WhatsApp Business: Building your engagement plan

Enterprise Nation and WhatsApp have joined forces to educate and support small businesses on the benefits of implementing and using technology, such as WhatsApp's free business app. 

This e-learning video is part of a free series designed to help small business owners connect with customers, showcase their product/service and respond to customer questions.

Building your engagement plan

The ability to have high-quality online conversations and engagement with your customers is one of the major advantages of the WhatsApp Business app. But before you start, a bit of planning can help set you up for the long term.

Find out more about Enterprise Nation and WhatsApp's partnership: WhatsApp Business app: How to manage customers and drive sales

Transcript

Hi, I'm Ellie from WhatsApp and today we're going to talk through how you can build your engagement plan.

In order to have great customer engagement, there needs to be a solid plan. This plan will be the blueprint for success for your business. This session is all about thinking strategically, building an engagement plan for key information to consider about your business before you actively engage customers on WhatsApp.

We've created a list of simple recommendations to follow when crafting an engagement plan so that you can always achieve great results. WhatsApp Business can be a very strong marketing tool and there are many reasons to implement it into your marketing strategy. It provides the ability to manage customer service, drive sales and to initiate interaction with your customers. Let's discuss how.

Firstly, customer service. WhatsApp Business is a great platform for direct communication with your audience. Having the opportunity to reach a business through a messaging app alone instils confidence in potential customers. With features such as automated messages and labels, customers can send their questions quickly and spontaneously without having to place a phone call or write an email.

At the same time, this form of customer communication is very personal because your customers get their answers individually. The app's automation options help you to be reachable outside of opening hours and to handle large numbers of inquiries without a great deal of work. It also helps you to meet the expectations of more customers with options for an immediate response.

Generating sales. There are other features that can be used to generate sales. Broadcast lists are a great example of this. With the broadcast list feature, you can send a message to several of your contacts at once and recipients will receive the message as a normal message. They're great for sending newsletters, special promotions, discounts and more.

Interaction. You can also initiate direct interaction with your audience by using status. Status allows you to share text, photo, video and GIF updates that disappear after 24 hours. You can use status to engage with your customers in a creative way.

See what Organido did. Organido wanted to encourage customers to use their juice as a possible ingredient in cooking. They invited consumers to leave their own telephone number and a photo of their fridges' contents. Those who did this were provided with a recipe based on the photographed food and tips for the preparation were included.

They found the successful campaign as a prime example of how WhatsApp can be used creatively to stimulate interaction with their customers.

We will continue to explore more features through which WhatsApp can be a game changer for your business in future models but before you start to engage customers, it is important to be clear on what you want to achieve in your own business. Having this clarity will allow you to create content that aligns to your business and keeps you focused on the direction you want to head. We will discuss each of these questions in more depth in turn.

So don't worry if you can't write them all down just now. Asking and answering these questions will help shape your messages, making them focused and effective so that your customers don't feel like they are being spammed. Let's look at the following questions.

• Number one, what is your story?

• Number two, what are my business objectives?

• Three, who is my audience?

• And four, what makes my business unique?

We all tell stories about ourselves and we've been doing so for thousands of years. Stories define us and keep people connected but by story, we don't mean something made up to make things look good. We mean a narrative about sharing true identity, experiences and turning points that define your business. When a story is authentic, it more easily becomes engaging to your audience. Your business story is a narrative of what you do and who your business is.

Let's talk about you, the story of your business and its role in your customer's messages. As a business owner, knowing what your business story is will help people connect emotionally with your business. When it comes to WhatsApp, this doesn't mean you have to create long messages with loads of information, it just means that you need to know how to explain your business story should someone ask you.

What's the problem you're trying to solve? And what's your solution? It could be as simple as I want to be able to buy really good coffee or I'd like food deliveries for my local shops, not supermarkets. Take a look at how Organido tells its story in a concise way in its business profile.

Your business objectives are your aim, where you want to go in the future, your goals. It's a statement of purpose and the steps you plan to take in order to achieve them. Another way to look at this is by asking what does success look like for your business? What do you want to achieve? It could be reaching a certain number of customers or having lots of shops, employing more staff or even winning awards.

Determining what the objective is for your business is important when communicating with your audience. Are you trying to drive sales either online or in your shop? Are you trying to connect with existing customers or generate more leads or perhaps inform people about a particular product or service? Maybe you want to drive more traffic to your e-commerce site to sell your product or service or just generally let people know a bit more about your business and increasing how many people know about it.

Focused and well-planned messages will help you achieve your business objectives and avoid customers being spammed with unnecessary or unwanted communications.

Now let's think about defining your audience. If you think your audience is everyone, you might want to think again, it is not. Ultimately your brand story is something you build for your audience and you want to make sure that the narrative you're telling is one that your customers want to hear.

