11 June 2021

How To Use WhatsApp To Market Your Business: Tips and Strategies

With over 2 billion active users, WhatsApp is now a must-use for businesses worldwide. Join us as we take a look at how to market your business using WhatsApp.

Chee Yong Qing

Content Marketer

Reading time: 12 minutes

With a massive base of active users, WhatsApp recognizes the potential of its messaging platform network for businesses.

That’s why WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Business in 2018 to help small business owners improve business communication and increase sales, with features such as template messaging and WhatsApp Broadcast.

So how can you use WhatsApp to market your business? What are some of the best practices while doing WhatsApp marketing?

Read on to find out! 👇

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Why market on WhatsApp?

Other than the fact that there are over 2 billion active users on the platform, we need to first convince ourselves why to market on WhatsApp. What are its strengths to utilize, and how does it complement our existing marketing strategies?

Text > Calls

It’s not that text messaging is outrightly superior to calls. You can still sell like a pro over the phone.

However, Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, found that over 58% of people feel more confident to message a business than to make a call.

In fact, the same survey found similar results that people are more confident with messaging overfilling website forms or emailing businesses.

Why, you ask?

The people who were surveyed shared that they preferred messaging businesses because of 3 main reasons — faster response times, better advice and care, and more truthful responses from businesses.

Develop customer relationship

People prefer messaging over traditional ways of contacting businesses because they experience greater responsiveness and personalized communication when they message a business.

Here are some statistics to back up that claim.

78% of leads will buy from businesses that respond first and 55% of people reported feeling more personally connected to the brand when messaging a business. That’s because quick responses through text messaging accelerates the development of a relationship between leads and businesses.

Messaging has transformed how leads and customers perceive businesses. No longer are they typing emails or making phone calls that feel impersonal and ‘all about business’. Instead, they now feel that they are talking to a person-like persona when messaging a business.

With an international reach and an immensely huge user base, WhatsApp is now the ideal messaging platform to reach leads and customers to deepen customer relations.

It’s free

If you’re part of a small business, you will be delighted to find that WhatsApp Business is free to download and use. With no strings attached and no hidden fees, we should confidently maximize the use of this powerful and free messaging platform.

Understand who’s on WhatsApp

To market your business right, you’ll have to identify who your target audience is to better optimize your marketing efforts.

In order to do that effectively on WhatsApp, let us take a look at some of the user statistics on who is on WhatsApp.

Worldwide

With over 2 billion active users on WhatsApp, 1 billion of them are DAILY active users. Furthermore, WhatsApp is available in 180 countries and in 60 languages.

Out of the worldwide user base for WhatsApp, 54.5% are males and 45.5% are females.

In 2020, India had the highest number of WhatsApp users, with over 390 million users. Brazil came in second with over 108 million users, and the US with over 75 million users. If your business is expanding globally in these regions, you should definitely increase your WhatsApp marketing efforts.

No matter who your target audience is, there’s a high chance that they are already on WhatsApp. Rest assured that you’re casting a wide net when marketing on WhatsApp.

The US

Out of the 75 million users, another study in 2020 found that at least 50% of US users use WhatsApp on a daily basis. The most popular age group in the US that uses WhatsApp is 26-35 years old.

If you’re marketing on WhatsApp in the US, do target your content more towards a younger age group, and you can expect to reach them frequently.

For businesses

For any business out there, it’s important to note that about 175 million people send WhatsApp messages to business accounts every day. 😉

This means that other businesses have already started using WhatsApp for their business communications, so you too should hop onto the platform!

Getting started

So if you haven’t already started to use WhatsApp to market your business, let us quickly run through some steps and tips to get you started!

1. Create a WhatsApp Business account

Found in both iOS and Android systems, the WhatsApp Business app is free to download and free to use. As a separate application from the regular WhatsApp app, small business owners can use WhatsApp Business on their personal devices, if needed.

An example of a WhatsApp Business business profile. Source: WhatsApp

Simply connect your phone number to sign up for a WhatsApp Business account, set up your business profile, detailing your business and type of industry, and get started with connecting to your customers.

2. Update business catalog

The next step is to utilize the special feature in WhatsApp Business — a business catalog.

Here, you can detail the product and service offerings of your business with photos, descriptions, pricing and website links.

An example of a WhatsApp Business business catalog. Source: WhatsApp

This in-app business catalog will allow customers to easily refer to your products and services within WhatsApp itself, and is a helpful tool to let your customers easily refer to your business offerings.

