In the digital marketing landscape, the debate between WhatsApp Marketing vs Facebook Marketing is gaining momentum. This comprehensive guide offers a side-by-side comparison of these two powerful strategies, helping you make an informed decision for your eCommerce business. From cost considerations to campaign personalization, delivery, and follow-ups, this article provides a deep dive into the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms, enabling you to choose the most effective growth route for your business.
When it comes to promoting your online business, you want to leave no stone unturned. But at the same time, being able to leverage each marketing and advertising platform to its utmost potential is getting tougher by the day - especially owing to the increasing competition in the ecommerce industry.
One of the leading channels that ecommerce businesses tend to use the most for promoting products, deals and discounts, is Facebook advertising. It helps them get their value proposition noticed in times when the organic reach of posts is dipping every day, and get them actually noticed by a specific set of customers.
But with everyone using the same strategy, Facebook advertising and Facebook marketing is no longer ‘friendly’ for ecommerce businesses. More so if you have a resource constraint in terms of how much you can pay to play.
That’s where we’re seeing an increasing number of ecommerce businesses leveraging WhatsApp marketing to keep customers engaged, and make the most out of those they acquire through Facebook advertising and marketing.
In this blog though, we’re going to give you a side-by-side comparison of the two marketing strategies, so you can visualize why WhatsApp marketing may be the growth hack you’ve been waiting for.
WhatsApp marketing comes with fixed costs irrespective of the time you’re sending out a campaign or a broadcast at - peak time or peak season or a competitive period, you have a better hold on your spend.
On the other hand, running ad campaigns for Facebook marketing at peak hours or peak seasons can result in a much higher spend. Since you’re competing against many other businesses who are trying to tap into the same time period, you have to bid higher to get your ad campaign seen - this can turn into a very costly event if not managed properly or if the ads are not optimized continually.
With the help of a WhatsApp Business API solution provider like QuickReply.ai, you can personalize all the messages sent to your subscribers and customers on the messaging platform. This includes the ability to add their name, use their past purchase details, personalization of coupons and more to make the campaign more contextual to their journey with the brand.
When you’re running ads for Facebook marketing, you cannot personalize the campaign on an individual level. Your targeting is set to address a specific audience set that comes with the same or similar demographics and characteristics; so it’s more of a one-to-many approach of marketing instead.
With WhatsApp, the automations can help you pick when and how to deliver a campaign message to the recipient. Based on who you’re selling to and what your products are, you can schedule a campaign to be pushed out at a specific day and time, for maximum results. This also gives you more visibility on the campaigns.
On the other hand, Facebook advertising and marketing is entirely algorithmic. This means that your ad campaign gets distributed based on the targeting you have set; but ‘when exactly’ does the message get displayed to a user, is not in your control - which means lower visibility on when and how a campaign is delivered.
The good thing about WhatsApp marketing is that you can send follow-up messages to your campaigns at no extra costs. For example, if you have sent a message at 7 am, “Good morning, it’s your lucky day, buy 1 and get 1 free sale starting at 12 pm”; you can then also send a reminder at 12:15 saying, “Hey, sale is live and your favorite products are running out. Hurry!” - WhatsApp does not charge extra for follow up messages sent in the same 24 hours.
On the flip side, Facebook advertising and marketing costs for every campaign you set up. Even if it is a retargeting campaign, it comes at a cost that needs to continually optimized on the go to keep budgets streamlined.
This is especially important when you’re running campaigns to recover abandoned carts to bring back high intent buyers to the site to complete a purchase. You want to recover as many buyers at as low a cost as possible.
Another aspect that you can look into is the personalization of where you make a recipient of the campaign land. With the help of the WhatsApp Business API and its smart integrations, you can push out personalized landing pages to your WhatsApp list for higher context and conversions.
With Facebook marketing, you’re driving an entire target audience segment to one landing page; which may or may not appeal to some consumers.
Facebook advertising is more about broadcasting a one-sided message, wherein an interested consumer has only one way of interacting with the brand - clicking through the ad and going to the website and then leveraging features like a live chat to talk to the business.
WhatsApp on the other hand, is great for two-way communication. With its intuitive interface and abilities, consumers can respond to campaigns almost instantly and businesses can make use of interactive messages, chatbots or even a team of live agents to engage them in a real-time conversation.
To get the best of results on your campaigns, Facebook tends to push your ad campaigns to the targeted audience multiple times a day. This often leads to ad exhaustion, wherein the targeted consumer loses interest in the product altogether, and also leverages features like ‘show less of’ or ‘hide’ to see lesser of the ad campaigns.
On WhatsApp though, due to the limits sent by the messaging platform, businesses need to be conscious of their frequency of messaging. At the same time, the message delivery is in such format that it does not break the natural flow of app usage for the recipient, making them less likely to block the number.
As internet users, we’re seeing an average of about 5000 ads being displayed to us on social media every day in one form or another. This indicates just how many campaigns we’re exposed to on a daily basis and the number of businesses using this strategy to promote themselves.
On the other hand, since WhatsApp marketing has just begun to pick up, and a lot of businesses are still figuring out the nuances, there is lesser competition to tackle. This increases the chances of campaign success for your brand.
We actually suggest making the best out of what both the platforms have to offer - with click to WhatsApp ads.
These are Facebook advertising campaigns that are targeted at initiating a conversation with the audience on WhatsApp, so you can capture their intent, get them to opt-in to your list and turn conversations into sales with the help of smart automations that can be set up using a WhatsApp Business API solution provider like QuickReply.ai.
Additional reads:
- WhatsApp marketing vs Email marketing
- WhatsApp marketing vs SMS marketing
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Because Facebook offers such a wide range of demographic targeting options, it is one of the most often used platforms for company advertising. If your business is new and you don't yet have a contact list to retarget, you might start by focusing on finding new clients. Facebook has a large user base.
WhatsApp marketing acts as a kind of sales magic wand. Including a WhatsApp phone number on your website could generate 27% more leads for sales. Potential clients appear to have more faith in brands just because they have the option to communicate with them through messaging apps.
Your small business may find Facebook ads to be an effective marketing tool. Because of its easy measurement and unique ability to target based on interests and bespoke audiences, Facebook advertising can make all the difference when it comes to cutting through the noise, reaching your target audience, and growing your company.
