The Quick & Dirty Guide To Snapchat Marketing

By Stephanie Frasco - Social Media - 0 Comments  

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I know, I know. It just seems so far out there for many small businesses. But hear me out. Snapchat is seriously a network to consider. Plus, it seems like every few weeks Snapchat is making headlines with new updates and features. Just this week Snapchat launched the newDiscover feature, which is a brand new way to consume content on Snapchat. We'll get into that below.

Ready to learn more? Here's my quick and dirty guide to marketing on Snapchat.

What Is Snapchat?

Snapchat is a photo and video messaging app that allows you to send and receive messages that will self-destruct.

Who Is The Snapchat Audience?

100 million active users
70% are women
400 million snaps per day
30% of users are over 25 years old
58% of college users will use a snapchat coupon
1% of businesses use Snapchat
See more here: https://www.convertwithcontent.com/instagram-snapchat-vine-included-social-media-marketing-strategy/

Snapchat Glossary

Snap: a picture or video sent to another user.
Snapchat (v) - the act of sending a snap to another user.
Snap stories - a string of snaps or a collection of snaps that are public for friends or everyone to see.
Snap cash - money sent through Snapchat using square
Videosnap - a video snap.
Discover - a new feature that allows you to browse editorial content from publishers like Warner Music, Cosmopolitan and Food Network. It doesn't self-destruct and is in a different format than normal snaps.

Pros & Cons

Pro- Fun new age way of connecting
Con - Self-destructs which means you have little time
Pro - Intimate way of marketing because it is mobile
Con - Can be hard to grow a following

How Businesses Can Use Snapchat

1. User-Generated
User-generated content or UGC is one of the most authentic ways to engage a new audience. It works because the content comes from a real person in the way they believe it should. It's not altered. It's not branded. It just is. You can encourage your fans and customers to share snaps (photos/videos) of your business or products. It's best to have them add it to their Snapstories for a longer lasting effect.

2. Branded Content
This is the content that comes from your account. GrubHub is ridiculously good at creating fun content. In order to succeed here you need to think like a user and create content that fits authentically with that mindset. Here's a contest idea for you.

3. Discounts
Discounts work and they work well on Snapchat. Think about making it fun by posting a new letter in each snap and your fans have to unscramble it to redeem. And when you are ready for someone to buy you can have them send you snap cash. I like that. Another way you can get into the coupon game is by asking your fans to send a snap of them with your product in order to get a discount code.

4. Snap Stories
TacoBell does a really good job at sharing stories. Here's a recent story about their new Cinnabon Delights Coffee.

You can get into the story game by posting your day or a promotion clip by clip. I like when the companies ask you to send a snap back in order to be added to the story. This increases the engagement factor and gives people a little fan envy. Remember, fan envy is a good thing!

5. Sponsored
This is a brand new feature and something I think that will take off. I'm not sure if it is open to all users yet or just Beta. But it's definitely worth thinking about.

Here are 8 other Snapchat marketing ideas.

Brands as content publishers

Just as businesses and other website owners were being strategic about content long before the phrase ‘content strategy’ was coined, we were all marketing with content long before ‘content marketing’ became the buzzword it is today.

Intelligence marketing, thought leadership, advertorials, infomercials… all these classic marketing formats were developed to meet business goals – sales, conversions, brand engagement – by adopting an essentially editorial approach. Content marketing in its many forms adopts the same basic mechanism today.

Content marketing is about engaging prospects and consumers with informative or entertaining content they’ll want to use or consume for its own sake, rather than pushing or interrupting them with direct sales or promotional messages. That’s not to say, of course, that this isn’t a commercial activity – just that the consumer has changed, and so must the way we market to them.

FROM INTERRUPTION TO PERSUASION

Online – where most of us live a lot of the time now – the way we interact with brands changes. Even in high e-commerce mode, we might begin our journey with a question, essentially a request for information. The business that’s made the effort to anticipate my question – and been generous enough with its expertise to try and answer it – will have the best chance of being found in search, and may well predispose me towards a sale too.
Another big trigger for the online user is peer opinion. As social media shows us several million times a day, we’re much more likely to be pulled towards what our friends like than we are to respond to an old-fashioned commercial push. So brands need to create content that’s worth sharing in its own right. Inevitably, such content tends not to work if it’s too brand-focused.

