If you intend to humanize your brand and build affinity with your audience, your business should think seriously about starting an account on Snapchat.
Before we get into specifics, let's quickly sum up what Snapchat's best use is in a marketing strategy. If you don't know the basics–i.e. what Snapchat is and how it works–we covered that comprehensively in a recent post where you can view a quick infographic that sums it up.
I will say this about Snapchat's design, one of its most intriguing features is the self-deletion feature. With Snapchat, you do not have an endless accumulation of your life online, which is a desirable feature of privacy for many users. It is a glimpse of what the Internet's future might look like when you can “buy a bottle of Internet like you buy a bottle of water” in privacy as Edward Snowden said recently in an interview with Popular Science. Though that's another article for another day.
But as far as marketing strategy goes, Snapchat's highest value to a business is its ability to grow the brand's audience and create meaningful, continuous engagement in an authentic way.
In case you still have doubt about its viability beyond high schoolers chatting with each other, take a look at the app's usage stats, as reported by Social Media Examiner:
- Snapchat has 100 million active daily users (and growing)!
- 86% of Snapchat’s users fall into the 13 – 37 age range.
- 5+ billion videos are viewed on Snapchat each day.
It's growing popularity among the older users of that demographic means that Snapchat has grown beyond being a fad among high schoolers. Plenty of adults, brands, and businesses now use it, so it is a viable tool for both B2B and B2C.
Why Snapchat Can Be Good For Your Business
1. You Can Use Snapchat To Go Behind The Scenes
In the middle-of-funnel marketing path–when your potential clients have gone beyond brand awareness and gleaning helpful information from your content marketing and are now actively considering your product or service–this is where Snapchat can do some good. It is a great tool for creating a behind-the-scenes experience for clients. You can create a Snapchat video or infographic with its fun-to-view features and give people a memorable, tactile immersion into how your product or service is made.
2. You Can Use Snapchat To Create Innovative Partnerships With Influencers
In a recent April 2016 article by Marketing Feast, they noted that teaming up with an influencer is a fantastic use of Snapchat: “One of the topics that all of the panelists unanimously agreed on was the benefit of the Snapchat takeover. Allowing someone who is influential to your fans takeover your Snapchat account for a day can be a way to draw attention to your message.”
Find an influencer in your industry whom you trust and respect, and see if he or she would be interested in a takeover. Give them freedom to post whatever content they want on your account for a day. Not only will it catch the attention of your target audience, but it will give your brand a compelling endorsement from a thought leader.
Once the takeover is confirmed to happen, make sure you let your target audience know that it's going to happen. Build anticipation for it.
3. You Can Use Snapchat Content To Help Clients Better Understand The Problems They Are Trying To Solve
As mentioned in the introduction, Snapchat is not a bottom-of-funnel direct conversion tool. It is middle and top. One way to do top-of-funnel content is to create content that is informative, helpful, and somehow valuable for our customers. In the top-of-funnel stage, as every devoted Hubspot-trained marketer knows, potential clients are not yet looking for solutions. They simply have an awareness of a problem, and they are trying to find more information about that problem. Provide that information on Snapchat. Use the app's innovative features to create videos or infographics that help clients understand their problem better in a way that prepares them for the next middle-of-funnel stage: the search for solutions and comparison of products and services.
