The Essential Digital Marketing Trends to Watch in 2025
By Emily SmithDec 13
WhatsApp is massive. It’s the most popular messaging app in the world, with over five billion downloads and two billion active users.
Obviously, businesses are scrambling over each other to reach this enormous audience. It’s not as easy as you might think, though—after all, WhatsApp currently doesn’t serve ads, and its encrypted messaging system means targeting would be very limited anyway.
Innovative companies have been discovering effective ways of reaching customers on WhatsApp. The messaging app has proven useful for customer service, one-on-one communications, and even unconventional marketing campaigns.
Still, the platform limitations have left some businesses unsure if having a presence on WhatsApp is worth their time and money. Well, we’ve got news for them: it is.
To jump ahead, click the links below:
Why use WhatsApp for your business?
WhatsApp’s sheer audience size makes it appealing for marketers right off the bat. This is especially true if your business has a presence in countries such as Brazil or India, with 108 million and 390 million active users. The US ranks third with 75 million active users.
Beyond just the scale of its user base, there are three main reasons businesses should seriously consider developing a presence on WhatsApp.
First, WhatsApp is a useful customer service channel. It enables community managers to engage with customers quickly and easily on a platform they’re comfortable with. It’s also free for brands.
Second, WhatsApp is underrated as a digital communications channel. WhatsApp Status alone has over 500 million daily active users. Messaging groups of customers can reach up to 256 people at a time, while 1:1 comms can build relationships with users that strengthen brand loyalty.
Third, WhatsApp marketing is more powerful than many brands believe. From sending paid notifications to directly messaging leads, marketers can use plenty of strategies and features to boost revenue and increase conversions.
We’ll be diving into how to use WhatsApp for businesses in a second—but first, we want to clear up how small & medium businesses can use WhatsApp versus how larger businesses can take advantage of its capabilities.
WhatsApp Business vs. WhatsApp Business API: How to use WhatsApp for small businesses or enterprises
If you’re using WhatsApp for business reasons, it doesn’t make sense to do so through a private account. You risk losing access to the account and missing out on many useful features
For small businesses, WhatsApp has a solution: WhatsApp Business. This app is available for Android and iOS. Still, it’s also accessible as an online platform called WhatsApp Web that you can use in-browser if you already have a business account set up for your company.
WhatsApp Business is specifically designed for smaller companies that want to organize their presence on WhatsApp. It’s free to use but slightly more limited in its capabilities than the WhatsApp Business API.
What features does WhatsApp Business have?
WhatsApp Business offers many useful features, from business profiles to automatic away messages.
- Business Profile: You can create a publicly-visible profile with information about your business, including email address, location, description, URL, hours, logo and more.
- WhatsApp Business Statistics: You can see basic analytics reports about your account activity, such as the number of messages sent, delivered, read, and received.
- Labels: You can add custom color-coded labels to active chats with customers to keep them organized.
- Greetings: You’re able to set up a default greeting message for customers that start chats with your business.
- Away messages: You can pre-set messages to send to customers when you’re not online.
- Quick replies: You can save frequently-used responses to send quickly by typing short commands starting with “/”. For example, if you save a quick reply telling customers your address, you could type “/address” to automatically send a pre-written message like “Thanks for asking! Our address is 123 Main Street.”
The WhatsApp Business app makes things easier for small brands. It makes business information more readily available to customers and helps with sorting active chats. Plus, it has some auto-reply capabilities and enough response templates to handle a smaller customer base.
However, medium and enterprise-sized companies will probably need a more powerful tool if they’re dealing with large numbers of users or want to add more functionality. That’s where the WhatsApp Business API comes in.
What is the WhatsApp Business API?
The WhatsApp Business API lets brands tap into WhatsApp’s code to get deeper insights and add their features and integrations.
For example, take KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. They were the first brand to test the API back in 2017, and they were able to get a lot out of it.
