Snapchat – providing a new platform for marketing to millenials

The social media landscape was transformed with the launch of Snapchat in 2011; the app has demonstrated enormous potentials going by its astronomical growth year on year. The concept of Snapchat is quite simple as it focuses on creating messages, pictures and video content to be shared with your contacts. Snapchat has some unique features and gives a different perspective from other social media platform:

• Everything is temporary! When you share pictures and videos on snapchat, it doesn’t stay permanently on the device of the recipient as it disappears within few seconds to 24 hours of posting, depending on the content posted. This may be an attraction to millenials who want to keep as much of their activities short term and private. The short nature of posts also creates anticipation, curiosity and buzz around a brand.

• Snapchat doesn’t just share contents like other popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter & Instagram, it encourages content creation.

  Snapchat offers a real time social media platform that provides a direct access to live events.

• Snapchat offers embellishment to the raw images it sends out and gives its users features they can apply to make their contents more enhanced for the end receivers.

• Snapchat is fun to use and provides a private perspective to sharing contents.

The benefits of using Snapchat affirms the reason why a lot of teenagers and millenials are hooked on it. For an App that currently has about 150m users, it offers a huge platform for marketers to exploit, especially if your target are teens and millenials. Why should marketers use Snapchat for their campaigns? If your target audience are millenials and you are still not on board, then you will be missing out if you do not use Snapchat to engage them. A few statistics will give you some basis to convince you:

• An average user of Snapchat spends between 25 -30 minutes in-app use daily, showing active engagement and commitment by its users.

  About 63% of Snapchat’s users are aged between 13 and 24 years old.

• According to Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel, Snapchat gets 10 billion video views a day, up from 2 billion views in May 2015. With such huge contents generated and viewed, there is a ready base of consumers to engage with your brand communication. (data by MarketingProfs.com)

In 2015, Snapchat launched its money-making platform with some creative and engaging advertisements. Some of which are Ads within videos, sponsored Geofilters, live ads, discover ads etc. These provide a platform to be exploited for marketing campaigns.

Marketers have several ways to drive engagement with customers;

• They can give an exclusive preview of an impending product launch, especially as a teaser campaign

  Snapchat can be used to do a demo of their products

• You can use Snapchat to run short term promotions. You can offer your customers a promo code to grant them a discount which can be applied on their next purchase.

  Snapchat can be used for launch events. This can be a tradeshow, a new product launch or brand presentations.

What resonates quite highly amongst users of Snapchat is its privacy, authenticity, creativity and fun; all attributes that aligns with the age bracket of 13-24 years. The latest launch of the Snapchat IPO and the wide acceptance and vote of confidence (the share price surged 44% on the first day of trading), gives a positive signal and we can only hope that Snapchat will continue to grow and evolve in ways that are relevant to marketers.

Bolajoko Bayo-Ajayi

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