Marketing with WhatsApp – Tools, Techniques & Cases

• Advantages of WhatsApp as a Marketing Tool
• Strategies to Market on WhatsApp
• A Case Study

How do you reach prospective customers for your products or services? Where might you market them? Which platforms and sites assure you the kind of reach you are seeking?  As a business owner or a marketer, you might have, by now, become aware of WhatsApp’s potential as a setting for marketing your product and services. After all, WhatsApp is the largest user base among social media platforms, with more than 1.6 billion active users. 

Advantages of WhatsApp as a Marketing Tool

WhatsApp also has many other benefits.

It might surprise you to know that nearly 60 billion messages are sent on WhatsApp daily!  Numerous studies have also shown that youth between the ages of 15 to 25 prefer WhatsApp over other platforms. Here that they are most likely to respond to instant messaging related to purchasing and shopping. 

Many people become aware of  WhatsApp through Messenger. So, by the time they begin to use it for Business, they are already familiar with its interface,  features, and functionality. Thus, using it to promote their products and services to communicate with their prospects or customers becomes easy, intuitive and efficient.

The chats in WhatsApp are completely secure. So, businesses are assured that their messages are completely private to them and the information contained therein is safe and confidential.

Studies have indicated that customers respond at a ratio of nearly 40% to WhatsApp messages sent by businesses to their prospects. This response makes the conversation ratio on WhatsApp significantly better than any other platform.

Strategies to Market on WhatsApp

‍Know your target audience

WhatsApp is designed for small business owners to reach out and engage with prospects. Many business owners resort to the ‘spray and pray’ approach. This approach means sending messages to all and sundry and hoping for a response. Before you start sending messages, you might like to consider your target audience and create a customer profile or persona. Such a persona would generate demographics, preferred communication styles, purchase behaviors, and purchase drivers. This persona would enable business owners to target those WhatsApp users who match this profile and also to craft their messages in such a way as to get a quicker reception from them.

Create a contacts list

You need a contact list of your target audience. You could acquire customer contact numbers through subscription forms. Subscription forms used as lead generation collateral are called lead magnets, such as E-Books, presentations, articles, and so on. You could place these on your website.

Create personalized communication

Your chances of getting a response from your prospects are significantly higher if your messages to them have not only appropriate content and do speak to their requirements and needs. Your communication needs to speak of your product or service, that’s for sure. However, the message must also point to WHY the prospects ought to give your message attention and interest. So, if you were to speak to an independent graphic designer, then your communication to them ought to speak to them about the importance of sharing their design portfolio with their clients and so on.

Have a communication strategy

People don’t like to be bombarded with messages with only text. So, be sure to use visuals and graphics, even videos. Also, people don’t always want to read messages that give only information about products and services, all the time. To break the monotony, you could have messages that have information about the domain or industry trends or a quiz. Be sure to change things around a bit.

Create a brand persona

It would help if you were sure of how your brand ought to look and feels. For instance, you could imagine your brand as a character. What kind of character would it be? How would it speak? What would it say? What would it look like? What would be its values? Such questions could help you decide on the brand persona and guide the design and content. Arriving at such guidelines would make your communication distinctive rather than sound like any other communication sent by any of your competitors.  You must think about your brand if your communication has to stand out.

Businesses will have to try a variety of approaches in order to grab the attention and interest of their prospects in the bid to market their products or services. The more innovative the method, the more likely it is to yield dividends in terms of leads.

A Case Study

An excellent example of an innovative marketing technique is the one used by the Indian healthcare brand, Saffola. Although Saffola is a company that produces and sells refined oil, it has branded itself as a healthcare brand, i.e., a brand whose product is conducive to health.

Saffola positioned itself as a company that fought unhealthy eating habits. So, it crafted a WhatsApp campaign that used a WhatsApp chatbot. Users could engage in conversations with this bot whenever they felt the craving for unhealthy food, the bot would try and talk them out of it. The bot would try and distract the user by playing pre-recorded positive statements that reinforced their resolve to stay away from unhealthy food. It even used puzzles and rap songs –in short, the works, to try and dissuade the user from unhealthy comfort eating. 

Saffola used such innovative techniques for marketing its products, branding itself, and drawing attention to its value proposition. So, when Saffola sent an offer through a WhatsApp message to a prospect, chances were very high that the user would respond positively.

For more details about how to market your products or services on WhatsApp, you can reach us at www.bot.space.

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