Complete WhatsApp Marketing Guide For Beginners

WhatsApp has been labelled an anti-marketing company in the past but now they have created a separate app for the purpose of marketing or better said, for the purpose of connecting businesses to their audience. To get a better understanding of the importance of WhatsApp as a marketing tool, read USING WHATSAPP AS A SUCCESSFUL MARKETING TOOL. That is by the way. Moving on, WhatsApp does not sell ad space like other social media platforms so you must be very innovative in your marketing approach before you can get people’s interest.  WhatsApp business was created for brands and companies to easily use the platform to enhance their businesses. This is proof that they had it in mind to use their platform for marketing and this means that businesses and marketers now have access to the pool of engagement.

STEPS FOR MARKETING ON WHATSAPP

1. Download WhatsApp business and create an account for your brand

You should not use the normal personal WhatsApp app to conduct business. I know a lot of individuals sell one thing or the other and they make use of their personal accounts. I am boldly telling you that this is bad practice. The way people will relate with individuals will entirely be different from how they would relate with a brand because of the identity. Even if your name and personality is your brand identity, your social media accounts should not be personal accounts but business accounts. For WhatsApp marketing, it is better to have a separate number for business and use that number to create your WhatsApp business account.

2. Upload your brand logo as your profile picture

Image branding is important when dealing with a potential market. The audience are looking out for consistency in brand identity. They have this feeling of trust when they can easily identify a brand or business with their image or name.

3. Use your brand name as the profile name

It is bad practice to use a personal account for business. So, it is advisable to go through the branding phase for your company before attempting to market on any platform including WhatsApp. Brand identity is a very important factor in marketing even if all you do is resell products you don’t own or produce.

4. Fill up the profile details and utilize the business tools in the settings

Put your business or company details in the profile section. Fill every necessary information about your brand in the required places. This will help your audience identify you easily. You can also redirect them to your other social media accounts or your website through the business tools.

5. Build your contact list

Although building this list might seem like a challenge, once you have it, you’d realize that the result is worth the challenge. Your audience at the initial stage of building have to consent to being messaged by exchanging contacts with you or simply giving you their phone numbers. Another way is to send your number out to the public for them to contact you or add you at will. You can write a short message leading to a call to action with your WhatsApp business number in it and put this message in articles, emails, and promotional contents to be posted on various platforms including WhatsApp tv. For example:

You need to be specific about the action you want them to take like sending a code to you so that you would be aware that they have saved your number. You can also build a “set it once” solution by including the call to action message in your email signature. It can be as simple as this:

It does the job of asking the reader to communicate with you via WhatsApp and answers the question why?

6. Build your audience by creating broadcast lists or groups

In the case of groups, you can either notify people on your contact list that you want to add them to a group, but you have to give them good reasons for them to agree. The other option is to share the group’s link on various platforms so that strangers can join at will. You can label them with the ‘label’ feature that WhatsApp has incorporated into their business app.

Things to consider when creating groups

• You need to know who will be in your group since there’s a number limit per group. If you’re having more than one group, determine how to segment your audience according to each group.

• You need to know what the dynamics of each group will be.

7. Engage your audience

Now that you’ve put your audience in groups and broadcast lists, you should engage them differently and consistently. For the ones in broadcast lists, the type of contents you send to them should be personal (should target an individual) since broadcast messages work like personal dm. This way, every one of them feels you messaged them directly. You can include links, invitations, or call to actions in your messages. For the groups, your messages should have a general tone since you are addressing a public. You should not turn your messages to spam because people hate it. On the other hand, people appreciate value.

The more valuable the contents you post to your groups are, the more engaged the contents are. If your goal is to direct this audience to a page or website, etc., there is a way at which you can track the statistics. Create a UTM code with Google URL builder; to do that, insert your link, answer some questions on where it is posted, and you get something like this:

You can always see the traffic source coming from WhatsApp in the stats on your Google analytics dashboard.

WAYS TO IMPROVE ENGAGEMENT ON WHATSAPP

1. Create an engaging brand persona and build buzz

WhatsApp is an intimate messaging platform where people connect with those they relate to. Any brand that seeks to get invited into anyone’s WhatsApp dm needs to feel like a friend or an acquaintance to say the least. So, you need to create an engaging brand persona, identity or character that represents your brand. The identity can be a person in charge of your WhatsApp account, and it can also be a fictional character designed to create interest and engagement. After creating the persona, you can use it over and over for different events to bring customers in. You can use WhatsApp to make noise about an event or an offer.

2. Offer great value (like random help or solution, advice, or free consultation) to build a phone database

you need to offer your audience or potential audience something of value in exchange for their phone number and attention. This can be a useful suggestion, valuable referral, useful promotion, freebies, a free service or consultation, or valuable information. You can design an attractive promotion to get users to share their numbers with you. Once you add them on WhatsApp, send them an offer they can redeem and begin their relationship with you. An example is Unilever’s Mayonnaise brand Hellman’s that needed to expand the use of its products in new dishes in Brazil. So, it offered consumers a WhatsApp line where they could ask professional chefs questions, get recipes, share videos of cooking, while building a database of mobile numbers in the process.

3. Giving customer support

Your messages are more likely to be read if you customer is on WhatsApp with you. That said, you need to ensure you are adequately resourced to handle customer queries. The last thing you want to do is get people on your WhatsApp business account or group and not respond for hours. Ensure there is a dedicated person or group of people if your company has a very large customer base, depending on the traffic, and ensure performance is measured.

4. Posting feeds, updates, and reminders

5. Giving special offers and coupons

6. Requesting feedback and conducting consumer research

Surveys should be conducted on how they are being treated by the company and its staff, products they like, proposed launches, among other things.

7. Be creative while posting on your status

8. Build user loyalty by developing a good rapport with your audience

9. Engage with WhatsApp calls directly or in groups if need be. You should seek consent first though

10. Send quality contents

Contents on relevant topics that have high value always drive engagement. Always try to make them short, concise, and straight to the point. An example is radio Interconomia, a business radio and tv channel that created a WhatsApp number to offer users free business news, interesting interviews, and stock analysis by top analysts on the channel. They charged just $1 to join the channel for a massive 2-way engagement.

11. Send curated contents

These are contents created by other organizations but shared by a brand because they believe it will be of interest to their audience. Any content not created by you but will be of interest to your audience can be shared with them. Just make sure you don’t alter anything, and you reference the owner.

12. Get to know your audience

13. Always remember that it is always about your audience

how to solve their challenges, how to serve their curiosity, how to be the answer to their questions, and so on.

14. Always stay relevant and engaging

CONCLUSION

WhatsApp marketing is unbeatable once you know how to leverage the app very well. It has grown to become the number one closing platform for online sales because of the amazing tools and its organic reach strength. I know of a course that can teach you advanced ways of using WhatsApp extensively for marketing. An expert has put together proven strategies he used to close over 850,000 Naira within 3 days of using WhatsApp to close sales.

The course is filled with practical approach on how you can leverage on WhatsApp, not only to sell your products once, but to always sell over and over to the same sets of people. I enrolled for it and it has enhanced my organic and closing skills. You should also give it a shot. So, if you want an in-depth knowledge or training on the extensive use of WhatsApp as a marketing tool, how to close deals on WhatsApp and more, click here to enroll. It is a high value course and only costs a one-time payment of 23USD.