By Rochelle Ceira
It’s funny how the very nature of Snapchat and “snapping” images or messages is against traditional marketing. Traditional marketing requires businesses to send out consistent and repetitive messages, and even make sure they STAY with the message receiver. Snapchat’s technicalities, however, don’t allow this feature which is the very reason why businesses’ can’t market traditionally via Snapchat.
But why should they be marketing via Snapchat in the first place? Probably because so many brands have already figured it out and made their campaigns a huge success. Not only are the most famous brands making use of these contemporary social media apps that are highly popular among the millennials, they are going beyond the boundaries of traditional marketing and coming with novel ideas to keep their fans engaged.
Check out how GrubHub used Snapchat to send its customer special updates and deals. The brand also used the doodle feature in Snapchat to recruit interns for their marketing department. Taco Bell used the application to introduce new items on their menu and other campaigns using the Snapchat story feature.
How You Can Jumpstart Your Snapchat Campaign
- Decide on a voice. The message(s) you want to send out to your customers are have a lot to with your business’s brand image or the company voice. Just like Jayson DeMers says, it’s important to humanize your brand and give it a personality. Skittles, for example, has a Twiitter voice of a Gen Y’er. Focus on your brand personality and send out messages that build on that personality.
- Understand your audience. You know what they say, more you know about your audience, the better. Snapchat is largely comprised of an audience that is quite tech-savvy. You won’t find many baby-boomers on this app. However, you can differentiate the young adult (Gen X) from the teenage audience (Gen Y) and determine what type of messages/images/videos they normally share. As a general rule, it’s best to have casual tone – similar to the way user’s portray on the application—and make your messages “fun” to engage your audience. You may also browse accounts of your model follower and to see how they use the app.
- Take advantage of the self-destruct. This is the tricky part. This feature of the application is what makes marketers turn away from it. Top brands that have successfully used this application didn’t reject it but in fact used it to support their marketing strategy. They cleverly used the feature’s “downside” and transformed it into an “upside” to the feature. For example teasers, time-limited offers, real-time snaps taken at “the spur of the moment” are all great examples of the way this feature can be utilized. Check out fabulous examples of how this feature was used by 5 very popular brands at com. Here are 5 other case studies on how brands have used the application for marketing campaigns.
- Start snapping: Go ahead and start experimenting with you Snapchat marketing! It is important to establish a clear goal or objective before you begin any campaign. Talk to your team mates and contemplate ways this application can be used to your advantage. Carefully plan out a strategy that you know will work because it fits the audience’s needs and matches the applications features.
Images or “snaps” are not the only feature you can use. Although, the Brand Stories feature is no longer selling, you can use the video feature to create sneak-peeks that are meant to tell stories and then self-destruct. We already mentioned how GrubHub used the doodle feature for hiring internees.
Try to make your messages authentic, fun, relatable, and sporty. Get creative!
Rochelle Ceira works as a marketing executive at dissertationavenue, a company that provides help with dissertation writing. When she isn’t at her desk, she can be found writing insightful pieces of career development and leadership.
Photo courtesy: Snapchat
