Articles and Blogs

If you’re not yet convinced about including Snapchat into your digital marketing strategy, then here is an amazing fact that might change your opinion - this unique platform has lured more than 150 million users now and has also grown to become a hot spot for business promotion. It’s exclusive features that include colorful filters, messaging, and other creative functions have become widely popular with people of all ages and with brands as well.

So, if you’re ready to hop on to this trend to increase audience engagement and raise brand awareness, here are some features of Snapchat that will help you promote your business effectively -

Stories - Snapchat stories are an easy and quick way of getting a message to your audience. You can upload images or videos that your followers can view. Recent surveys have shown that users spend a minimum of 25 to 30 minutes on this app every day, thus indicating that the platform offers a great opportunity for business promotion. Brands often use Snapchat stories to share with the audience what happens behind-the-scenes, or to give them product demos and previews, and to promote upcoming events.

Snap Ads - A Snap Ad is a full-screen vertical video of 10 seconds that appears between Snapchat Stories. This is a great way to promote business and catch the attention of interested individuals. On your Snap Ad, you can provide the viewer to swipe up to know more about the ad. As per Snapchat metrics, the swipe-up rate on Snapchat is higher than the click-through-rate on other similar platforms.

On-Demand Geofilters - Geofilters is another Snapchat feature that can help you create engaging content for your audience. Geofilters enable you to overlay a design on top of your Snapchat photos or videos to display a specific location or a certain period of time. On-demand Geofilters are similar to Geofilters but can be created by anyone. So whether you’re promoting the inauguration of a new store, or organizing a special event, you can create your very own Geofilters to grab the attention of your consumer.

Snapchat Sponsored Lens - Another way of promoting business and increasing purchase intent through Snapchat is by using Snapchat Sponsored Lens. Sponsored Lenses provide brands with the opportunity to explore a rather playful side of their image, whereas users can experiment and interact with the brand’s image. Not only does this feature ensure audience engagement, the effect of this engagement is enhanced by social sharing, which helps in increasing your organic reach significantly.

With its fun features and active audience base that is growing on a daily basis, Snapchat can be a fantastic addition to your social media marketing campaign. So, learn more about this creative platform and watch your business grow.
 

For more interesting articles log on to www.smstudy.com/articles

Snapchat has emerged as an exciting social media platform with a large audience of close to 160 million. It offers marketers a unique way to promote their products unlike other social media platforms. Snapchat, offers an opportunity to help you increase your brand’s community engagement, loyalty, and brand visibility.

Why Snapchat?

With over 400 million snaps in a day and 100 million plus active users, Snapchat is one of the fastest growing social media platforms. With the demographic range lying between 18-34 years, Snapchat provides an excellent platform for marketers to connect with the young audience. Marketers are using the Snapchat ‘Story’ feature to create stories which engage and excite audiences. Snapchat stories get close to 1 billion views in a day and Snapchat provides native tools and features such as add filters, geofilters, text, emojis, music and more to make it more fun and engaging.

Here are a few innovative ways in which you can use Snapchat for your business:

1. Give a Sneak Peek Tease

Create a buzz among your audience by giving them a sneak peek. Generate suspense before the launch by creating a Snapchat story and revealing few details of the product. The stories last only 24 hours and hence create the right kind of suspense that will keep the audience hooked onto your profile to know more.

2. Share behind the curtain scenes.

Share behind-the-scene content and show off your corporate culture. Give your audience a look into corporate parties and office staff outings. Give your audience a glimpse into how you manufacture their favorite product. Handing over the Snapchat account to trusted employees from various departments of the company will add variation to the content. In sharing such stories, you engage the audience of your brand where they see the whole process from ideation to creation.

3. Partner with Influencers

Like all other social media platforms, Snapchat also has its share of influencers who can increase the views and reach of the brand. By associating with such influencers marketers can reach a wider audience and spread awareness to a targeted demographic which is otherwise difficult through traditional channels.

4. Keep it Young

Since majority of the audience on Snapchat are fairly young, a company has to keep its content colorful and entertaining. The snap story should be free from the regular corporate stuffiness. The trick is to keep it fun yet professional.

5. Promotional Campaign or Contests:

Your audience loves giveaways and contests. Contests are engaging and create an impact in the social media sphere. You can offer promo codes and giveaways to people who snap with your product or share something related to your product or service.

Snapchat platform can make a real impact among your followers and boost your brand’s point with real time marketing.

Find additional posts on digital markting at smstudy.com/articles

When creating an online presence, one of a marketing team’s initial steps is to explore the various digital marketing channels available that will maximize the reach of their products or services. Given the nature of the online world, which is constantly evolving, new channels are developing with greater frequency, and audiences are continuously exploring new sources of online content. Knowing this, marketers must continually assess digital marketing channels for their effectiveness.

To identify the most effective marketing channels for an organization’s products or services, marketers spend a considerable amount of time identifying and understanding the dynamics of all available digital marketing channels and evaluating these channels relative to their company’s overall organizational goals and objectives.

When first moving into the digital marketing realm, it is common for a company to veer towards Facebook and Twitter, considering their global reach. And if so many companies before them have done the same, why not follow the crowd, right? Wrong!

Snapchat is the place to be. Seriously. And here’s why…

According to Adage, “Snapchat entered into a niche that's so forward because it's catered towards a generation even its creators didn't understand. It's not that the user interface is complicated, it's that the user interface doesn't even exist. It makes assumptions about its users preemptively and doesn't care if it's shutting out an entire generation.”

