Will Snapchat Be The Next Comeback Kings?

Snapchat’s fall from grace over the last year was almost as swift as its meteoric rise.

Founded in 2011, the social media platform had acquired 301 million active users a month by 2016. When several high-profile celebrities, including Rhianna and Kylie Jenner, jumped ship last year, Snapchat suffered a Biblical exodus.

The video-sharing app reportedly lost 3 million daily users in the second quarter of 2018.

Businesses that have built a solid following on Snapchat may have every right to feel aggrieved right now. But don’t be too hasty to leave. Snapchat is in the process of re-engineering a social strategy that could play into the hands of advertisers.

In this article, we take an in-depth look at Snapchat as a video hosting platform, and discuss the benefits and difficulties for content creators together with providing you with a list of recent updates and successful cases.

Why use Snapchat as a marketing channel?

Snapchat first started making a noise around 2012-2013 when millennials went in search of a Facebook alternative. Young users were immediately smitten by its visual content, geofilters, selfie animations and the nostalgic “memories” function.

Marketers were slow on the uptake with Snapchat despite the bulk of their user-base being the primary target for the majority of businesses. Plenty of brands are taking advantage of the the video-sharing platform now though.

Together with Instagram Stories, Snapchat is a key marketing weapon for online businesses to have in your locker. Social video is essentially the new TV for younger viewers.

But whilst video is a primary route into the lives of consumers under the age of 34 years old, Snapchat users are ad savvy. They are not swayed by generic ads that target demographics, nor do they like repetitive ads.

As a matter of fact, the more they see of a brand, the more likely they are to skip the ad and develop a negative sentiment towards the company.

But that’s not to say that snapchatters spurn brands. On Black Friday 2017, there was 20% more shopping conducted on Snapchat than any other social network.

Why Snapchat Ads Work

Snapchat has a unique process which immediately drives users to the buy button. Marketers that nail quick-hit marketing strategies can actually benefit from the platform.

The most powerful tool in the Snapchat arsenal is stoppable ads which enables users to shop without leaving the platform. This means they can still interact with friends and receive notifications whilst browsing 3rd party stores and buying merchandise.

The only negative is that ads have a 10-second limit - but this is where the skill of marketers come to the fore. You have to know how to come up with clickable ads.

Another benefit of stoppable ads is that brands have access to essential data that provides positive insights into how customers are interacting with your ads. Even better, you can even create virtual reality ads.

Sponsored ads in Snapchat also has advantages in that branded content features in regular feeds. For example, if an end-user swipes on an ad, they are driven to content that provides more information about the product or service.

This works well for brands that use video or images to raise awareness or curiosity. And don’t forget, modern consumers often want to know more about a product before they buy it. Snapchat’s sponsored ads provides marketers with an automatic sales funnel.

When executed well, brands can market products and services without the content appearing like an ad. And this is an important factor when marketing to savvy millennials.

Snapchat Hoping To Reclaim Lost Users

Snap has not shied away from explaining to investors or users why they lost 3 million daily active users. Instead, the company has rolled up its sleeves and addressed the issues raised by its users.

And then added some incentives to win them back.

Snap basically blamed the decline in users on the fresh design it launched last November. The major flaw in their strategy was to separate consumers from brands. Big mistake.

To make up for the error in judgement, CEO Evan Spiegel has announced a spate of key updates and improvements to entice content creators back to the app.

The latest announcement was news of the smooth and speedy Snapchat Alpha. The app is supposedly designed to help content creators launch promotional ads and can be enabled on all devices that have root access.

The primary focus of the new app was to improve performance, particularly on Android. Slow crawl speeds, crashes and an inability to send chats have all been addressed.

But Snap’s major pullers are the new and improved marketing tools together with incentives that are designed to draw the interest of online businesses.

The charm offensive started a couple of months ago with the introduction of Snapchat Storytellers. And yes, it is very much like Instagram’s Stories.

The new feature gives brands an open avenue to consumers and help content creators promote products and services with the assistance of influencers.

If that is not incentive enough, Snap have even said they do not intend to take a percentage of earnings generated by the ads.

Hot on the heels of Storytellers was Stickers which was rolled-out with little fanfare. The fun feature allows creators to design stickers and add them to a designated section in the app so that anybody can use them.

Some examples of how brands are using Snapchat for their marketing efforts include FuckJerry and Paris Match - who incidentally attracts 7 million unique viewers a month on Snapchat.

Snapchat may have some shortcomings, but it makes up for them with some powerful tools that work in an online environment better than many of its competitors.

To make the best of the platform though, you do need to be creating premium content that entices millennials in an instant.

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