Should you incorporate Snapchat within your marketing strategy?

It’s been well documented that Snapchat is the ‘fastest growing social network’ with the 100 million daily user mark being reached in May. Snapchat now sees over 6 billion video views a day – that’s three times the number of views the platform received in May 2015 ago and at the current growth rate, Snapchat is on track to be the dominant video platform by 2020.

The recent Social Media Marketing Report revealed that only 2% of marketers are using Snapchat as part of their strategy while 36% have implemented Instagram. Although both platforms specialise in visual media, their approaches differ widely and so does the way that the content is being consumed.

With the Olympics, the Football Euro’s and the ICC Cricket T20 World Cup coming up in 2016 there are some big sport events awaiting us, providing a considerable opportunity for brands. Brands will look to become increasingly more visible as we near these events with the ambition to capitalise on the attention and reach as many eyes as possible. However, introducing a platform like Snapchat into your marketing strategy does not necessarily mean more audience engagement, which is why here we take a deep dive into whether brands should be considering incorporating Snapchat within their marketing strategy and how best to approach utilising the platform.

Snapchat and the youth market

According to recent research, Snapchat appears to be one of the best ways to reach the youth market. A report by the Financial Times states that a third of 18-34 year olds use Snapchat, compared to 24% on Twitter and 17% on Pinterest. This is still behind Facebook where 76% of 18-34 use the platform and Instagram with 43%. However, with Snapchat’s rapid growth, along with its launch of new features and increasing number of partnerships with high profile events and teams, this figure is expected to rise.

People love Snapchat because it offers a real-time ‘in the moment’ experience, most notably defined by its functionality where content self-destructs after 24 hours. This constantly attracts users, especially millennials, due to the FOMO phenomenon – ‘the fear of missing out on an interesting event that may currently be happening elsewhere’, meaning users are regularly returning to Snapchat for more ‘unique experiences’.

Additionally, Snapchat allows people to be themselves as ‘Snaps’ provide a personal window into the way people see the world. Stories are updated in real-time and are therefore a reflexion of who a person is in the moment – there is no need to curate an everlasting persona. Furthermore, as people’s attention spans get shorter, Snapchat becomes even more attractive because of the bite-size content it offers.

The imperfections of ‘Snaps’ (spur of the moment, low quality footage) increase Snapchat’s appeal to users, as content is deemed more personal than commercial. Content like this is highly sought after as users enjoy being able to relate and engage with behind-the-scenes footage that isn’t planned or staged.

How much of an investment is it?

Snapchat has recently reduced its price point for ad buys from $700k to $100k. Not only have they lowered the fee, they have added a whole load of improvements, such as new lens options (similar to animated instagram filters) and photo manipulation elements.

Snapchat’s Discover channel is currently one of the hottest properties in media, which explains why Snapchat and its publishing partners asked for such high ad prices and why marketers paid for them. Industry sources say that Discover ad pricing is about $100 (CPM) for every thousand views – 10 cents per view. In contrast, Instagram has advanced their ad products and asks for $50,000 for boutique ads. Snapchat ads are seen anywhere from 500,000 to a million times a day.

Brands love Snapchat because of its reputation as the most user-friendly mobile video platform. Jon Steinberg, the CEO of the Daily Mail explained:

The whole notion of turning your phone on its side to watch a video is awkward and a bit of a hassle. Our findings have convinced us that we need to move even more aggressively to develop visual content. 

Steinberg continued:

Videos that do not have to be flipped sideways on a phone are 9x more likely to be viewed to completion than those that do.” Ad Age’s Victor Pineiro went on to explain Snapchat’s appeal as offering something “unique in the world of mostly-broadcast, feed-centric social media-intimacy at scale.

One of the reasons advertisers have been reluctant to consider Snapchat is because the initial entry spend was a whopping $750,000 for day.

For the past month Snapchat has been offering ‘audience bundles’ to advertisers,  packaging audiences by certain themes to help them match their content to the most appropriate people using the Discover channel. What this means is, if an advertiser chooses the ‘world news’ package, the adverts will feature within the likes of CNN, National Geographic and Sky News’ channels. An interesting proposition no doubt to brands looking for depth with their target market rather than just scale.

The main disadvantage for advertising on Snapchat compared to other social media networks such as Facebook is that it does not provide the same sort of campaign targeting and reporting data.

