A recent HubSpot blog post raised the interesting topic of messaging apps in online marketing campaigns. Depending upon your web marketing company’s quality and breadth of experience, this might be a topic that you haven’t even considered, much less discussed with a social media consultant or other relevant professional.

Everyone is familiar with the role of social media in modern-day web marketing. And if you’ve read this blog before, you probably realize that this role can usually be filled by the same contractors whom you employ to boost on-site SEO and place advertisements that drive traffic to your website. But the role of messaging apps is much less discussed than any of this, although it does fall into categories that we’ve discussed here, such as direct marketing in a web-first world.

Direct Messages as Sales

The HubSpot article pointed out that WhatsApp, for instance, limits its audience for broadcast messages to around 250 recipients. On the surface, this would seem to severely limit its applicability to web marketing. But this is not the case if you think of such messaging apps as modern outlets for cold calling, or if you explore creative ways to leverage their features for customer engagement.

HubSpot provides a helpful example of the latter phenomenon, describing a live recipe service that had been created by the Hellman’s brand in Brazil. Its apparent success goes to show how messaging services of all kinds can function to expand customer engagement on the scale of both individuals and groups.

Responsive Messaging

When using messengers to fill this role, it is not always necessary for you or your web marketing firm to personally build the customer base that you will be engaging with. As HubSpot makes clear in its discussion of other relevant messaging apps, it is quite possible to build these into a comprehensive web marketing campaign so that interested parties will contact you.

Sometimes this is the entire point of the app, as in the case of Slack, which is generally intended for internal communications by large organizations, but which has been utilized by HubSpot itself as another outlet for promoting its site content to people in relevant professions.

Generally speaking, if a messaging app is popular among your chosen sales districts and demographics (and your web marketing company will be able to tell you whether it is), you should consider it as another form of public contact information. Furthermore, compared to phone and email, it can be easier to direct interested parties from your online ads to your messenger profile. And from there, your web marketing company should be able to set up automatic responses to guide a message’s sender to the information he or she needs.

Be Comprehensive

The bottom line is one that we’ve repeated a number of times on this blog. When consulting with your web marketing company, try to build a strategy that is as comprehensive as possible. A web marketing professional should be prepared to guide you to this outcome without much prompting, but it is certainly helpful to understand your opportunities and resources ahead of time, so as to make sure that no stone is left unturned.