form great relationships with strategic partners in those industries.

“The key to our New Zealand success has undoubtedly been through connections and relationships, and we plan to take that same approach in America.”

Why is chatbot automation key to your marketing strategy?

• It works towards converting the opportunities you’re currently missing.
• Automation can be used to build your databases.
• When implemented correctly, it creates great customer experiences.
• An Izzybot automation will acknowledge every person’s message.
• It can help manage scale as activity builds to large volumes.