Unlike their B2C counterparts, B2B businesses are infamous for their lack of customer proximity and non-personalized approach to marketing. There are very few B2B companies that do one-to-one marketing with customers. WhatsApp can change the way B2B marketing is done currently. Here are a few recommendations from us on you can try to leverage the strengths of WhatsApp for marketing.
• Product demos: Considering that your customers might be too busy to schedule an appointment with you for a product demo in office or on Skype, you can offer on-the-go demo using WhatsApp’s multimedia facilities or via video call. This will save your prospect's time and accelerate the decision-making process.
•Content distribution: Let’s face it, once your customer purchases your product, it is unlikely that they will return to your website to read your content. It is also unlikely that they will notice your emails or social media postings amidst the clutter in their inbox and news feed. WhatsApp enables you to directly share your content such as blogs and industry news with your customers leading to easy consumption of content. Sometimes, sending direct content can also rekindle the interest of the customer to engage with you more.
•Send easy invites to webinars, events, and conferences: As with content distribution techniques, there are high chances that your customer might miss the invite that you send them for webinars, events, and conferences. You can send invites directly on WhatsApp to ensure that your customer does not miss the important updates from your company.
•Easy cross-promotions: Launched a new product or a service that you think will be useful to your existing customer? Instead of sending emails or calling them at an odd time, you can use WhatsApp to inform them about it. You can schedule a call or a product demo or even send introductory videos and document to give them a preview of how it works. This will help in reducing any potential gap in communication.
The challenges in using WhatsApp Ads
•Ad Fatigue: Your customer might see the same promotional ad that you put up on their Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram feed. This could lead to ad fatigue. Considering that WhatsApp is more personalized than other social media platforms, it’s important to make your WhatsApp promotions more interactive and one-to-one to prompt the users to engage with your business.
•Non-compliance to GDPR: As WhatsApp cannot adequately protect corporate data, companies such as Deutsche Bank had banned the use of WhatsApp for business communication. However, theoretically, it is compliant as it is a product of Facebook, and Facebook is certified under the US-EU privacy shield. Considering that it is a grey area, we would recommend you to take advice from your legal team before planning a WhatsApp marketing campaign.
•Risk of being marked as spam: Although WhatsApp is a great way to have one-to-one communication with your customers, it is crucial to be as non-intrusive as possible. Frequent and irrelevant messaging or ads could result in blocking your contact number, and that would prevent you from contacting your customer in the future. The best tactic is to restrict your marketing to one relevant message or ad per day unless there is an important update that you want your customer to know immediately.
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