Are you thinking about the ways that you could integrate Snapchat into your company’s marketing efforts? Snapchat presents an unparalleled opportunity to reach a new audience that is open to clever, imaginative marketing techniques. During this short read, you will learn and understand why businesses should take advantage of it and 5 great ways to place your business on the global social media stage in 2019.

Why You Should Use Snapchat For Business Marketing

With over 185 million active daily users, sending over 3 billion snaps daily, Snapchat is undoubtedly a big game player in the world of social media. A lot of people say that it is losing its relevance as Instagram introduces more and more interactive features, but the statistics speak for themselves. Snapchat isn’t going anywhere for a very long time.

Boasting of a relatively active younger audience. Unlike any other social media platform, Snapchat is more informal than Instagram and boasts of way fewer grandparents than Facebook has. Snaps last for 24 hours before they disappear; therefore, companies have to put in a lot of effort and thought into their digital marketing for Snapchat.

5 Different Ways To Use Snapchat As Part Of Your Business Marketing

1. Work With Snapchat Influencers

Although Snapchat users are less likely to add random people to their contact list than some other social media platforms, there is still a lot of potential for influencer marketing on the platform. Teenagers tend to follow two types of people on Snapchat, friends that they personally know, and those people who are deemed to be celebrities or influencers. The only disadvantage of this is that it is relatively harder to become an influencer because there is no happy medium where you can continuously build up followers and supporters.

Businesses have found that the simplest way to use social media influencers to promote their products is to encourage them to tell a brand story. An influencer might be prepared to take photos of themselves using your product and then share these photos on Snapchat. Alternatively, you could let the influencer use your own business Snapchat account. Once you allow a temporary takeover of your Snapchat by a popular influencer, you stand to gain a much broader audience and reach. Some people will only get to find out about your company when a very popular person starts to post about it.

2. Post Behind The Scenes Content

One of the most striking things about Snapchat is it’s authentic. Since videos will vanish after 24 hours, you don’t need to dedicate loads of resources or spend a lot of company money when creating your content. If you run a restaurant, then you could post a short video of what goes on before opening your doors for lunch service. Similarly, if you work at college or university and social media is your responsibility then you could post a time-lapse of students entering their lectures. Or short videos of them being taught in the lecture.

3. Advertise Your Products

There are basically three different ways of advertising on Snapchat; sponsored geofilters, Snap Ads and lenses. Sponsored geofilters enable users to post photos from specific locations such as shopping centers, restaurants, and nightclubs. For example, if you run a business that has multiple locations, then you can pick a geofilter for a particular area. Geofilters are widely used by brands to promote events that they are hosting.

Snap Ads are 10-second long, vertical, full-screen videos that typically come with an interactive feature, such as a call to action to visit a particular link when the user has finished viewing the ad.

4. Invite And Encourage Participation

Social media should be social and fun, not a one-way funnel for promotions and content. Replying to every snap isn’t practical or scalable, but you can certainly do it every now and again. In a personal example, imagine how amazing it would feel if your favorite brand clothing replied to a photo that you put on Snapchat. You can give your company followers that feeling, too.

For example, if you run an independent clothing shop, you could reply to your follower’s Snaps by giving them a discount code for the next time they visit. If they want to use the discount code, then they will need to screenshot your response. Furthermore, when somebody takes a screenshot of your content, you will get a notification. Which is excellent for knowing how many people engaged with your response.

5. Add A Call To Action Within Your Content

Ask your followers to visit your website, but make sure there is a strong reason for them to do so. If the incentive isn’t strong enough resulting in disappointment, then they are not likely to want to revisit your site. For example, start a telling a story on Snapchat, and then tell viewers that it’s continued on your website. It’s all about giving your audience a reason to visit the site. You can track the effectiveness of this strategy by creating a particular page with a URL that you give out only on Snapchat and track it with Google Analytics.