From promoting new products to sending welcome sequence emails, WhatsApp can help elevate your marketing campaigns. But before you press send on your first WhatsApp messaging campaign, you’ll need to know how to build a WhatsApp marketing strategy.
That’s why we’re here. By illustrating the steps to creating a WhatsApp marketing strategy, we’ll show you how to get your campaign off the ground faster than you can say conversational commerce.
- Determine Internal and External Constraints
- Set Gols & KPIs
- Build Audience
- Create Message Templates
- Execute Strategy
What Is WhatsApp Marketing Strategy?
In short, a WhatsApp marketing strategy is simply the route your brand takes to achieve its WhatsApp marketing goals. For some brands, this route may be long, combining several message types. For others, this route may involve only one or two message types.
Knowing your goals and the steps you need to take to reach them can help you save:
- Time – Although SMS marketing can shorten sales cycles by dramatically increasing open rates, managing a marketing campaign is still time-intensive. Having a marketing roadmap will take you on the shortest route toward achieving your goals.
- Money – It’s no secret that SMS marketing campaigns can cost money. Luckily, you can cut down on these expenses by knowing your goals before your press send for the first time.
How to Build a Successful WhatsApp Marketing Strategy
Creating a successful WhatsApp marketing strategy is like building a house. Just as you wouldn’t construct a house’s roof before laying the foundation, outlining your marketing goals comes before choosing your message types.
Let’s take a closer look at the steps to building a WhatsApp marketing strategy.
Step 1: Determine the Campaign’s Internal and External Constraints
A business’s internal structure and external operating conditions largely determine a goal’s attainability. Often, your industry will affect these conditions as well. In other words, your brand may only be able to reach a goal if the right factors are in place.
To ascertain these factors, it’s helpful to look at your business’s internal and external constraints.
Internal constraints refer to a business’s:
- Strengths – While some businesses may excel at humorous messaging, others may drive success with subtle graphics or abandoned cart sequences. Learn your strengths and play to them.
- Weaknesses – Conversely, your weaknesses consist of elements your business doesn’t do particularly well. As a result, you may want to avoid them in your marketing strategy or remedy them if feasible.
- Opportunities – Some marketing campaigns succeed because they were launched at the right time. For example, if your company just received positive press coverage for a recent product, using WhatsApp to launch a new product may help your marketing campaign succeed.
- Threats – Threats consist of the operational and marketing elements that can squash a campaign before it has time to grow. These threats include limited budgets, marketing team disagreements, and new competitors.
Performing a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) can thus help your WhatsApp campaign reach its full potential.
External constraints refer to the sociopolitical, economic, environmental, and technological factors that may increase or decrease your marketing campaign’s effectiveness. To understand these constraints, it’s helpful to perform a PESTLE analysis that looks at the following external factors:
- Political
- Economic
- Social
- Technological
- Legal
- Environmental
For example, a PESTLE analysis focusing on a marketing campaign’s political factors may look at legislative or election trends that may increase or decrease a campaign’s success rate.
Step 2: Set Goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Once you understand the internal and external factors that can affect your marketing campaign, it’s time to nail down your goals and KPIs. After all, without identifiable goals, your marketing strategy isn’t a marketing strategy at all.
Let’s first look at several common goals:
- Increase subscribers – If your business provides a service, especially in the communications industry, you’ll likely want to boost your subscribers. WhatsApp marketing campaigns focused on welcome emails and discounts can help boost subscribers.
- Generate sales – Many businesses use WhatsApp marketing to generate sales. For example, you might use WhatsApp to promote new products or offer holiday discounts.
- Boost your return on investment (ROI) – The best marketing campaigns offer high ROIs. This means that the revenue the campaign generates exceeds the campaign’s cost. Marketing campaigns with high ROIs can ultimately help lower your business’s overhead.
On the other hand, KPIs show you the success with which your goals have been met. So make sure to set adequate and measurable t KPIs. Familiarize yourself with what successes they measure or represent, and understand their role.
Common KPIs include:
- Open rates
- Conversion rates
- Clicks
- Customer retention rates
For example, suppose generating sales is one of your goals for your WhatsApp promotional launch. To help measure the efficacy of this campaign, you might consider the message’s conversion rate. A higher conversion rate typically indicates higher sales.
Step 3: Build an Audience
Like traditional SMS message campaigns, WhatsApp messenger campaigns rely on large contact lists to reach their full potential. Taking out advertising space with your campaign’s WhatsApp number is one way to add contacts. However, this can be cost-prohibitive for some businesses.
A more cost-effective way to add subscribers involves attaching subscription forms to your website. It’s easy, simple and effective.
Once you build your contact list, you can segment your contacts based on their demographics and buying habits. That way, you won’t waste time, money, and energy sending the wrong message to a particular audience.
To nail down your marketing campaigns’ audiences, consider surveying members of each target demographic who’ve recently made purchases. Here are a few questions to ask:
- Why did you make the purchase?
- How did the purchase alleviate your pain points?
- Which marketing tactics most influenced you to make the purchase?
Step 4: Create Message Templates
Once you’ve identified your marketing constraints, selected your goals and KPIs, and built a solid subscribers list, you’re ready to create your message templates. Message templates allow you to send the same message to all of your subscribers within a target demographic.
Common message templates include:
- Welcome sequence messages – Welcome sequence messages greet new subscribers. They ofteny feature warm emojis, positive messages, and new subscriber discounts.
- Promotional messages – Promotional messages promote new products and incentivize subscribers to make purchases by offering discounts. These messages typically rely on images and videos to entice consumers.
- Informative messages – While informative messages may persuade consumers to make purchases, they largely offer information of importance to the receiver.
- Abandoned cart messages – Abandoned cart messages remind customers that they still have items in their cart. These messages can feature emotion-themed emojis and gifs that inspire urgency.
However, just because your WhatsApp marketing strategy employs templates doesn’t mean you have to respond to customer queries with an umbrella response. Instead, conversational commerce means that you can send personalized messages to best meet customers’ needs.
Start Executing Your Strategy With Connectly
WhatsApp marketing can be an incredibly effective way to build your brand. However, before you even send your first welcome message, you’ll need to think about your strategy. Fortunately, Connectly makes strategizing your WhatsApp campaigns easier than ever.
Our no-code tool allows you to implement your marketing strategy and drive conversational commerce without learning complicated programming languages or processes. AI-powered tools do the heavy lifting, so you can spend time enjoying increased sales and engagement rates.
Get a free demo today and see how our personalized plans can unlock your full potential.