Some brands are having of a growing amount of success with Snapchat. Pollyanna Ward, digital and social media manager at Mondelez International – and a speaker at our upcoming Digital Marketing conference on July 14 – explains how you could, too.
Snapchat is the hottest social media platform right now. It’s taken advertisers from Twitter, got Facebook trialing disappearing messages, and 10 billion videos are watched every day on the platform.
Snapchat is no longer that platform for kids sending messages to their friends they don’t want others to see. It’s the fastest growing social platform, beating Instagram to that title at the end of 2015. 100 million people log on to the platform every day of which 10 million of those are in the UK. It’s totally mobile with a dynamic and interactive user interface that has people checking back frequently to stay up to date with their friends and publishers. Some of the biggest publishers on the platform, including Buzzfeed and Mashable, report 6 – 7 minute engagement per Snapchatter that clicks on their content. All of this combined makes Snapchat the platform right now for growing your brand.
Do you belong?
Now I could just stop here, and let you make a decision as to whether your brand belongs on the platform or not, but let’s go in a bit further first. Facebook is the platform that has the lion’s share of the population, but that won’t stay the same forever. I’m not saying Facebook is going to die, all is well in the walled gardens of FB. However, the problem with Facebook is that it’s not a platform for the younger generation and user acquisition with this audience will slow. Whilst people may have an account, the way that they interact with Facebook is totally different to Snapchat. It’s a mobile experience so personal and at times exposed, that its now been found that Generation X don’t care as much about having their photos taken because they’re used to sending selfies 24 hours a day. Snapchat have figured out how to keep you coming back too, the 24 hour time limit means that there is new content every day, and the whole thing is done in real time (and chronologically ordered).
The recent news that Snapchat has opened up its API shows how serious the advertising game has gotten with the platform. Snap Ads are available to brands and include: lenses, filters, and 3V ads. The 3V ads in particular have revolutionised the way we think about the shape of the mobile phone and video. Brands now need to think about optimising their video content to work vertically, plus Snapchat is also beating the drum for continuing to make videos with the sound on!
The biggest shock to many is learning that people don’t actually mind ads. What they do mind is when you ruin their experience. But look at Snapchat lenses, they allow users to add value to their daily story that they share with their friends. Look at Taco Bell’s Cinco de Mayo lens, 224 million views on a lens that turned users’ faces into tacos. On top of that, the lens was played with by users for 24 seconds, which surpasses the 10 second length of normal Snapchat videos, and goes way beyond the 3 second rule for Facebook, and the recent 6 second rule for YouTube. Ultimately, Snapchat is the platform that gets users interacting with your brand and places you in the palm of your next customer’s hand.
Those on the platform will have noticed the changes to the layout as time has gone on. The Stories now automatically move on to the next person’s story, the Discover publishers are no longer just logos but entice you in with their juiciest titles and big pictures, and the messaging service has taken the ephemeral pictures to the next level of disappearing messages that you can fill with emojis, stickers, pictures, and you can also make calls!
Within all of this, the 3V ads lie. These 10 second video ads sit within the Stories and users can watch and swipe up to reveal more content. According to Snapchat, ‘The swipe-up rate for Snap Ads is 5x higher than the average click-through rate on comparable platforms.’ Just some of the brands that have found success with the Snap Ads include Spotify who saw an 8pt increase in brand favourability, Vans had a 34pt increase in purchase intent, and Bare Minerals found that search traffic for their products doubled. You can see that Snapchat gives brands the opportunity to have more relevance; particularly with one of the hardest to reach audiences, 16-24s. This young audience are, for many brands, the cherry on top of a marketing strategy cake that aims to get their content shared, engaged with, and enjoyed. They’re the highly coveted audience that Facebook are struggling to on board, and they’re the ones that are enjoying pop culture through Snapchat instead of through traditional media.
Snapchat is doing things with its platform that just don’t follow the norm. They’ve taken everything you’re familiar with and added their own sparkle to it that’s made it the most relevant and authentic platform for users out there. The potential for growth through the Snap Ads is great, and I haven’t even touched upon using influencers or getting your brand onto a Publisher channel. All of this is of course very positive for Snapchat, and this is assuming that their team size and account management are, and will continue to be, up to scratch. Serious marketers will see the value that Snapchat can add to their brand, and the examples I’ve touched upon are a small number of a growing amount of success stories for brands. I hope you’re as excited as I am to see what Snapchat will do next.
Full details of the Figaro Digital Digital Marketing conference on July 14 can be found here.