Overview

Wati is a CPaas tool that helps B2C businesses to communicate with their customers through WhatsApp. They predominantly operated in South Asia. Now, they want to move beyond this region to diversify their users, revenue and become a global company.

In this breakdown, we will see the channels and strategies they need to follow to break into South East Asian countries which is the second biggest market for WhatsApp Business.

Assumptions

In order to build GTM strategy for the SE Asian launch, I’m taking a few assumptions as I am not directly part of the company. Here are they:

• Wati already has atleast 1000 sign ups from these countries
• They have recruited native language speaking sales and support team
• Hired a PR specialist

Target Geo

South East Asia.

Reasons

• LATAM has a high penetration of WhatsApp; however, with $127M spent on WhatsApp business, Asia Pacific is the major contributor to WhatsApp Business.
• Within the larger APAC region, I want to focus more on South East Asia. Indonesia alone saw 73M WhatsApp business downloads, indicating an opportunity for greater adoption of WhatsApp business APIs. Additionally, the e-commerce business is booming in these regions.
• The internet economy in SE Asia is poised to grow $365B by 2025, making it a big TAM.

Competitors

I’ve identified 5 major competitors for WATI who are very predominant in this Geo:

• CM.com
• Yellow
• 360dialog
• Infobip
• Gupshup

Except for 360dialog, all others position themselves as conversational commerce enabler targeting B2C businesses with one specific use case. i.e., talk directly to the customers.

Conversational commerce started to attract more eyes 4-5 years back when adding a Chatbot to the landing pages made the customer experience delightful. But both technology and businesses have come a long way now. In particular, WhatsApp has evolved from just a channel to communicate with customers to a full-fledged marketing channel.

Earlier businesses used WhatsApp to converse with the customers. Now, they are sending updates about the delivery of the order, new product launches, providing technical support, and, with the latest update, running their entire e-commerce shop in WhatsApp.

So, it doesn’t make sense if we keep talking about conversational commerce. WhatsApp has become a full-fledged marketing channel that needs its own automation features, just like emails and SMS. With a better API ecosystem and product stability than most competitors out there, WATI has always positioned itself as an API platform. However, there is a caveat. Because of this positioning, the solution offered becomes too horizontal and lacks depth.I want to change that and build a more vertical positioning tailored to specific businesses and a GTM for them. Based on the solutions pages, I’ve broadly classified them into three business categories. They are:

• Marketing Agencies
• B2C business
• B2B business

Positioning Statement

From my understanding, B2C businesses care about increasing return on ad spending (ROAS). WATI needs to hit that sweet spot. Since even Meta is positioning WhatsApp as a tool that improves ROAS, Keeping this in mind, we can say – “Increase Your ROAS Using WhatsApp.” Then, explain how Click to WhatsApp Ads increases your ROAS on the landing page.

In the case of B2B businesses, their major point is to get in touch with businesses. They want to resolve the issues that arise quickly. We can center our messaging around this pain point. We can say, “Be there where your customers are,” and then proceed to explain why having WhatsApp as a Channel for support reduces the TAT for support tickets.

For Marketing Agencies, WATI should be positioned as a WhatsApp Automation platform for marketers rather than for founders since it’s the marketers using the product. Competitors focus mainly on conversational commerce, but WATI should stick with “Automation” since many B2C marketers are moving away from just conversational commerce to WhatsApp automation.

With these positioning in mind, let me dive into some strategies that help us gain market leadership in the SE Asian market.

GTM Strategies

South East Asia has seen a boom in e-commerce businesses for quite some time because of the increased internet penetration among the masses. Due to this, there is an increased need for brands to market themselves to customers. One of the best channels that works out for them is WhatsApp since they can easily connect with their customers directly.

Before jumping into the strategies for acquiring these booming e-commerce businesses, I want to know whom I will target. So, I’ve built an ICP:

Traits	ICP 1	ICP 2
Name	Andrea Chong	Richard Brian
Age group	35-50	35-45
Description	– Andrea represents the modern e-commerce business leader. – She runs a fashion brand for new-age women. – She’s tech-savvy, values innovation, & actively seeks solutions to expand her business.	– B2C marketing Agency owner – Typically works with mid-level to Enterprise e-commerce businesses – Marketing nerd and knows in and out of B2C marketing
Location	Singapore	Indonesia
Behavior & Interests	– Relies heavily on digital solutions for business operations. – She often consults industry peers and checks online reviews before making decisions. – Once she finds a service that meets her needs, she sticks to it. – Always looking for the best deals, especially if it can optimize operational costs.	– Active on social media – Participates in forums, webinars, communities – Interested in upskilling his area of expertise. – Already knows what’s WhatsApp marketing. Tried other vendors but didn’t work out very well
Personality Traits	– Open to trying out new technologies and solutions. – While she loves innovation, she balances it by also adopting widely accepted tools and solutions.	– Open to trying out new solutions. – Also adopts widely accepted tools and solutions.
Type of content they consume	– Case studies that talk about technical integrations – Latest Industry Insights	– Ads – LinkedIn posts – Webinars

Learning Academy for WhatsApp Marketing

Target audience	Business owners & Marketing agencies
Expected results	Increased product awareness
Timeline	8-9 months

Why?