With a simple customer opt-in while purchasing flight tickets, KLM could send booking confirmations, flight status updates, check-in reminders, mobile boarding passes. Plus, KLM was able to provide 24/7 customer service. Check out how they used the WhatsApp Business API in this clip:
Looks great, right? Access to the WhatsApp Business API is still limited. You can sign up with this form if you want your company to be considered for access.
Alternatively, you can use a third-party tool for WhatsApp that already has access to the WhatsApp Business API and is a certified WhatsApp Business Solution Provider (BSP). Third-party tools like Brandwatch allow businesses to filter, label, and manage WhatsApp messages alongside messages from other social networks within a single social inbox, for example.
So, if you don’t want to use your personal WhatsApp account for business (and we strongly recommend that you don’t), you have three options:
- Use the WhatsApp Business app (for small businesses)
- Get access to the WhatsApp Business API (for enterprise)
- Buy a third-party tool from a WhatsApp Business Solution Provider (for all businesses that want to strengthen their WhatsApp presence)
WhatsApp customer service tips & tricks
For most brands, WhatsApp is first and foremost a customer service channel. For people who use it as their main form of digital communication, it’s a convenient and natural platform to reach out to businesses with questions or concerns.
Consumers now prefer to message businesses more than almost any other means of communication. It’s quick, easy, and doesn’t require customers to be stuck on hold for hours.
It’s no shock that WhatsApp is a preferred customer service channel for its users. But it can also be a great customer service tool for brands. Here are our top tips for businesses that want to offer great WhatsApp customer care:
1. Always respond within 24 hours
This may sound like a no-brainer, but quick replies are a pillar of successful WhatsApp Customer Service. After all, 42% of people who message brands now expect a response in under an hour. A study even found that the faster businesses responded to customer service requests, the more those customers were willing to pay for their products.
2. Take advantage of different message formats.
WhatsApp offers many features that make communication easier for businesses and customers alike. For instance, you can send photos, videos, exact locations, GIFs, PDFs, or even voice recordings.
This variety of formats means you aren’t limited to answering customers’ inquiries with text alone. Brands can send video tutorials or PDF guides to help users with more complex problems, and users can send screenshots or videos showing the issues they’re dealing with.
Plus, you can deliver a fun, positive customer service experience by throwing in some fun GIFs if appropriate.
3. Consider using WhatsApp chatbots
If you have access to the WhatsApp Business API, you can add a chatbot to your business account to automatically answer common questions. This can save you time and energy, and it means you’ll always be able to send a response within 24 hours.
However, it’s important that you don’t leave everything to the bot. Think of it as an automatic FAQ, and make sure you still have a human around to answer less common questions and deliver personalized responses.
If you don’t have access to the API, you can still set up automatic away messages and greetings with the WhatsApp Business app—we highly recommend doing so to save time and energy and keep your response times down.
4. Publicize your WhatsApp customer service number
Facebook offers click-to-WhatsApp ads you can put on promoted content to get people to message you.
There’s no point in setting up and offering customer service on WhatsApp if no one knows you’re using it. Once you have a business account set up and a dedicated employee or team ready to handle WhatsApp inquiries, you can add a link, button or phone number to your social media accounts, website, email signature, etc..
There are a variety of ways to integrate links to message your business on WhatsApp via social media or your website—here’s a guide on how to do it.
There are a variety of ways to integrate links to message your business on WhatsApp via social media or your website—here’s a guide on how to do it.
5. Handle replies via WhatsApp Web (or a third-party tool)
Trying to respond to large volumes of messages on your phone isn’t realistic—it’s time-consuming and unscalable, not to mention how sore your thumbs will be.
Luckily, WhatsApp users can also send and receive messages through their browsers using WhatsApp Web. This option lets you use a mouse and keyboard (or a headset if you’re taking calls), making your customer service workflows faster and more efficient.
