How to Market Products on WhatsApp

In the past couple of years, WhatsApp has continually introduced new features to its Apps that have offered its users more functional tools both for business and personal use. WhatsApp, like most other social media channels, is an effective marketing platform, but because of its closed nature, the approach for marketing promotions is quite different, but this is not known by many who try to use the platform to market their product and services, only to meet stiff resistance by members of the group.

Popularity:

WhatsApp has the second largest number of subscribers, with 1.2 billion users, next only to the social media giant, Facebook, and it is one of the favourite social media platform across all age bracket. It is also one of the most used short massaging channel. WhatsApp is the world’s number one messaging platform, with over 55 billion messages every day, and it is effective for video, text, photographs as well as voice calls.

Secure:

WhatsApp is a more secure social media platform, where messages shared remain strictly within the group unless shared by a member with someone outside the group. For voice calls, the functionality is quite difference. Users can place a WhatsApp call through to anyone who has the app on their mobile device and are also on the phone list of the receiver. But that is not the case for WhatsApp groups, users must be added to the group before they can see posts in the group.

Restrictive:

One of the salient feature of WhatsApp groups, is its restrictive nature, whereby conversations are confined within the group most of the time, unless as mentioned above, until it is shared by a member with people outside the group.

Interactivity:

Another very critical feature of WhatsApp is its interactivity. Members within the group very easily know each other, especially the active members. This is so because, WhatsApp groups are usually compact and few, and often based on the contact list of the creator of the group.

Mobile-Centric:

WhatsApp is a purely mobile-centric social media platform, where even the desktop version requires your mobile device to remain connected for it to function. What that means is, WhatsApp notifications are sent in form of text alert to your device, and the more groups you sign on to, the more notifications you receive.

For those whose notification is set for sound, it means that every message that you receive comes with an alert tune, and for a very active WhatsApp users, the alerts could sometimes become too much to bear, and even when the sound setting is tuned off, the number of messages received can equally be very disturbing.

Highly Active and Consumes Battery

Because of the high frequency of incoming messages, WhatsApp often consumes much higher percentage of your device battery life than most other social media apps. Both the high frequency of notifications received and the high battery consumption rate are reason for the resentment often expressed by members of WhatsApp groups, whenever messages that are not relevant or do not conform with the cause or purpose for which the group was formed.

Using WhatsApp group as a medium for promoting commercial activities, religious believes, fake news and adult materials, it quite often faces stiff resistance from group members. This reasons as written in a previous article titled, “WhatsApp Groups Redundancy Rate Rises”, is why increasing number of users are leaving WhatsApp groups, or becoming simply inactive participants in groups they belong.

Effective Digital Marketing Channel

Social media is known worldwide as the most effective digital marketing medium, and WhatsApp is no exception. Although the method of marketing on WhatsApp is not very different from other channels, it has a rather peculiar method unique and a lot more effective to WhatsApp. Whereas users have the opportunity of ecommerce feature on Facebook, WhatsApp does not have such feature that allow users to display products and make digital payment.

For WhatsApp users, it is best to use the Twitter model of messaging when crafting commercial content – short descriptive and precise messages with a link to a storefront. Though WhatsApp has more text room unlike Twitter, commercial messages should be limited to as few words as possible. A banner Ad with a link to a storefront, would also have similar effect.

Avoidable Mistakes

The greatest mistake anyone can make on a WhatsApp group, is to post a long list of product and prices. It is even worse when such a message is repeated severally. Sending commercial messages to a group whose cause is not commercial could cost users their membership or result in members exiting the group in large numbers.