WhatsApp marketing is still a new concept for most businesses in this region. Many marketers and business owners are figuring out how to use WhatsApp as a channel. I want WATI to come to their mind whenever they think about learning WhatsApp marketing.

The current Udemy course is very broad and doesn’t talk about industry-specific use cases.

Initiatives

• I want to start “WATI Academy”, which consists of webinars, tutorials, templates, and reading materials.
• This will cover industry-specific strategies like “How to build an effective WhatsApp funnel for skincare brand”, “WhatsApp automation for logistics businesses”, and “Fast track your customer support by using WhatsApp.”
• We need to partner with industry influencers like Antony Chacko (preferably someone from SE origin)to build this academy**,** who can discuss industry-specific use cases.
• The subscribers to this academy will get deeper insights from them and will leave us with valuable information like emails and phone numbers, which we can use to retarget them.

Partner Portal

Target audience	Marketing agencies
Expected results	Increased participation of marketing agencies, thereby increasing product sign-ups
Timeline	1-3 months

Why?

Venturing into a new geo is always a tough nut to crack. So, instead of trying to hit the businesses directly, we target marketing agencies who can bring in more users for the product. WATI’s organic traffic is around 33.7k/month, and I want to capitalize on this.

Initiatives

• WATI already has a partnership program where marketing agencies are onboarded as implementation partners. However, it’s just one-sided. The incentive for agencies is just commission here, and they can sign up with any other vendors, too.
• To up the game, I will open a partner portal that lists all the partners, like how Facebook lists its business providers.
• There are tons of B2C businesses that will discover WATI via our campaigns, and if we have a partner portal, these businesses will find out who implements WhatsApp marketing for them. It greatly helps increase the visibility of agencies. This way, Agencies get more clients, and WATI gets more users.
• A backlink from a domain with a high authority score and traffic will make agencies to not just be an implementation partner but also evangelise the product among their clients actively.

Build an ecosystem

Target audience	B2C owners
Expected Results	Tight integration with allied tools + increased product sign-ups
Timeline	5-6 months

Why?

Nowadays, people love bundled services. They just don’t want to purchase one item but don’t mind paying a small premium if they get combos. In the same way, WATI can partner with allied tools such as Shopify to create an ecosystem for business owners.

Initiatives

A few ecosystem initiatives WATI can start:

• Shopify and Woocommerce are the 2 major CMSs in the SE Asian region. Partner with Shopify and provide Shopify Plus as a bundled service for those who sign up for WATI.
• Since WATI works with Zoho, a bundled solution of Zoho CRM + WATI can bring more visibility to our audience. Zoho is also bullish on the SE Asian region and this also helps us

Apart from these strategies, we need to follow these usual strategies to break into SE Asian geo and become the go-to platform for WhatsApp business APIs

Paid Marketing

Target audience	B2C owners
Expected Results	Product Sign-ups
Timeline	1-2 months

Ads are the first channel I would explore to enter the new market. I’ll start with Google Ads to tap the high-intent users and then slowly expand to Facebook and other channels.

Webinars & Events

Target audience	B2C owners & Agencies
Expected Results	Product awareness
Timeline	2 months

Running industry-specific webinars and attending trade shows will increase brand awareness and sign-ups.

Content Marketing

Target audience	B2C owners & Agencies
Expected Results	Problem & Solution awareness
Timeline	5-6 months

I checked out the blogs of WATI, and it’s neatly written and classified based on the categories. I’ll double down on the use cases and guides part since those blogs are the ones that provide true value to the readers.

💡 Note: I haven’t included the budget anywhere in this strategy, as I would need more insights from the market, team, and objective.

Landing page Content

We can use the below messaging on the Above The Fold of the landing pages:

• Improve Your ROAS via WhatsApp Marketing.
• Build A Marketing Funnel in WhatsApp.
• Automate. Personalize. Scale Your WhatsApp Marketing
• One-Stop Solution For WhatsApp Automation