‘Redefin[ing] customer relationships based on serving, educating, and entertaining customers with content necessitates a shift away from the “I” of a brand or product toward the “you” of the customer, writes Rebecca Lieb in her Altimeter report, Content: The new marketing equation.

‘Content that is too product- or brand-focused does not travel well digitally, whereas content that stands on its own merits as entertainment, storytelling, education will be shared and passed along.’

So, as marketing guru Seth Godin puts it, businesses must move from interruption marketing to permission marketing. Brands have become the new publishers, and what they publish has to be searchable, shareable – and actually worth looking at on its own merits.

‘Content marketing,’ says Godin, ‘is all the marketing that’s left.’

CONTENT MARKETING BY NUMBERS

Stats that demonstrate the commercial advantages of editorial-led marketing – and business’ uptake of the approach – are not hard to come by:

• the average cost to generate a lead through inbound marketing ($143) is about half the average for outbound marketing ($373) (cited here)
• two-thirds of consumers say the information provided by content marketing helps them make better purchase decisions; more than a half say they are more willing to buy another product from a company that provides them with content marketing (Custom Content Council)
• B2B companies that blog only 1-2 times a month generate 70 per cent more leads than those that don’t blog at all, while companies that increase blogging from 3-5 times a month to 6-8 times a month almost double their leads (Hubspot) 
• ‘interesting content’ is cited as one of the top 3 reasons people follow brands on social media (Content+)
• $118.4 billion will be spent on content marketing, video marketing and social media by end 2013 (eMarketer)
• 78% of CMOs think custom content is the future of marketing (Yahoo)

Visual content marketing tactics such as video, imagery and infographics have a big role to play here too.  Use of video as a content marketing tactic has risen from 52% to 70% year on year in 2013, according to a survey of global marketing decision-marketers by copypress. Articles containing relevant images gain on average 94 per cent more total views than articles without images, according to Skyword. And both tweets and Facebook posts with images have significantly higher user engagement rates than those without.  

BEST-PRACTICE EXAMPLES

So who’s doing content marketing well? In B2C, the best-known example of all is probably Red Bull.

Red Bull is a massive content marketing industry all of its own, with an archive of over 5,000 videos, 50,000 images, and a range of high-octane sports events to its name – and not an energy drink in sight. It sells a lifestyle, a story – one that can be summed up in a single word: ‘adrenaline’.  In orchestrating Felix Baumgartner’s Stratos jump from the edge of space, the brand created around 15 videos a day in the period leading up to and during the jump, earning over 360million YouTube views.

Red Bull has the sort of budgets and production values that many pure-play publishers can only dream of. As Mashable’s James O’Brien puts it:

‘Red Bull is a publishing empire that also happens to sell a beverage.’

The great thing about content marketing, though, is that every brand can tailor the approach to suit their needs and resources. Even very niche businesses can benefit massively.  I love thestory of Louis E Page, an old-school distributor of mesh and fencing. The company has launched a helpful and very informative blog, written in an engaging homespun style, which sets out to do nothing but answer customers’ questions about how to choose and use mesh and fencing. Since it launched, Louis E Page’s sales leads have increased by 850 per cent.

MEETING THE CHALLENGES OF CONTENT MARKETING

So everyone’s a publisher now. What could possibly go wrong?
For one thing, marketers struggle to find the skills and resources to plan, create and sustain all the content they now need to produce. This is especially true in b2b, where products and services are often complex, lead times can run into years, and content often has to go through a complex stakeholder sign-off process. The biggest challenge in b2b in 2013 is producing enough content, according to a recent Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs report.

The key here is to focus not on creating individual pieces of marketable content, but on putting in place a content marketing strategy that helps you embed a publishing operation in your organisation.