It is believed that the Discover content can be a bit hit or miss, which is pushing advertisers towards instead using using influencers of Live Stories on Snapchat. Using influencers means that advertisers can submit longer videos and receive valuable data such as follower count and the metrics surrounding the engagement between the influencers and their viewers. However, it still remains unclear what $100,000 actually buys you on Snapchat and their website does not have a menu of pricing. All we know is that brands can easily spend a lot of money on Snapchat with Sponsored Lenses costing a report $750,000 per day, somewhat similar to Twitter charging $200,000 per day for a Promoted Trend.

Snapchat in the sports industry

So far, Snapchat is being used to greater effect in America, where over 70% of the top teams in the NFL use the app to broadcast everything that happens in a match, as well as interesting, behind-the-scenes footage from training, warm ups and features with athletes. Furthermore, leagues like the MLB and NFL have also teamed up with Snapchat to create a weekly stories, featuring fan-generated footage. However, it’s not been reported if this was a paid partnership.

The first NFL Story received over 15 million views worldwide. The campaign has so far been deemed a success with Snapchat receiving a multitude of lengthy, filter-overlaid stories and accumulated screenshots by users viewing stories’. This suggests that fans enjoy being able to consume and share the live content they see on Snapchat. Snapchat, when used to its full potential offers a second-screen experience to compliment live game broadcasts that goes beyond the play-by-play feed you get on Twitter or Facebook.

Callaway Golf’s campaign is a great example of how a brand can use Snapchat to be more personal and engage with fans. The campaign provided users with a template of a golf ball and and encouraged users to play with the drawing and caption tools to create their own ‘Snap’ drawings.

This campaign was successful for several reasons. The template gave users a direction and made the contest less intimidating than starting with a blank canvas. Callaway persuaded consumers to share their creations on social media, spreading the campaign across multiple channels. They also managed to engage fans through a unique method of interacting with consumers. This helped foster a deeper relationship with their fans meaning they are more likely to revisit the brand’s content in the future.

As a contrast in the UK, at the start of the 2015/16 football season, only 35% of the Premier League clubs had active Snapchat accounts. In three months this figure has grown to 65% showing that teams are starting to realise the potential of Snapchat. The accounts do not provide a full broadcast of matches, but offer occasional random Snapchats which don’t tell the full story. It would be great to see English teams and leagues take inspiration from their American counterparts, who successfully use Snapchat to broadcast every eye-catching feature on and off the pitch in the lead up to, during, and after the match.

One team that has seen the benefit of a Snapchat campaign is Southampton Football Club, who used the app to help announce their home shirt for the 2014/15 season. They organised a treasure hunt and snapped clues to help fans to find hidden footballs. Fans were asked to take a selfie and post it on social media with the hashtag, #EarnYourStripes for a chance to win a new shirt before they went on general sale.

Fans love this type of engagement as it helps them feel closer to their team and gives them the chance of winning exclusive prizes. It also benefits the brand, through participants sharing their pictures across channels, increasing exposure.

The early bird catches the worm 

Snapchat is experiencing tremendous growth and this should not be ignored. In what is the ‘attention economy’, marketers and advertisers have to acknowledge that the attention of the youth market is very much within Snapchat. Snapchat appears to be very much focussed on the US market. However, they are opening a UK office at the end of November 2015, which is a sign of their ambition within the European market.

For brands, Snapchat provides two options – investing in advertising across the platform or creating a channel to provide content and tell the brand story. It should be noted that Snapchat is not for all brands. Exclusive content or the resources to create compelling footage is necessary, therefore brands without the resources should not feel pressurised to jump on the Snapchat bandwagon. Dull content on Snapchat will just do your brand a disservice. It is also important to be mindful of the audience and only use Snapchat to target millennials.

In terms of investment, it’s not very clear how much advertising costs and what the return on investment is. This presents itself as a barrier to most brands, but for the larger brands with a global audience, maybe this is an opportunity.

There is also still an early mover advantage to be had on Snapchat. If a brand does have an active audience on other platforms that they can announce their Snapchat presence to, they’ll be able to widen the reach to new audiences as well as deepen relationships with those that follow them elsewhere. The analogy is simply that where there are less whales in the water there will be more krill.

Snapchat presents itself as a real contender to enter the marketing mix for any brand that has a compelling story to tell. Snapchat should definitely not be ignored by UK brands, particularly if your target audience is millennials. The early bird catches the worm and Snapchat, as well as Instagram have the full attention of the youth market. Snapchat and Instagram know it, many of the US brands are capitilising, so should you.