The niche generation Adage refers to is the Millennials. If Millennials are your target market, which by the way, they should be considering a recent piece by Entrepreneur stating that 89 percent of Millennials use social media, then exploring Snapchat should definitely be considered.

In the initial stages of researching digital marketing channels, a company’s marketing team identifies target customers in the digital space to understand their likes, dislikes, perceptions of the company’s brand, its major competitors, their digital needs related to the brand, and how the brand may fulfill these needs. All of this information, along with Documented updates of current trends in digital marketing, should be recorded for future reference. But, how does this data lead to a successful ad campaign directed at a target audience? Exploring the many social media platforms that can engage a target audience is a good start.

Snapchat offers brands the opportunity to create their own account allowing them to be followed by their customers, but the app has also paved the way for Snapchat influencers to have great sway over their followers. Influencers, in general, are people that have extremely large social media followings and are paid by companies to advertise their brand. The use of influencers has proven to be a smart move, since, as noted by Jay Baer, president of Convince & Covert “only 33 percent of people in America actually follow brands”

In the end it’s all about reach. The more people you can reach in your target audience the better, so it is important for a company’s digital marketing team to explore all options. Maybe even if that means stepping out of their comfort zone and focus on a new avenue for social media marketing. Based on the low level of online brand loyalty, companies like Snapchat have thought outside the box to offer innovative ways to reach target audiences without a company having to push to gain followers.

For more interesting articles visit SMstudy.com

Sources:

“To Big Brands, From a Millennial: Snapchat Filters Are Where It’s At,” Jillian Hausmann, March, 28 2016. http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/steps-brands-sponsor-snapchat-filters/303288/

“The Real Generation Gap: How Adults and Teens Use Social Media Differently,” Kathleen Davis, August 26, 2013. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228029

“11 Shocking New Social Media Statistics in America,” Jay Baer. http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-research/11-shocking-new-social-media-statistics-in-america/

There are 83 million Millennials. That is 83 million young adults that were born in the early 80s to late 90s, and 71 percent of those young adults check their social media websites every day. It only makes sense that companies have moved to social media when it comes to advertising their brands.

Snapchat, a company born in 2011, is now worth 18 billion dollars. So, ask the question. Go ahead. How did they do it? They learned how to monetize their product. Snapchat Discover is part of the latest app update. It provides companies with the ability to market their brand on the Stories menu. This not only eliminates the restriction of only being able to reach the people that personally follow a company but also costs 100 dollars CPM or cost per mille. For those who have no idea what that means, that is 100 dollars per 1,000 views. You can imagine how fast the money is being raked in when you consider there are 100 million daily active Snapchat users and the number is rapidly growing.

As fantastic as the new Snapchat Discover is, it doesn’t really assist companies that are not able to fork out large sums of money to reach the masses. Companies such as The Coca-Cola Company have figured out how to overcome this issue by handing the metaphorical reins over to Snapchat Influencer, Harris Markowitz. Snapchat Influencers are just your average Joes that have accumulated millions of followers by utilizing the app to it’s potential. The Coca-Cola Company partnered with Harris Markowitz to organically advertise their brand.

Markowitz has been providing weekly exclusive content for their Snapchat Story by, “reflecting the company's set mission: to refresh the world, to inspire moments of optimism and happiness, and to create value and make a difference. The Snapchat stories Coca-Cola creates refresh the organic advertisement world within the app by meeting all of their company missions in a creative way,” said Julian Gamboa, Lead Course Assistant at the University of California, Berkeley.

So not only do these snaps reach the followers of The Coca-Cola Company, but every single one of Markowitz’s 5 million followers has the opportunity to enjoy the engaging and entertaining Snap Story. By hiring Markowitz, The Coca-Cola Company went from promoting their brand to the few that have chosen to follow the company to having the brand viewed by millions of users virtually overnight. Other companies such as Taco Bell and Mashable have also jumped on the organic advertising bandwagon by partnering with Snapchat Influencers.

Partnering with an influencer on social media almost tricks viewers into thinking they watching their favorite Snapchat star’s Story and in the digital marketing world we like to call this native advertisement. According to Digital Marketing, book 3 in the SMstudy® Guide, “native advertising is a form of online advertising that blends in with its surroundings. The objective is to promote a company’s product or service in a way that is ‘native’ to the platform in which the message appears. Native ads are promotional pieces that are attempting to look like the material to which they are adjacent.”

The going rate for partnering with Snapchat influences varies as much as their online personalities, but there are best practices when it comes to negotiating a mutually beneficial agreement. Most influencers accept a flat fee. It simplifies the process for everyone and it is helpful for the allocation of funds months in advance (if need be). As Snapchat charges cost per mille, so do influences. For the most part. Influencers have also been known to ask for a percentage of the sale rather than flat compensation, as well as free products or services.

According to Ad Week, “Snapchat splits revenue with the media companies for ads on Discover channels, and those sponsorships can cost as much as $75,000 a day, say marketing execs. In other cases, brands like McDonald's cough up as much as $750,000 for daily official sponsorships.”

Companies like Boost Insider aids brands in finding the right influencer for them at the right budget. You can partner with an influencer for as little as 200 dollars, but, again, this number does depend on the amount of followers the influencer has. For small business, hiring an influencer is not out of the cards, it will drastically improve the way you organically use Snapchat and give you the fun of going native.

For more interesting articles about sales and marketing, visit www.smstudy.com/articles

[Stephanie Vezilj, SMstudy staff writer, contributed to this article]