New Kid Alert: How to Drive Sales to Your Business Using Snapchat

200 million.

That’s the number of monthly users on Snapchat. And, they send 400 million snaps every day!

That’s staggering, right?

What’s more amazing is the high engagement on Snapchat. A user spends an average of 25 to 30 minutes (per day) which translates to 8 billion video views daily. This video love is equivalent to Facebook’s activity, with ten times the user base.

Many social media platforms have passed by as a fad. But, this kid, born in 2011, has had incredible growth and engagement numbers that beat Twitter, Pinterest and even the social giant, Facebook.

Snapchat is now a leader in privacy social media and it seeks real-time attention. These two USPs have stopped many marketers from adopting the social platform.

Why?

It’s because social media was inherently meant to be shared in public and spontaneously. This is especially true with Snapchat.  And, planned marketing campaigns might not work well on this in-the-moment platform.

But, if you’ve been holding off, you need to take Snapchat seriously. This is incredibly vital, especially if you target the younger demographic – more than 60% of U.S.13 to 34 year-old smartphone users are Snapchatters. Look at the Snapchat app penetration, as per ComScore.

The platform has native tools and amazing inherent capabilities to expand your brand’s reach. Besides, since Snapchat users like a personal touch, you can expect your marketing messages to get an authentic layering.

Want to delight your audience and grow your business using Snapchat?

Then, in this article, I want to outline how businesses like yours are marketing on the platform successfully. Let’s start building your audience on Snapchat. 

1. Announce your Snapcode on other social media platforms and invite your audience to access ‘private’ content

Remember how I predicted that social media would become a largely paid marketing medium in 2016?

That might not be true right now for Snapchat, because the starting budget for advertising on the platform is $100,000 (dropped recently from $700,000).

So, if you don’t want to shell out a hundred thousand dollars initially, you’ll have to rely on growing your audience organically, for the time being.

Once you’ve set up your account and downloaded the app, you can tap on the ghost icon at the top of the screen to add friends. On clicking “Add Friends,” you’ll get the following options:

Adding friends is a great way to build your following (much like Twitter users follow you back when you follow them).

A Google search will help you in finding the username/snapcode of your favorite brands and celebrities and you can add them as friends.

You can also search other social platforms for the Snapchat usernames of people that you know.

You can search using a sentence like “follow me on snapchat.” Here’s how a graph search on Facebook will reveal people and brands that have shared their Snapchat presence publically.

A similar search will help you in picking up some more Snapchat peeps from Twitter.

Next, you can announce your Snapchat presence to your current fans and followers on other social media platforms.

Sure, you can send your username. But, a better way of doing it on Snapchat is by sharing your custom Snapcode that functions like a QR code.

Let me quickly show you how to incorporate your profile picture/business logo in the ghost space.

Step 1 – Download a .PNG version of your Snapcode from here.

Step 2 – Change the background color of the Snapcode using Canva (choose a color that suits your brand).

Step 3 – Drag and drop your logo or profile picture within the black dotted boundaries of the white ghost.

Step 4 – Save your new Snapcode as a .PNG or .JPEG.

Now, you can share your username and snapcode with your fans and followers on social media, encouraging them to follow you on Snapchat.

You can also share your Snapcode on your website, alongside other social media accounts or on your About page.

You can also change your profile picture on other social media to this Snapcode to create a buzz and gather more Snapchat friends.

You might want to sign up for the Snapchat Directory, created by Carlos Gill, to discover and add new friends daily.

Besides adding friends and sharing valuable content, a great way to grow your Snapchat audience quickly is:

Creating exclusive Snapchat content that you aren’t providing on other social platforms.

See, Snapchat is a highly personal medium. The app doesn’t allow you to upload a nicely designed image and video.

That’s why the content on Snapchat is raw and shows the personality of the creator. So, you can use Snapchat to build a tightly knit community of brand advocates.

For example, NARS used Snapchat to release an exclusive preview of their new collection.

They started by spreading the news on their Instagram account.