Knowing who your audience is will help you focus your messages. When thinking about your audience and your messages, a good practise is to pretend that you're having a conversation with your ideal customer. Ask yourself, what are their needs? What situations do they relate to?

Defining your audience in terms of their demographic and their interests can be helpful. In other words, what's the typical age of your customers? What's their gender? Do they have a certain education level or do they have a certain level of income? Once you know who your target audience is, you can create messaging specifically for them which will generate a greater impact for your business.

Now you may not have that level of detail about your audience but it's important to try and build it up over time. Keep asking yourself questions until you can envision your perfect customer in your mind of being as specific as possible.

You can talk to your customers or even use surveys to get some of this information but for now it's okay to focus on defining your audience with the information you already have. Ultimately, the purpose is to decide how your business can be a solution to your customer's problems or the answer that simplifies their lives.

The last question to ask yourselves, what makes your business unique? It's a very good question to ask. What is it that makes your business special, different and appealing to customers? Standing out from the crowd can give you an edge over your competition. When you know your unique selling point, you're on the way to giving people a good reason to connect with you and stay connected.

Plenty of factors can make your business unique. It could be convenience. Maybe you commit to delivering in 30 minutes or less, great customer service, you're always there for your customers. Reliability, your product or service never fails or interaction, you've got outstanding team members or hilarious social media content.

Think about your favourite businesses. Why are they so special? Why do you keep coming back for more? Your ability to articulate your unique value proposition will have a direct impact on the growth of your business. To help you get started, we've compiled a list of ideas for you to try.

How about asking your customers for feedback or asking your employees or colleagues or taking a look and researching your competitors?

Congratulations on having answered those questions. It provides a base for your business personality. Your business personality represents how you will be perceived. Your customer's first impressions. It represents your behaviour and interactions, values, images, processes and customs. It's about building heartfelt, meaningful and long lasting connections with people. Think of some of the very large businesses that you know, they all have personality types that you can explain to some level.

Now, before you start making content, we recommend taking some time to answer a few more questions. It will help you organise your ideas and thoughts and keep your message and your real objective on target. Even the best creators start with a brief like this to set out what they're trying to achieve. Here's five questions you can try out.

• How would you describe your business to a friend?

• What makes your business stand out?

• Who are your customers as people?

• What do you want to tell them about your business, product or service?

• What is the goal of the message?

Now that you've defined your story and business objectives, identified your audience and your unique trait, it's time to introduce them to your strategy and how you communicate. You can start using this information to frame your messages, both texts and images.

So when you add your goals, your audience, your text and your visuals all together, it will help you create engaging content for your customers. If you get each of these elements right, people will pay attention to your content and your business and not just anyone, but the people you really want to engage with, your target audience because you'll be creating content specifically for them.

It's always best to be authentic about your business. Try using images and texts that reflect your business and incite a bit of emotion.

As per the example on the left, be concise, don't try and shove loads of information into your messages. The message simply says, best painters in town. On that message could be a link to request a booking. Be crisp and clear or short and simple. Stay focused on what you want to communicate or the messages objective and use a tone that reflects your business personality.

The example on the right is Organido. Organido is reflecting their business personality with a light-hearted casual, come see us message.

Time to craft a message plan. Think about your business, review your profile. Does it need updating?

Define a tone for your communications that you want to use in customer responses or marketing messages. Think about the important times during the year that you might want to do some marketing. Mother's Day perhaps or New Year's or the summer holidays. What's important for your business and when.

Timing is super important, there's no point in marketing suncream during the winter. What would be a good frequency for your business to market or communicate with customers? Whatever you are doing with your business, you can plan things out over time. So you're not trying to communicate everything at once to your customers.

It's a great help to build a plan like this one of Organido's. Organido decides on images and texts in advance. They determine when to schedule the messages based on feedback and engagement they've received. Your plan helps your business to be regular and consistent in your communications to customers.

So what have we covered today? Remember to refine your story, be clear on your business objectives, define your audience. Remember what makes your business unique, put it all together and write yourself a brief and schedule plan and remember, you can always review and refine if things are not received by customers well, just don't go changing things all the time or customers will get confused. Don't change for the sake of changing, only change things for a purpose.

In order to build an engagement plan, try to define what you want to achieve. This can be done by answering the questions we went through earlier. What is your story? What are your business objectives? Who is your audience? What makes your business unique?

Use this information to frame your messages, both text and images, and finally, put it all together into a plan.

To learn more about the WhatsApp Business App, visit whatsapp.com/business. Thank you.

Find more WhatsApp Business e-learning

• Why is WhatsApp Business so powerful?

• Getting started with WhatsApp Business

• Creating engaging content

• Using broadcasting messages

• Sharing short links and QR codes