Latest WhatsApp marketing hack – it's not what you think it is

Did you know that right now WhatsApp has more users than Instagram or Twitter? 

Especially In India, this messaging app has become a part of our family. Every day millions of users from over 3 generations are using it to connect with their loved ones. Grandparents are using it to send “Good morning” messages while their grandkids are using it to stay connected with their friends. 

And ever since the pandemic, it has become an essential service for students as well as employees to connect. 

So, it is only common sense that marketers use it to promote their brands and businesses. I mean, why miss out on over 2 billion users? 

Every day, 100 billion messages are being sent on WhatsApp. Read that again!! 

100 billion chats, talking about everything under the sky from grocery lists to dinner plans to travel itineraries. 

Till now WhatsApp marketing has mostly been utilised by eCommerce platforms like Flipkart, Myntra, Purplle that use WhatsApp for either sending deals and sale notifications or informing customers about the status of their order. 

But there are some brands who got a little more creative and found a way to actually increase brand awareness, improve brand recall, and even lift purchase intent amongst users. 

Some of the most seasoned brands, including McDonald's, Oreo, AirAsia, have started including “Conversation Media Marketing” as a part of their marketing strategy. Scroll down to read how they did it. 

In short, Conversation Media Marketing is the use of conversation media formats like branded Emoji, Stickers, GIFs, and more for the purpose of marketing to the right consumers. 

Conversation media formats are popular on every social media or messaging platform you know. Without them, our online communication is basically without expression. 

When was the last time you wished someone Happy Birthday without using at least one of the various emojis. And if not for them, you would have used stickers, GIFs, or memes. 

I am sure you were not surprised when I called emojis popular because over 10 billion emojis are being sent every day.

Although Emojis, Stickers, GIFs, Memes, are used vastly in social media, most of their usage is on messenger platforms like WhatsApp. 

Want to know all about emoji marketing “How These 7 Brands Nailed Emoji Marketing Campaigns And What To Learn From Them” 

How can conversation media formats help brands? 

Now let’s say you are a fast-food brand that could become a part of billions of conversations by making branded stickers and emojis around the words hunger, hungry, lunch, burger, pizza etc. 

Imagine being in front of the right user at the right time with the right content they would want to use. 

Here is a list of 5 brands that achieved great brand recall with the help of conversation media marketing: 

McDonald’s 

McDonald’s did the same thing on Independence Day by creating stickers around friendship and the spirit of Independence Day. This campaign was enabled by India’s first conversation media platform, Bobble AI. Bobble AI has its own suite of keyboards that provides a cross-platform usage, so these campaign creatives are available for sharing on any social media or messaging platform. According to data from Bobble AI, these creatives received over 400k shares in a span of 16 days. 

Oreo

In 2021, Oreo partnered with Bobble AI in a 90-day campaign and brought home 2.76 million + shares and 355 million+ impressions from Bobble users and their loved ones. 

In 2022, when Oreo made the campaign strategy for the “Say It With Oreo” campaign, they complimented their conversation media marketing campaign with more innovations. Oreo had launched cookies with different alphabets on each of them. Their objective was to use them as a medium to engage kids and their parents, its prime TG, how they can make different words by collating different cookies next to the other. And what better way to inculcate this habit than leveraging a custom keyboard where their consumers can type words with letters shaped like Oreo cookies. More than 125,000 downloaded their themed keyboard and engaged with it, creating it a massively successful campaign. Conversation media marketing further amplified the reach of their messaging and led to more than 350,000 original content shares.

Air Asia 

Raise your hand if you haven’t made travel plans with your friends or family over messaging. Isn’t the first step always creating a WhatsApp group? 

AirAsia built on this insight and chose to collaborate with Bobble AI to boost brand awareness for AirAsia by leveraging people’s most loved language of communication - visual stickers, GIFs and emojis in WhatsApp and other chat messaging apps. Bobble AI created conversation media creativity along with the themes of vacation and travelling. The creatives were shared over 630k times in 28 days. 

Conclusion 

If you are planning to use WhatsApp marketing, it is important you don’t just stop at sending notifications. Platforms like Bobble AI allow you to provide hyper-contextual engaging content that you can leverage to make users' conversations more expressive and increase brand recall and brand awareness. All this while ensuring a 2-way communication where your consumers get to pick and choose your content based on their interest and intent. A collaboration like this can help you reach user conversations happening not just on WhatsApp but on any messaging or social media platform.