Although customers cannot make purchases through the business catalog, don’t underestimate the potential of this business catalog. It serves a mini-webstore where you can share your products and services in a more natural manner when conversing with customers on WhatsApp.

3. Identify marketing goals

It is difficult for you to determine the effectiveness of using WhatsApp as a marketing tool without specific goals and identified metrics to measure these goals.

Before you jump into your WhatsApp marketing efforts, take time to first identify your marketing goals.

Are you doing WhatsApp marketing to improve customer satisfaction? How will you measure it? Or is your business looking to increase its sales through WhatsApp?

Perhaps your business is struggling with customer retention, or perhaps you’re just starting out as an entrepreneur and want to get the word out there about your business.

Once you’ve identified what goals you want to get out of your WhatsApp marketing efforts and the KPIs to measure them, you can begin crafting your WhatsApp marketing strategy.

4. Get people to add you

Get your WhatsApp Business number out there and let prospects and leads add you.

WhatsApp Broadcast can only reach users who save your business number as their contact. Before you start sharing marketing messages about your business, you’ll need to overcome this challenge as people seldom save business numbers in their contact list.

To start off, you can use existing marketing efforts like social media, emails, advertisements or website articles to encourage people to add your business number and text you first. For example:

Or, if your business is offering a specialized service, gather new leads and concurrently generate a broadcast list with something like:

Don’t underestimate other places to insert your WhatsApp number as well, such as in email signatures or LinkedIn profiles.

As long as you give a good reason as to why they should save your number and text you first on WhatsApp, you can effectively use this method to cast a wider net to reach more leads and customers.

But…you’ll have to manually store these new contacts on your WhatsApp Business account. 😅

5. Use website widgets

WhatsApp Marketing strategies

1. Craft a brand persona

If you’re a new business owner and have not yet created a brand persona, consider what are the human-like characteristics you’d want your business to have. 🤔

How would your customers recognize you? What are the business’ unique personality traits, values, and attitude?

Your WhatsApp business profile and business catalog should also reflect a brand identity that supports your brand persona. This means that the fonts, colors and logos used in these WhatsApp pictures should reflect the brand persona.

For example, you may want to keep your customized service’s brand persona as sophisticated, professional, and sincere. Or perhaps you’re a new tech company, and want to have a vibrant business persona filled with energy and excitement.

Remember to keep your brand persona consistent across all marketing platforms, including on WhatsApp Business, so that you present a coherent image to customers from your website to your social media accounts.

2. Provide high quality customer service

Good customer service is good branding.

The WhatsApp Business app supports up to 2 devices per account, so get both your marketing representative AND your customer service representative to be on WhatsApp.

Remember how 78% of leads buy from businesses who respond first? Well, real-time customer support with good responsiveness makes customers feel valued.

Answering questions and providing assistance further conveys that your business is detailed and customer-centric.

Top it off with a warm yet professional messaging tone to make customers feel welcomed when interacting with your business. 😊

3. Utilize broadcast message feature

If you have not yet heard of WhatsApp’s broadcast feature, you’re missing out! WhatsApp Broadcast allows you to simultaneously send the same messages to multiple people while appearing as if it was personally sent to every recipient.

When you broadcast messages on the WhatsApp Business app, do take note that you can only send out template messages that have to first be pre-approved by WhatsApp. This is for WhatsApp to enforce their guidelines that broadcasted messages cannot be of promotional nature.

However, there still other types of messages that you can broadcast to market your business:

Events: Maybe you’re hosting an expert roundup webinar on a special topic, or you may be livestreaming a Q&A session on Facebook Live. Gather interest on special events through WhatsApp Broadcast, and let customers feel more involved with your business!

Updates: Convey to your customers that you care and value them. You can update existing customers when requested features are newly added, or when new store locations are opening near them.

Surveys: Gather your customers’ opinions while conveying that you value their feedback. Ask about comments for your new products, or about their latest shopping experience on your website.

You may find your broadcasted messages to have a low response rate from your customers. But don’t be disheartened and don’t give up! The whole point is for you to proactively reach out and convey to customers that they are remembered and valued.

4. Create WhatsApp groups

You’re most probably familiar with what a WhatsApp Group is. But consider using this feature in a refreshing way — treat it like an intimate Twitter platform.

Build communities on WhatsApp by adding customers with similar interests into the same group and frequently share thoughts, trends, and product launches surrounding that interest.

