WhatsApp is a real “national” messenger. His audience is so vast that it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand who is best addressed with his help. Despite the active struggle of the messenger team with advertising spam, it still should not be debited. Nobody forbids using WhatsApp to strengthen communication with your audience. And we will try to figure out how to do this best.
WhatsApp was created in 2009 by Yahoo immigrants Jan Kum and Brian Acton. Since then, the popularity of the messenger has grown steadily. So, in 2017, 1.2 billion people already use it. It’s easy to guess that WhatsApp has everything - people of all age categories, professions, races, etc. In other words, your target audience almost certainly installed it.
Promised statistics:
In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $ 19 billion. Since then, the service has been developing successfully. And the time has come to understand how it will help your business.
An attractive argument for beginners will be the fact that the messenger is free and allows you to communicate with customers in real time. And of course, let's not forget about the huge audience, where everyone can find what he needs. In WhatsApp you can share discounts, coupons, news from the life of the brand. In addition, you can attach a photo, video, link, document or audio recording to each message.
In the messenger you can create groups of up to 256 people. Such a quantity is quite suitable for conducting research, surveys or organizing events with company employees. But do not forget that all the benefits of WhatsApp can be used only by the owners of the phone numbers of the people who make up their target audience.
A messenger can work as a tool to promote your business. There are many examples of this, but we will take a look at some of the most successful.
The first is "Absolute". Representatives of the brand decided to celebrate the release of a new product by organizing a private event. To get an invitation, people needed to convince Steve (a character created by the brand special for this event) that he was obliged to invite them. Users had to send messages, photos and any other content that they considered necessary to WhatsApp chat. The result was deafening.
Another case was provided by Toyota. In 2012, the company's specialists decided to hold a contest, the participants of which were to add the word “Hybridized” to their status. Then, every week, from October 25 to November 28, iPhone 5 was played out among users who registered on the company's website. Thus, Toyota managed to get thousands of users to talk about themselves, not to mention the interest that was constantly heated for several weeks.
A Nielsen Facebook Messaging Survey study found that users are willing to interact with brands. So, 67% of users say they plan to use the application more often to communicate with sellers over the next two years, and 53% of respondents said that they are more willing to shop in stores that you can contact immediately and directly.
It doesn’t matter which way you choose - voice chat, text messages or video calls, all this will be carried out in real time. This will improve the quality of your customer service and audience loyalty. WhatsApp web version is best suited for these purposes, since it is much easier to respond to user messages using the classic keyboard.
As mentioned above, you can create a WhatsApp Group of up to 256 people. Here you can create a group chat. Such groups and chats are an ideal tool for conducting surveys, research and announcements of new products. And they are great for organizing sales.
Do not forget that these are people who have agreed to provide you with their phone numbers. Therefore, you need to behave very correctly so as not to lose them. Your text messages should be clear, understandable to all, relevant and, of course, correct in terms of spelling. And don't forget that a single post with several paragraphs is better than several separate posts. Do not infuriate users.
If you want to avoid obsession, you can talk about all the promotions, discounts and offers in WhatsApp Status - this is a feature similar to Instagram Stories, which allows you to create posts that disappear after 24 hours. "Stories" appear in a special tab of the messenger. Always upload a profile photo - your company logo should be there. We don’t think about image quality. A bright, attractive logo is another reason to pay attention to your business. By specifying the address of the company’s office, you can use the function to send your exact location - so the user will go to the interactive Google Maps with all its capabilities.