Suppose your business wants to deliver WhatsApp customer service even more efficiently. In that case, third-party tools like ours let you view all incoming messages in one inbox, assign them to different employees, label them, sort them by read/unread, and more.
We hope these tips and tricks for WhatsApp customer service help you deliver great experiences to your customers.
But what if you want to go beyond just answering replies and use WhatsApp more proactively for marketing?
WhatsApp marketing strategy tips & tricks
WhatsApp is not the most obvious marketing channel. You also can’t advertise to users, and you need their phone numbers before you can contact them in the first place.
However, these barriers to entry have an upside: despite WhatsApp’s two billion users, only a minority of businesses actively use the platform for marketing. That means less competition and an audience likely to be less annoyed and more receptive to your campaigns.
Plus, the limitations of WhatsApp marketing will force you to be more innovative with your strategy and try new techniques for engaging users. Here are some of the best ways to face the challenge of launching a WhatsApp marketing campaign.
1. Use WhatsApp Status to reach a broad audience
WhatsApp Status is WhatsApp’s take on the popular Stories format.
If you’re not using WhatsApp Status to communicate with your business’s contacts, you’re missing out on one of the biggest channels available. But what type of content should you post?
One option is to build brand awareness and customer loyalty by telling entertaining, human stories about life at your office or an event you’re attending. Think of this as a continuation of your social media marketing strategy on Facebook and Instagram Stories.
Another is to use your Status more promotionally. For instance, try posting images or videos highlighting flash sales or temporary discounts on your website. Since the content will disappear after 24 hours, this is a great way to create a sense of FOMO and get people excited about your products.
2. Engage users through WhatsApp Groups
If you want to form a community around your brand on WhatsApp, Groups are your best bet. They allow up to 256 people per group to interact with your business and with each other.
BUT: be aware that WhatsApp Groups are purely for customer service purposes. WhatsApp forbids using its platform for “advertising, marketing or promotional messages unless authorized by us in writing.”
Consider WhatsApp Groups a branded channel where anyone who wants to join can ask questions or discuss your latest products or campaigns. Because they have a maximum size, Groups have an air of exclusivity. You can take advantage of that by spreading the word on your other channels that the first 256 people to join, for example, get access to special discounts and offers.
Give it a shot—you’ll be reaching an audience that’s already shown interest in your content on a channel that’s comfortable and familiar to them.
3. Go for nontraditional campaigns
With WhatsApp, you need users to message you first before reaching out to them. Since you can’t make the first move, you need to get creative.
WhatsApp marketing motivates users to message you, give you their phone number or join your Groups. That means you have to make it worth their while.
Take online retailer Buyagift, for example. They created a landing page on their website that gave their WhatsApp number and offered to send valuable coupon codes to anyone who messaged them the word “Start.”
One of the most compelling parts of the campaign was a mock screenshot with examples of the deals users who opted in could expect, complete with the WhatsApp format:
This landing page clearly shows consumers the value of messaging the brand on WhatsApp. Source: Buyagift via Econsultancy
Or consider Absolut Vodka. They were promoting the launch of a new product with an exclusive party, and they started a WhatsApp marketing campaign to give away tickets to the event.
They invented a fictional bouncer named Sven, who people could contact on WhatsApp to convince him to give them tickets. A community manager at Absolut played the role and got three days of nonstop messages, over 600 contacts, and more than 1000 pieces of user-generated content made for the campaign.
See how it played out for yourself:
The key learning here is that getting creative and offering real benefits to people who reach out to your business on WhatsApp can generate leads, engagement, and brand awareness.
That’s a wrap
All in all, brands should expect a lot of new options for customer service and marketing on WhatsApp in the next couple of years. Facebook clearly wants to monetize the platform and incorporate it as smoothly as possible into its product ecosystem.
If you’re on WhatsApp already, think about how you can improve your customer service, work in some clever marketing campaigns, and consider whether you need a third-party tool. And if you’re not on WhatsApp, it looks like the right time to jump on the bandwagon.