Snapchat took the social media world by storm. It was embraced by the digitally savvy users and thousands, more like millions of photos, videos and drawings are sent monthly. It was a ‘given’ that brands and businesses would start embracing the app as well. If you have never heard of Snapchat, it is a video/photo messaging app that allows users to take pictures, record videos, add text to images and send them to one of their contacts.
Very few brands have used Snapchat as a marketing medium, but in 2016 you won’t be able to ignore it. The hook is the time limit to content and the expiration date. You can create integrated marketing campaigns that offer exclusive content to the younger generation, which is quite difficult to do. Create teasers for upcoming products/services either with photos or videos that only exist for a few seconds. This creates an exclusivity to your campaigns, which users love.
The key takeaway here is that real-time marketing is becoming more and more popular, and companies need to create platforms which allows users to be a part of the experience, not just experiencing it. "If you want to speak to a millennial audience, hire millennials to create the content for you," said Jason Peterson, chief creative officer at Havas North America. "Snapchat is the immediate future for reaching our consumers, [and] whether or not our clients are ready for it, we want to be ready for it."
Just like Facebook and Twitter before it, Snapchat has faced the question, “Is this really a place where we can reach our target consumers?” And just as with the other social giants, marketers will come to understand that Snapchat isn’t just a tool for some fun “marketing experiments.” It’s a platform that users are flocking to, in order to digest social media in real-time.
‘Real-time’ is the key phrase in that last sentence. Since the inception of social media marketing, brands and agencies have been searching for the best methods to deliver integrated campaigns that make constituents feel connected and an important key to keeping the younger generation of consumers interested is by offering exclusive content that has an expiration date. As we all know, there’s no longer room for “one size fits all” marketing tactics. Snapchat is the ultimate platform for making consumers feel connected and at the same time, unique.
To date, the approach to a Snapchat communication strategy has been as elusive as a Snap itself. There have been only a few examples of successful campaigns so far, and many digitally fluent brands are still struggling to find relevance on the channel. Dozens more are aimlessly flocking in, and the rest remain on the sidelines.The recent informal announcement of ads and discovery, however, means more brands should be paying attention. While the demographics still skew young (81% under the age of 25; 50% under 17), the user base continues to rapidly grow past 30 million and can no longer be ignored. For many brands it’s officially the next frontier and the key to reaching Generation Z.
Snapchat’s core philosophy is “delete is our default.” No surprises there. For the most successful accounts on the platform, however – celebrities, Snapchat personalities, entertainment brands, and many publishers as well – the best content strategy is clear: offer users VIP access, behind the scenes content, and slice-of-life vignettes. Humor also never hurts. The blanket term for this is “exclusive content.” It’s important to note, however, the difference between providing unique content between a brand’s social channels, and truly exclusive content. This distinction is key. It’s the difference between a series of doodles and access backstage to a concert. It’s also the difference between a video-of-a-video simply for the sake of posting, and an intimate glimpse of your favorite NFL team’s huddle minutes before kickoff.
Snapchat, with its 100 million daily users, is expected to have its IPO in 2016, just four years after launching its ephemeral app. So it has taken CEO Evan Spiegel half the time to get to the same chronological spot where Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg stood in 2012 when he took his site public during its eighth year.
"Snapchat's major advantage is that it's entirely rooted in the user behavior and values of a digitally native demographic, not in those of a demo who started using social media in college," noted Topher Burns, group director, distribution strategy at Deep Focus. "It understands how they want to share and consume content, what they're comfortable divulging, and how to appeal to their interests."
While industry observers have been wowed by the timeline (see details below) on which Snapchat's ascent has occurred, they still want to see more marketing tools. Here's an agency wish list:
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