Advertising is a crucial element of every business’s marketing strategy. There are multiple social media platforms and search engines that businesses can leverage when implementing advertising campaigns. However, Whatsapp is becoming a significantly popular option for marketers wanting to engage the potential audience directly.
The Meta-owned app has approximately 2 billion users worldwide, and those users send around 100 billion messages daily – a huge portion of which is being sent by users to brands directly. Therefore, Whatsapp’s active user base presents an excellent opportunity for marketers and businesses wanting to run effective ad campaigns to reach a global audience.
What are Whatsapp’s key statistics every marketer must know?
- Whatsapp is the most popular messaging application worldwide.
- Users spend around 18.6 hours on Whatsapp every month.
- Revenue across Meta-owned applications increased by 37% in 2021.
- During the Covid-19 pandemic, Whatsapp usage increased by approximately 40%.
- In September 2021, Whatsapp Business was downloaded around 18 million times.
- Whatsapp’s user base is significantly bigger than Facebook messenger’s.
How to do organic marketing on Whatsapp
People use Whatsapp to reach out to friends and families. Therefore, businesses and marketers must customize the brand persona to talk to potential audiences in the space of informal conversations. To grow the audience on Whatsapp, it’s essential to add a Whatsapp button on the business website so customers can quickly start a conversation.
From your business account, you can collect contacts and message them as a group or directly. This can help with events, product announcements, or contests and giveaways. Make sure you provide value to your contacts when you use a personal communication channel like Whatsapp.
The first step of Whatsapp marketing is to create a Whatsapp Business account. Then, connect this account with the business’s Facebook page. This will allow marketers to analyze the traffic and access other metrics associated with Whatsapp’s ad campaigns. Without this connection, it isn’t possible to view the plethora of metrics and analytics to run click-to-message ads or optimize the strategies.
The next step is to build ads by using the Ads Manager function on Facebook. First, select the ad objective, such as traffic, messages, website conversions, engagement, brand awareness, or video views objectives to build the ad campaign. After that, there’re 3 ad formats available, including carousel, images, or videos, which can be selected according to the ad’s objective. You cannot place an ad directly in Whatsapp, but a Meta-network ad can enable a user to click on it and chat or talk in Whatsapp.
Moreover, leverage Whatsapp’s stories feature to deliver special offers or discount codes. For example, a coupon can be added to the story with the announcement that the offer will expire within 24 hours. Besides that, share a video on a story showing the behind-the-scenes of the product. Showing a sneak peek of an unannounced product or service is a great way to grab the audience’s attention.
How to do paid marketing on Whatsapp
Unlike the Whatsapp Business account, which is free, the Whatsapp API is an advanced solution for medium and large-sized businesses that comes with a paid model. The benefits of Whatsapp API are excellent flexibility in adjusting to existing workflows, easy scalability, and a secure GDPR-compliant setup. Moreover, it also has dedicated enterprise features such as the option to add Whatsapp bot and template messages. Furthermore, due to the data sharing between Whatsapp and Facebook, marketers can do branded ad targeting to bring more ROI.
How does Whatsapp Business API transform customer journeys?
Customers want to effortlessly connect with live agents to source the services, products, and customer experiences they want. Therefore, Whatsapp Business API significantly boosts conversions by allowing customers to engage in two-way conversations. It also helps personalize message content with customers’ names, locations, countries, purchase histories, etc.
Besides that, when customers select Whatsapp-based communication with any brand, they know they are interacting with a genuine company, not an imposter. The marketers also know that the user is the real deal because of Whatsapp’s two-factor authentication.
What are the best tools for Whatsapp marketing?
Sparkcentral is an automated messaging platform developed to manage high volumes of messages. It offers AI and chatbots solutions to help businesses and marketers automate customer service across multiple social platforms in one dashboard.
Our next pick is Veepar – the best Whatsapp marketing tool to help marketers build a customizable broadcast list and send relevant texts to groups. This tool helps to communicate with the business contacts efficiently, run polls, and manage the sales pipeline. Its features include auto-responder templates, campaign creation, monitoring and scheduling, calendar/reminder system, message reporting, and contact management.
Omnisend helps to combine several marketing streams such as social media, email, and SMS into one platform. It also provides redefined visitor workflows like product purchase and cart abandonment. Its features include analytics/ROI tracking, customizable CTAs, drip campaigns, event-triggered actions, message personalization, customized landing pages, 2-way messaging, and much more.
How to analyze a Whatsapp ad campaign?
Marketers can analyze the Whatsapp ad campaign with parameters such as the total number of messages sent, delivered, failed, read, queued, and with key metrics, such as clicks, conversions, and revenue.
Let’s understand each parameter and metric.
- Messages sent
It indicates the messages that have been successfully sent to the target audience.
- Messages delivered
It indicates the messages that have been successfully delivered.
- Messages failed
It indicates the users who failed to get the messages within the specified time.
- Messages queued
It indicates the users for whom the messages are queued at the moment for delayed delivery.
- Messages read
It indicates the users that have read the message within the specified time.
- Clicks
It indicates the users who have clicked the message link within the specified time.
- Conversions
It indicates the users converted through Whatsapp within the specified time.
- Revenue
It indicates the total revenue that occurred within the specified time.
What are top examples of Whatsapp marketing?
1. Hellman’s
Hellman’s started a great campaign to promote mayo to Brazilians. Through this campaign, they provided individuals the opportunity to connect with a real chef via Whatsapp. The individuals send a picture of the contents in their fridge to the chef, who then creates a recipe and guides them to cook.
2. Agent Provocateur
Since purchasing delicates is a nuanced process, Agent Provocateur realized that users would appreciate the messaging application privacy. Therefore, they started connecting customers with personal shoppers via Whatsapp, leading to a significant bump in conversions.
3. Clarks
The popular shoe brand Clarks wanted to tell stories about their brand and its accomplishments, and Whatsapp seemed like a perfect platform. Clarks had live exchanges between multiple subcultures that were their story’s part, namely the 1960s Paris, Reggae, and Mod Era. This got excellent responses from customers and got younger groups’ attention that might not have been aware of the brand beforehand.
4. KLM
KLM effectively uses Whatsapp to help its customers receive flight alerts and other useful information. Once booked on a flight, customers can get booking confirmations on check-in notifications, flight status, and boarding passes through Whatsapp.
5. Cardex Autoteile OHG
Cardex Autoteile OHG is a German auto parts retailer which has added Whatsapp Business to the marketing channels and immediately saw a significant increase in orders (more than 15,000 orders in the first 9 months). Their priority was to offer a seamless ordering and communication experience to customers.
In conclusion
Whatsapp marketing is undoubtedly a golden opportunity for marketers to reinforce the brand and create long-lasting relationships with customers. Whatsapp Business account is free to utilize. However, to get advanced features, you may have to buy additional tools, which may cost a few bucks. But, to achieve the best results, go beyond Whatsapp marketing and leverage all the channels your potential audience prefers. Try Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn marketing and reinforce marketing strategy with web push notifications and email campaigns as well.
Milestone increases acquisition by enhancing digital experience and increasing content visibility. Contact us at [email protected] or call us at 408-200-2211.
