How to Synergize Other Digital Marketing Services with Your WhatsApp Marketing Strategy

by Hawke Media

According to a recent study, WhatsApp has amassed more than two billion active users around the world. Those people send more than 100 billion messages per day on what has become the widest-used mobile messenger app in existence. Marketers have their eyes on WhatsApp because it’s clearly where people are spending their time.

For those advertisers, WhatsApp is a tool to more effectively reach your target audience. Because of that, you need to synergize your other digital marketing services with that larger WhatsApp marketing strategy. When executed properly, this can allow them all to become something much more powerful as a collective than any one of them could be on their own. 

Paid Social

As you work to bring all these seemingly disparate parts of your digital marketing strategy together with WhatsApp, arguably the best place to start is with paid social. Yes, it's true that WhatsApp is primarily a messaging app, but its functionality for paid ads looks a lot like social media platforms.

WhatsApp is now owned by Meta, which makes it easy to retarget customers from Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. While the messages you craft and the collateral you create should certainly play to the unique strengths of each channel, you also need to make sure your branding is consistent. This is true of your entire user acquisition strategy including collateral, messaging, and images.

Brand consistency is how you stay top-of-mind, leading to long-term brand recognition. WhatsApp Broadcast Ads are particularly helpful at this stage of the process.

Farther down the funnel, WhatsApp can be invaluable to those customers who have already engaged with your site or your ads, but who haven't yet made a purchase.

Maybe they have a question about the product that they can't find the answer to on their own. In that case, you can give them the opportunity to do so in a WhatsApp chat. According to one recent survey, almost 99% of respondents said that giving people the opportunity to chat with either a live representative or an AI-powered chatbot increased their lead conversions in an appreciable way.

Paid Search

At Hawke Media, we've always found that a healthy paid social campaign will also improve page search results. A rising tide lifts all ships. Based on that, the next step in your synergistic efforts should be to take what you're learning about your target audience from your social campaigns and bring them to any and all forms of pay-per-click (PPC) that you're engaged in.

Retarget from one to the other. Paid social is usually more of a top-of-funnel strategy, but don’t be surprised if people convert all the way from WhatsApp ads. Those that don’t should see similar messaging on paid search. 

When executed properly, paid advertisements have an estimated 200% return on investment and PPC can generate nearly twice as many site visitors as SEO. Bringing this all together with your WhatsApp strategy will send those numbers even higher.

Content and SEO

In order to succeed in terms of content marketing, you need to give your audience what it wants. To get to that point, you have to learn as much about them as you can. Who are these people? What do they like? What do they dislike? What goal are they trying to accomplish or what problem do they have, and how can you help? These are all the questions you need to answer.

WhatsApp is unique in that it gives you the chance to hear from those customers directly. All you have to do is pay attention to what they're already saying.

Catalogue the conversations that are taking place on WhatsApp with your brands and find trends that you can then use to guide your larger content strategy. If your customers are always asking your fashion-related brand about "true-to-size" concerns, for example, it stands to reason that these are questions a lot of people have. Build content that answers a lot of the common questions that you're seeing over and over again.

You can do this in the form of blogs, FAQ pages, product landing pages, and more. The more helpful, relevant, and engaging content you create, the more successful your SEO efforts will be. The valuable content builds loyalty and trust while the SEO tactics increase brand awareness. Plus, people will start asking different questions on WhatsApp, allowing you to repeat the process again and again.

Use a similar mentality with social media content. Use WhatsApp to learn what sparks the most one on one conversation, and apply that to different social mediums. 

Essentially, you're starting a conversation on a site like Facebook and are "keeping the conversation going" on WhatsApp. That way, you can organically warm up cold leads and convert them into sales.

Additionally, you should use long-form content to actually assist the messaging that is taking place in WhatsApp. When those "true-to-size" questions do come up in a WhatsApp chat (or in Messenger or via your Instagram direct messages), your chatbot can and should answer them directly. But you can also use language like "feel free to view this page for similar questions that you might have" and link to the aforementioned FAQ page. 

Lifecycle Marketing

Another digital marketing service that WhatsApp will look a lot alike is your SMS program. These are primarily one on one private messaging services, so a lot of SMS learnings make sense here. Zoom out, and WhatsApp isn’t so different from other lifecycle tactics like email marketing. 

What you learn from one of these platforms should influence what you're doing on another. When you have a chat advertisement that gets an overwhelming response on SMS, for example, you should absolutely try it out on WhatsApp and vice versa.

When you have a message that is truly resonating in email, you should try it out on WhatsApp as well. In many situations, you'll see similar results across channels.

Of course, you need to be cautious about hitting people with the same message too many times. The concept of "you can have too much of a good thing" is still true. If a person engages with your brand on WhatsApp and on Instagram, they shouldn't see the exact same communication word-for-word. This is true even though the mediums are inherently similar. 

Create Synergy, but Remember WhatsApp is Unique

While it is a form of organic social media that marketers tend to treat like paid media, it also behaves like lifecycle marketing and serves the customer as a chatbot. Its similarities to so many different marketing channels make it uniquely its own. 

At the end of the day, WhatsApp is very much its own unique platform and opportunity. 

Because of its inherent versatility, getting started on WhatsApp can certainly feel overwhelming - to say nothing of what a challenge it can be to sync your efforts here up with all of your other digital services. But the truth is, it's only as intimidating as you make it. 

Your brand likely already has experience in all the relevant aspects to make your WhatsApp approach sing - you just need to align them with your other avenues to create the true omnichannel experience people clamor for.

If you want to synergize your WhatsApp marketing strategy with your other digital marketing services but aren't sure where to begin, don't worry - we're here to help. Contact the experts at Limechat and Hawke Media today to take your plan of action to the next level.