Snapchat for Business: How Your Marketing Can Benefit From Photo Messaging

Are you looking for new ways to add mobile to your marketing mix?
Do you want to deliver time-sensitive offers to your customers?
Wondering how SnapChat could help your business?
It’s no secret that mobile is the new black: most people rely on their phone or tablet to access information.
In this article, you’ll discover 5 ways brands can add Snapchat to their mobile marketing strategy.

How Snapchat Works

If your target audience is age 13-25, Snapchat may be the answer you’re looking for.
It’s a popular mobile app—it logs over 400 million messages every day—that shares photos and videos that disappear after a short time.
First, let me explain how Snapchat works. A Snapchat picture, or snap, is only available for a set time limit, from 1 to 10 seconds, once the user opens it. However, the new Snapchat Stories feature allows items to be available for up to 24 hours.
The limited lifespan makes Snapchat the perfect tool to deliver a call to action that creates excitement and a sense of urgency.

Open the app, then to take a snap, tap the center button once. For video, press and hold the center button for as long as you want the video to record.

Ready to get down to business?
Here are five creative ways you can leverage Snapchat to promote your own business. I’m including a few brand examples to get your creative juices flowing.

#1: Reward Current Customers With Mobile Coupons

Because Snapchat is ubiquitous with its young target market, it allows brands to deliver offers and coupons in a matter of seconds. Coupon snaps not only reward customers, they provide incentive to bring them back for more.
16 Handles, a frozen yogurt chain, uses Snapchat to send discount coupon codes to customers who send them snaps of themselves or friends eating 16 Handles frozen yogurt. The discounts range from 5% to 100% and recipients redeem the coupon by showing the cashier the code.
Within a few days of beginning their Snapchat campaign, 16 Handles had exchanged more than 1,400 images with users, and built a user list to which they could send future promotional material.

16 Handles uses Snapchat to send mobile discount coupons.

#2: Gain New Followers With a Giveaway

In the same way coupons can retain customers, giveaways put you in touch with new ones and generate leads. The giveaway incentive helps you build a follower base that receives future giveaway offers and coupon codes.
You can use a giveaway to encourage fans from other social platforms, including your website, to add your brand on Snapchat and get their friends to add you as well. You can track your new subscribers with a simple hashtag that reinforces your brand.
In June, sports ticket provider Chat Sports used Snapchat to offer their community a chance to win tickets to a game.
To enter, users had to have five friends add Chat Sports on Snapchat. Then those friends had to send a unique image to Chat Sports with the username of the fan who wanted to win the tickets and the hashtag #gimmietickets.
The result was 150 responses in 48 hours.

One fan’s submission to Chat Sports to win free tickets.

#3: Take People Behind the Scenes

Snapchat recently added a Stories feature that lets brands send out a combination of images and 5-second videos to tell a story.
If you have a lot of fun behind-the-scenes footage, offer your followers a taste with a story. At the end of the story, include a teaser and send fans to your website or YouTube channel.
The New Orleans Saints use this feature to its full potential by regularly sending out stories that include behind-the-scenes footage, a look at kits for the game and images of new Saints products.

The New Orleans Saints keep their fans involved in what they do.

#4: Preview a New Product

Sneak peeks on Snapchat are one way to build customer loyalty and buzz around a new product before it even hits the shelves. Your brand’s snaps could include a string of teasers leading up to the product launch.
When you send out an image of your new product, treat your community like personal friends rather than customers.
Taco Bell wanted a friendly and convenient way to reach their customers with information about the new Beefy Crunch Burrito. Snapchat fit their needs perfectly because it’s popular with their target market.

Taco Bell uses Snapchat to let current fans know about new products first.

#5: Tell Customers About Holiday Sales and Events

Snaps of a holiday greeting or invitation are great ways to keep your brand top of mind with customers during any holiday season. Use snaps to promote your brand or products to customers long before they decide to shop.
But you don’t have to wait for the major holidays. Every month comes with lesser-known celebrations like International Talk Like a Pirate Day or Chocolate Milkshake Day—prime opportunities to engage your fans in a new and interesting way.
Karmaloop, an online streetwear retailer, sent snaps to customers after Thanksgiving and included coupon codes for their online store. Using Snapchat let them reach their target customers without spending a lot of money on advertising.

Customers love holiday greetings with an online coupon.

Consider using Snapchat to reach a young customer base.
It can be hard to engage a younger audience like the age 13-25 demographic. Snapchat gives you inexpensive access to them, and done right, Snapchat can fit seamlessly into your mobile strategy and have a high ROI.
What do you think? How are you using Snapchat? Let us know your experience and thoughts in the comments below.

How Brands Can Leverage Holidays for Their Social Campaigns

Do you plan marketing campaigns around major holidays?

Do you need ideas for your 2014 holiday social media marketing?

From Valentines Day to Easter and beyond, holidays are an important time for brands to engage customers and promote products in new and exciting ways.

