In the world of social media marketing, Snapchat isn’t just “here to stay,” Snapchat is growing at a rate faster than Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
Quickly proving itself to be one of the dominant communications platforms available today, particularly among the Millennial generation.
In 2016 alone, Snapchat amassed an incredible 10 billion video views – an increase of roughly 350% over 2015.
If you can master the fine art of Snapchat today (and rest assured, it very much is as much of an art as it is a science), you could still have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of something powerful.
Something meaningful. Something that will give you a direct line into the hearts and minds of your target audience, allowing you to forge the type of strong connection that will provide that coveted ROI.
How to Use Snapchat in Your Marketing Strategy
If you want to ride the Snapchat wave into success in 2017 and beyond, it’s important to understand it’s original intent was not a social media or marketing platform. It was created as a communication tool.
Therefore, if you really want to reach your coveted demographics, stop selling to them and start talking to them.
That doesn’t mean that you should completely do away with any talk about your products or services. Instead, share this content by way of telling a story.
Brands like Target, the Huffington Post and more have all already had a tremendous amount of success on the platform by taking their traditional marketing message, reframing it as a compelling story and putting it out there into the world.
Everyony loves a good story – if it happens to show off your latest product or your company culture, that’s just icing on the cake.
Snapchat is also a powerful platform to take your marketing into a whole new world of interactivity.
You can use Snapchat to hold photo contests, send out quizzes and create custom filters that increase engagement and help spread the word about who you are and what you represent at the same time.
Proactive Data Protection
One of the major reasons why Snapchat became so powerful in the first place has to do with its higher than average protection of user privacy.
Snaps are permanently deleted after a specific period of time, giving people more latitude over what they’re willing to post and to who.
To latch onto Snapchat success in your own marketing campaign, you need to operate with this same proactive data protection in mind.
It’s a Brave New (Mobile) World
Another reason why Snapchat is so powerful, particularly among young people, is that it’s custom built with the mobile platform in mind.
Snapchat isn’t something you can replicate on a desktop – it’s exclusive to the mobile experience, something that millions of people all over the world are currently enjoying.
The mobile before all concept is something that you need to be willing to embrace sooner rather than later.
The content you post must always be created with the mobile experience in mind, allowing you to leverage what Snapchat was built to do as opposed to trying to fit a round peg in a square hole.
The Wonders of Instant Gratification
In many ways marketing success has always depended to a certain degree on instant gratification – or at least on your ability to take advantage of someone’s burning need for it.
This is another area where Snapchat shines as it has become the premiere source for immediate and “in the moment” posts on the Web today.
To properly integrate Snapchat into your own marketing efforts, you need to use Snapchat like your users are.
Provide timely updates, provide product/service sneak peeks and other of the moment experiences unique from all other areas of your marketing efforts.
To 2017: The Year Snapchat Matters (More Than It Already Does)
These are just a few of the key reasons why Snapchat is likely the silver bullet you’ve been searching for in terms of social media marketing in 2017.
It’s also one of the primary reasons why events like the Content Marketing Conference are so important.
They give you an opportunity to identify hot new trends as they develop, letting you get to work on honing your voice and developing your brand’s presence as quickly as possible.
Stay tuned as we have a Snapchat specialist who will be providing actionable takeaways for you to begin implementing in your own 2017 marketing strategy!