Snapchat Marketing Strategy

Go beyond evergreen content and step into the ephemeral world of Snapchat, where your marketing disappears but your engagement increases.

We live in a world of fleeting moments. Our average attention span is no longer than eight seconds, and the content we consume disappears within 24 hours. To break into Snapchat’s ephemeral marketing and increase conversion rates, marketers need to deliver personalized and localized content that speaks to their customers as if they were standing in the same room.

To localize your Snapchat marketing and encourage viewers to take action with your brand, follow these quick tips:

Know your customer

To make informed marketing decisions with Snapchat, you need to know who you want to target, who will be watching and more importantly who will interact. According to Snapchat insights, more than 50 percent of new Snapchatters in the US are 25 years or older. Snapchat is no longer just for millennials and brands like The New York Times, Gatorade and Dominos are taking ephemeral marketing seriously.

Looking at the activity of Snapchatters, on average, people open the app 18 times per day, contributing to 3.5 billion snaps. Some of these snaps are personal messages, while others showcase an interaction a viewer has with a brand — whether that be a live event or an experience.

Divide and segment

Before you send your first “Snap,” you'll need to segment your audience. Just like with an email marketing list, segmenting your audience ensures that you're targeting viewers with the right messages, at the right time. You can segment your audience based on their interests, language, demographics, geography, behaviors and other criteria. Learn how to segment your audience with Autopilot and apply the same concepts to your Snapchat marketing strategy.

Content featured on Snapchat is an extension of your brand and gives your company a human touch. When you post multiple images or videos, you need to create a linear narrative that tells a story, with a beginning, middle and end.

With stories, Snapchat offers a range of ways to help marketers boost engagement and conversion rates. Here’s a list of some common features used by top-performing brands on Snapchat:

Snap Map

Share real-time locations to notify friends or family on your whereabouts. Snapchat displays this feature on an interactive map, where you can view people, just as you would share locations on Google Maps.

Geofilters

Use a geofilter to design an image overlay so you can target your customers based on their location. Snapchat geofilters help promote your brand and create viral and memorable marketing campaigns. For example, if you’re hosting an event, create a geofilter within your event radius. Customers at your event and people around the location can interact and use the geofilter to send their friends and family images with your brand impression. For the next 24 hours, expect to see an uprise in conversions and awareness.

Deal offers

Build brand loyalty and send a coupon or deal to your customers on Snapchat. Encourage users to take a screenshot of the offer and apply the “special code” to an online store, event, product, etc. If Snapchatters want to cash in on the offered deal, they will need to watch your story and actively follow your 24-hour snap feed, creating an influx of viewers.

Stories

Give your customers a behind-the-scenes look at your brand or a glimpse of a new offering. Use Snapchat Stories to invigorate viewer excitement and narrate an event. Marketers use Snapchat stories to showcase the working culture and environment of their brand. Stories are a great boost for retention and give viewers another reason to advocate for your brand.

Influence your audience

Ephemeral content was made popular by Snapchat with stories, videos and images that last no longer than a day. Marketers get excited by this type of content because it elicits an immediate response from the viewer and increases user engagement at a personal level.

For example, imagine if you held a competition with no end date. Without an end in sight, customers are less likely to take action. With Snapchat you limit the time to enter and provide a 24-hour countdown, so customers experience FOMO (the fear of missing out). When people have a tight time limit, they are more likely to take action. This is how Snapchat creates an impact for brands.

Marketing temporary content also promotes user-generated content and invites viewers to market the brand on their behalf. Users become more engaged with brands, and advocate for them. Snapchatters who re-create a brand-related video or image transform from a passive audience and into influencers.

Instead of creating a 2019 social media strategy around professional influencers, marketers can tap into their Snapchat audience and empower their own viewers to pass on the brand’s message.

Localize your Snapchat stories

Just as you would localize and segment your Facebook Ads audience, with ephemeral content, you want to do the same. Today, customers want to receive high-quality, personalized and localized content. The content that marketers deliver on Snapchat could result in the reason a customer chooses their product over a competitor’s.

We’ve found that 72 percent of consumers are frustrated by generic, untargeted marketing. Marketing is not about the copying and pasting campaigns, it’s about an empathetic understanding of who and where your customers are. According to Nieman Journalism Lab, geo-targeted [social media] posts were six times more successful than posts shared globally.

Localizing your Snapchat marketing goes beyond translating content and into connecting with your customers on a personal level — knowing their interests, frustrations and pain points. Localizing your communication builds trust within your brand and creates repeat buyers. Before you use Snapchat, it’s important that to acknowledge culture-specific behaviors and target those behaviors with your language, images and videos.

Localize your marketing with Autopilot. Segment your audience and create customer journeys that adapt to your audience, no matter where they are. Learn more about Autopilot so you can create experiences, not just content.