And holiday-themed storytelling is an especially great way to build and cultivate a growing and engaged audience.

Here are four ways brands use social media to create and promote holiday campaigns throughout the year.

#1: Show the Fun Side of Your Brand With a Holiday Vine

Because Vines show up in Twitter’s main feed, they’re eye-catching and easy for people to share across Twitter and Facebook. Marketers have been quick to adoptTwitter’s 6-second video looping app to show a lighter and more creative side to the brands they promote.

Home improvement store Lowe’s used Vine to animate everyday household tools to look like bursting fireworks and wish their followers a happy 4th of July.

Lowe’s has used Vine in a number of ways to reach their followers.

Use stop-motion video to bring your products to life in a quirky animation and send your followers a holiday message. It’s a simple and clever way to draw attention to your brand and celebrate a holiday.

#2: Promote a Dedicated Microsite Campaign With Twitter

Microsites are a great idea if you want to set up a central hub for a competition or event, but keep it separate from your main site. Once the event is done, you can easily close it down or remove links and then reinstate it later with minimal hassle.

But how do you let everyone know about your campaign if it’s tucked away on its own? Integrate Twitter functionality!

Cosmetics and beauty brand Sephora‘s Sephora Claus campaign proved hugely successful. On the microsite, fans were asked to wish for a Sephora beauty product and connect to their Twitter account to complete the wish. One wish was granted each day for 30 days.

All the wishes are collected on the microsite in the form of clickable gift tags, which look really stylish and give a fun visual twist to the page.

Requiring wishers to connect their Twitter accounts meant that the ‘wishes’ were visible across social media, which boosted engagement—a staggering 50,000 tweets were sent overall.

Sephora made user-generated tweets an integral part of their latest holiday campaign.

Build social media functionality into the holiday campaign on your microsite toensure visibility.

#3: Add Facebook Games to Your Annual Product Campaigns

It can be challenging to encourage engagement that makes your campaign visible to people outside your fan base. Adding a gaming component to your campaign is a surefire way to bring it to people’s attention who’ll spread your message to wider networks as they play.

Every year, Cadbury’s Creme Eggs are sold for a limited time (January 1 until Easter Sunday) in the run-up to Easter, and every year Cadbury comes up with a fun campaign to boost sales in this limited timeframe.

The Creme Eggs are so popular they even have their own Facebook page with an incredible 2.6 million likes, which shows how successful Cadbury has been at increasing online engagement.

In 2012, Cadbury capitalized on their massive fan base and used their status as one of the London Olympic Games sponsors to introduce the Goo Games as part of their annual Creme Egg marketing.

Based on real Olympic events, fans could choose from several games including ‘Pole Yolk,’ ‘Goodles’ and ‘Triple Bump,’ and were rewarded with virtual medals and real-world prizes. Participants in any of the Goo Games had to like the Facebook page before playing, which helped to widen the campaign’s reach and generate huge levels of sustained engagement on the page.

Goo Games created sustained engagement for Cadbury’s Facebook Easter campaign.

Visitors to the Cadbury site and Facebook page could also participate by sending in a photo of themselves “getting the goo out” of their own eggs by splattering them in original and funny ways.

Combine user-generated marketing with a high-engagement activity like an online game for maximum reach and visibility.

#4: Get the Most Out of Image Sharing With Pinterest Boards

Although brands still produce traditional TV and print ads, some of the biggest brands are putting their most creative input into their digital content. Image-sharing sites likePinterest are becoming the focus of some exciting new targeted campaigns that drive engagement, as well as website traffic and online sales.

When Target partnered with Pinterest last spring to pilot Rich Pins—pins that work like a catalog with prices and other product information—it resulted in a 70% increase in visits to Target.com from Pinterest.

This Thanksgiving, Target teamed up with one of the most sought-after event producers in the world, David Stark, to offer guests a first-of-its-kind party-planning resource on Pinterest with a board called Best.Party.Ever.

The Best.Party.Ever. board features David Stark’s “secrets to creating the perfect holiday party, from DIYs to recipes to unique decorating ideas,” as well as rich pins that make shopping easy and videos that show tips and ideas.

Target’s Best.Party.Ever. campaign used rich pins to drive holiday engagement on Pinterest.

Build up your campaign’s secret board through the year. Unveil it by making it public in the lead-up to a holiday and remember to move your current holiday-themed boards to the top of your Pinterest profile to increase engagement at key times of the year.

Conclusion

Forward-looking brands are putting social media at the center of their holiday marketing campaigns and taking advantage of themed campaigns to build up long-term loyalty.

When you use the tips in this article to make the most of frequent, relevant campaigns, you’ll benefit from increased engagement and a growing audienceas well as enjoy a greater online presence, increased sales and website traffic.

What do you think? Are you using any of these tactics to get noticed? Which will you try in the coming year? Please leave your questions and comments in the box below.