Snapchat has been with us for over 18 months now, it's becoming hugely popular in a short space of time and takes up another precious widget space on our smartphones. We've seen that Facebook tried to buy it for $3 million and in May 2014 it was said that over 700 million pictures were being sent per day! So how can you utilise this platform to grow your brand?
  • The first thing is that is no clear way of doing it - not like other social media channels which encourage advertising on their platform and even have guides or specialised components to assist you. If you decided to advertise on snapchat, you're pretty much on your own and have to learn from success stories or trail and error.
  • This brings us on the next point, because theres no 'correct formula', its well worth checking out other examples. Big brands are really experimenting and trailing different things. A popular use of it is to give a discount code available only to snapchat users and lasting 24 hours.
  • How do you stay in someones mind when you have only 10 seconds? It's the ultimate marketing challenge. It's needs to be engaging and also unique, as well as rememberable.
  • We currently have a story telling culture in marketing, this has been evident in the rise of Storytelling roles. Snapchat is a very simplistic app with few features, but one of those is 'Story'. This allows users to create stories made up of 10 second videos that can be watched in a 24 hour period.
  • It's advert free which means you're not directly competing. Other platforms have paid advertising which can work against yourself. When you combine this with the fact that most brands aren't using it and it isn't geared towards advertising then it almost doesn't feel like you're being targeted when you get one.
  • Don't take it too seriously! Snapchat's whole concept is built on varnishing, it's never going to be your most important digital platform but its worth playing around with. It's also worth noting that there's no analytics beyond seeing the number of followers you have. Snapchat finds friends based on phone contacts, therefore for a brand it can be very hard to initially build up a following and would need another channel to push users to Snapchat.
Here's some examples to get you started:

CK One fragrance celebrated it's 20 year landmark with a huge campaign that involved a print media, snapchat and tumblr. They used snapchat to share content from the shoot and engage both ways with users.

Frozen yogurt chain 16 Handles jumped on the Snapchat train in January 2013, they asked fans to take a snapchat of themselves at one of its locations. In return, they received a snap with discount code for 16%, 50% or 100% off.

Lynx was the first brand I heard of using Snapchat. They focused of on addressing Snapchat’s reputation for ‘sexting’, as pictures could be ‘risque’, and ‘on those odd occasions where responses were close to the line, responded with an image of the new Deep Space shower gel, urging people to clean up and take a cold shower’.

 Clothing retailer, Karmaloop,  has also ventured down the risqué route. They thought this was suitable to their college target audience. Everyday they sent pictures of their new clothing lines, pictures of ‘scantily clad model’s’ and exclusive discount codes. It encouraged fans to post their own videos and images.
Even though it was ‘risque’ and engaged with the ‘sexting’ associated with Snapchat, it attracted more than 2,000 Snapchat friends.

 A few alternative ways to use Snapchat include; The NBA created excitement around an event by using behind the scenes clips of Kevin Durant's MVP announcement while GrubHub used Snapchat in a completely different way, they used it find and hire a summer intern.