Natasha Takahashi is a chatbot-obsessed traveler, life hacker, singer, and Effective Altruist. She is the co-founder of School Bots, also the founder and Cheif Marketing Officer at Ineffable Marketing. She is one of the most renowned bot marketer guiding startups, businesses and organizations through their digital transformation with a focus on chatbots, messenger automation, social selling, social media marketing, and sales & marketing alignment.
Her skills include Business Development, Business Operations, Event Planning, Event Management, Social Entrepreneurship, Project Management, Social Media, Organizational Management, Advertising, Digital Marketing, Growth Hacking, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing, Chatbots Marketing, and Chatbot Development.
She recently spoke at TEDx Speaking Experience at Woodbridge High on the topic: The Secret Not-So-Secret Formula of Be-Do-Have.
Here, in this interview, she’s available with her vast knowledge and experience to both educate and entertain the youth, business, entrepreneurs, and starters.
Social Champ – Hi Natasha, how are you? It’s a pleasure to have you on board with Social Champ.
Could you briefly tell us how you started your career and became a social media celebrity and Bot Marketer specifically?
Natasha Takahashi – I started my career working with tech startups in San Francisco and LA. But then my career totally shifted, when I read Tim Ferriss and The 4-Hour Workweek. From that point forward, I realized I wanted to live more of the digital nomad life with passive income, as opposed to always being burnt out and working in the startup world.
That led me to eventually be involved with bots, where I launched my marketing agency in 2016. As well as launched the School of Bots in 2017. It’s our educational brand that teaches people how to build and sell chatbots.
What motivated you to become such an exceptional social media influencer?
Natasha Takahashi – Now, what motivated me to become a social media influencer is really that I love making content. I love communicating with people online who share the same mindset and ambitions. So Facebook, in particular, has really allowed me to reach people who are interested in the same stuff that I am, and that’s the first platform where I started to build my audience.
My goal really was to teach people about bots. But more importantly, show young people that they can have a decisive voice and spread that very easily through simple content.
I try to spread a positive message every day through videos, written content, and collaborations. Showing people that you can do what I have done as well, no matter how old you are.
As a content marketer, do you think bots help a product to achieve its goals?
Natasha Takahashi – I think that bots are essential for building up your brand. For social media campaigns, customer support, operations automation.
As a bot marketer, I think bots are helping three areas of business: Sales, marketing, and operations. You’re trying to automate all of these to have more time to do more innovative things. Most companies and even employees are tied up with managing stuff as opposed to creating. Bots allow a business to create more as opposed to have to manage everything that they have already built there.
Who or what inspired you to do what you’re doing now?
Natasha Takahashi – Some of those people are Jesse Itzler, who I really admire for his spontaneity and his kind philosophies. Sara Blakely, she embraces making as many mistakes as possible. In terms of influence-ship or engaging an audience, Beyonce is actually someone that I think has a wonderful presence on stage, both singing and performing.
Her personality is something that I also strive to be. I think you can take a lot from the way she engages with her fans and even the positivity that she emits.
What 3 things should anyone starting in bot industry need to know?
Natasha Takahashi – One there are a lot of opportunities to go sell pretty much as many businesses as you could.
Second, you need to make sure you follow the guidelines. You followed platform policies on any messaging platform that you are building on. If you don’t, there is a very high chance of your bot or your client’s bot to get banned from the platform.
Third, make sure that you experiment a ton with what your audience actually wants to engage with. There are so many different ways that a conversation can go. It’s all about figuring out how your audience wants to engage with you.
We found your plans on world domination at LinkedIn? How far have you been successful in your To-Do List?
Natasha Takahashi – I haven’t gotten too far in my list or bucket list of items just yet. I’ve been focused on these two businesses and a lot of stuff on the list is pretty big, and I need to have a lot of time to focus on each other.
So far, I can say that I own some pretty cool companies. I like to own awesome stuff around the world, so those two things definitely qualify.
I’ll keep you guys updated on each thing that I complete as I go along. If you guys want to read the whole list just go to linkedin.com/in/natashatakahashi/ and you can read the entire list inside of my bio.
Let’s talk about the biggest failure you’ve had. What did you learn from it?
Natasha Takahashi – The biggest failure that I have had is partnering with an industry leader without any proof of delivery.
We were supposed to create a piece of content together, and it was quite a big piece. We were creating a course together. What ended up happening was they didn’t deliver for four months. I didn’t push too hard on saying, hey you haven’t produced it yet. In the end, we had to cancel it.
At that point, I just cut the cord and stop doing any business with that partner. But this was a huge business mistake. I lost about $60,000 on this overall deal because we ended up giving away $8,000 product to the people who had pre-bought this product that we never launched.
Here’s what I learned from this: In an early industry like bots, make sure that the people you’re partnering with actually have previous entrepreneurial experience.
What do you find are bot marketing’s biggest stumbling blocks, and what are the best ways you’ve found to overcome them?
Natasha Takahashi – Bot marketing’s biggest stumbling blocks right now is how to create a super engaging chatbot. Also, how to not be spammy and annoy people. At the same time, how do you not make a user feel like you’re invading their inbox. It’s a very delicate balance between being spammy and being engaging.
It takes experience and experimenting to figure that out for each brand. As a business owner, put yourself in the consumer shoes and think what would be fun to engage with.
How do you think social media scheduling tools are connected with the usage of bots? What are your favorite tools for digital/content marketing?
Natasha Takahashi – I love platforms like Social Champ because they allow you to be so much more productive when you’re posting content.
What I realized as I started to post a lot more content online is that I can just recycle everything that I use. You can recycle everything that you created, and your audience will still love it all the same. Such tools like Social Champ really allow you to do that in the best way possible.
My favorite digital marketing automation tools are Clickfunnels, Canva, which is becoming super popular now. My third all-time favorite tool is actually BeLive.tv, it is a Facebook live tool that allows you to add different texts to the actual Facebook live.
What has been your biggest customer success story? Why do you think it was a success?
Natasha Takahashi – I love sharing our students’ stories way more. So two of our students, one of them is Oscar. He got three clients a couple weeks after he went through the course and that put his program ROI at 193% because he made his money back from the program. He also was able to charge clients the minimum of $1000 to build a bot for them.
Our second excellent student is Rex, who got eight clients in two or three weeks into the course, which was insane!
As a Pro Traveller, would you like to recommend your favorite spots?
Natasha Takahashi – Some of my favorite spots to go are Thailand, Osaka in Japan, and Cancun in Mexico. The reasons are because you know the culture there is very rich, the food is fantastic; also, there are great digital marketing communities in these places, and it’s always exciting to go there and see the structure of the communities.
Check out the complete video of the interview on our YouTube channel.