For example, maybe you notice that there are a handful of customers who frequently purchase floral items on your fashion website. Create a group with these customers to ask for their feedback, gather customer insights, share the latest floral fashion trends, and specifically notify them of the floral pieces in a new seasonal lineup.

The idea here is to target a specific group of customers and engage them in a way that feels personal and communal.

Make continual use of WhatsApp Group invitation URLs in emails or broadcasted messages to grow such groups with new members!

5. Utilize various features

WhatsApp Status

In-app preview

When a website URL is sent on a WhatsApp chat, a preview of that page is generated to give users a glimpse of that page’s content. While you’re answering queries or sharing about new products, you can insert your business website URL and have the in-app preview prompt them to check out your website.

Additionally, WhatsApp also supports in-app viewing of YouTube videos. If you have tutorials or new product introduction videos on YouTube, share them in your WhatsApp chat with customers for immediate and easy viewing of these videos.

A screenshot of WhatsApp in-app viewing of Youtube.

Voice messaging

6. Reach out to customers

Recall that people value personalized communication. When you drop them a personalized text message, people are more likely to be re-nurtured, provide referrals, or provide feedback on their purchase experience.

In the final stage of a sales cycle, how we close the sale and manage our customer relationships may determine the customer’s future interaction with your business.

We should move beyond automatically generating post-sales email sequences as the only form of follow-up after a customer has made a purchase.

Proactively reaching out to customers 1-on-1 on WhatsApp may be time consuming, but it gives you quality feedback and deeper customer insights when done well.

We encourage you to directly ask customers for their feedback. What did they like about their shopping experience? Do they dislike the purchased product after receiving it? What new features would they like to see from your services?

Then thank them sincerely for their feedback, invite them to join any of your WhatsApp interest groups, or offer a small token of appreciation, such as a discount code. Show appreciation to your customers, and they’ll feel appreciated.

7. Vary message content

While using various types of features within WhatsApp, remember to not bore your customers by repeatedly sharing the same kind of content.

Keep your WhatsApp marketing refreshing with a variety of content types. Promotional messages may be important to improve sales, but re-nurturing customers can also be done with other creative content.

Share the latest trends. Tell a story of successful use cases enabled by your business. Publicize the webinars you’ve organized with guest experts roundup. Update existing customers of new free features. Be creative with your content! 😋

Tips for WhatsApp marketing

1. Use quick replies

The WhatsApp Business app has a unique feature that allows you to send quick replies. These are prepared templates that are helpful to answer frequently asked questions, generic greetings, and thank you messages.

Using quick replies saves precious time so you won’t have to retype the same messages time after time. 😉

2. Use a messaging software

As your business grows, you’ll find that you’ll have an increase in communication needs that exceeds what the WhatsApp Business app offers. As such, consider using a messaging software like NovoChat to bolster your marketing efforts on WhatsApp.

Novochat integrates with your existing WhatsApp Business account and allows you to broadcast personalized messages WITHOUT the restrictions surrounding WhatsApp Broadcast.

For businesses that are growing their team of marketing and customer service representatives, NovoChat offers a centralized inbox which is accessible by all account users.

The centralized inbox collates messages from all integrated messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, LINE, and Telegram, so that you can respond to messages from a single location, straight from your web browser!

The previously mentioned chat widget also channels more traffic from your websites to your WhatsApp inbox, increasing the reach of your marketing efforts. 🤩

3. Don’t overdo it

We suggest adopting this best practice when marketing on WhatsApp.

After all, most customers use WhatsApp on a daily basis for personal communication. They may appreciate the efforts from your business, but do it too often and too much, and they’ll find it more spammy than helpful.

Also, be mindful of the word count in your messages. Are you packing too much content into a single message? Are the messages merely a repeat of what you’ve already mentioned in the website URL shared, or are they attention grabbing and value adding to the customer?

Appropriately schedule your WhatsApp marketing efforts so that you maintain a healthy frequency of messages sent. Not everyone appreciates daily updates, even if they are interested in the type of content sent.

Refrain from an unethical spamming of broadcast messages to your customers when using messaging software. Avoid actions that badly reflect on your business. ⛔

In other words, be careful to not be counter-productive in your WhatsApp marketing efforts. Doing more isn’t always being more effective. Consider which marketing platform is appropriate for the planned marketing effort, and strategically deploy WhatsApp as one of the many marketing tools at your disposal.