AVOIDING INFLATING THE CONTENT BUBBLE

Another challenge – in a world where everyone from contract publishers to SEO agencies to creative shops is rebadging as a content marketing agency – is the content bubble. In the content economy, we’re in danger of creating a situation where the number of content creators outnumbers the market of potential consumer of that content.
Two million blog posts are written each day, 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month and 278,000 tweets are sent every minute. As The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker wrote recently about his decision to rest his weekly column:

‘I've been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of jabber in the world… a vast cloud of blah I felt I was contributing to every seven days.’

The result is a vast content bubble – a proliferation of poor-quality content we all have to fight to be heard over. Too much rehashed, me-too content could easily create a situation where the C-word (content) replaces the S-word (spam) as consumers’ number one marketing bugbear.

So to make sure your output isn’t just adding to the steaming heap of content landfill, it’s vital to focus on quality rather than quantity. Look to produce fewer pieces of content, but ones with legs – ideas that are rich enough to be reused in different channels, can make a whole series rather than a single execution, and/or can generate lots of user response, which can itself seed more content ideas.

And if it’s not realistic to create, look to curate. Platforms like slideshare, visual.ly and Pinterest facilitate the sharing and curating of relevant content. As content proliferates, users need trusted filters to help them sort out what’s worth a share of their highly-coveted attention.

The 5 Ss of marketable content

You need to put in place the skills, resources and processes to make sure that your content is…

Searchable: Search engines reward sites that deliver regularly refreshed content of a high editorial quality. Whether it’s for education or entertainment, your content needs to deliver both quality and impact. 

Shareable: As well as the benefits of gaining peer approval for your content, the social shares it attracts will also boost its search rankings.

Supportive: You can project yourself as an authoritative brand that’s generous with its expertise by anticipating users’ questions and telling them things they didn’t know. But first, you have to make sure you understand your users’ information needs.

Specialist: Your content must come from within your information niche – the intersection between your domain expertise and your users’ content needs and interests. 

Sustainable: You need a publishing process in place that allows you to generate ideas, populate an editorial calendar, and create relevant, effective content on a sustainable basis. 

TOWARDS A CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

To create engaging, shareable, search-friendly content on a sustainable basis, you need a publishing plan that addresses key questions like these: 

Goals and audience

• What are the goals for your content? How do these support your overall business goals?
• Who are creating content for? What are our audience’s content needs?
• What do we want our content to focus on? What are our messaging priorities?

Production and distribution

• What’s a realistic frequency for the creation and publishing of new content? 
• What content channels can we use? How can we rank their importance in terms of our goals and our audiences? 
• Where can we source content? What internal resources do we have? How much of our content creation needs to be outsourced?
• Who are our subject matter experts? Do they have time to create content or are there other ways we could share gather their insights (eg by interviews)?
• How can we make our content go further? Do we have existing content assets that could be reused?
• What’s our quality control and governance process? Ideas and creation
• Can we break content down into thematic areas and content types?
• What content do we create for which channel?
• Howe do we segment content by audience?   
• What are the seasonal triggers and opportunities for our content? How can we make sure we are set up to respond to ad-hoc topical content opportunities?

Measurement

• How can we measure the effectiveness of our content? Of all the available metrics, which ones are most relevant to us? Which metrics can we technically support? And how can we use metric data to improve content over time?  

Twitter Will Let You Send Group Messages And Shoot 30-Second Videos From The App

 

• SAM COLT
 
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• JAN. 27, 2015, 8:32 AM
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Twitter will let users send group messages and shoot video using its mobile app beginning Tuesday.

Both moves could help Twitter increase user engagement, keeping people actively using the service for longer. Right now, Twitter trails far behind social networks like Instagram and Facebook, although that partly depends on how you track engagement.

Allowing multiple people to talk to one another turns direct messaging into a built-in messaging app, like group texting or Facebook Messenger before Facebook separated it out. There are also a lot of business-messaging apps like Slack that have similar capabilities.

Twitter

When people initiate a group chat they'll be able to invite anyone who follows them into it, allowing conversations between people who might not know each other.

Group DMs will work on Twitter's iPhone and Android apps as well as on the Twitter.com website and Tweetdeck, a social-media dashboard owned by Twitter.

It's unclear when third-party Twitter apps like Tweetbot will be able to take advantage of group messaging.

Twitter also announced a new video feature for its mobile apps.

Users will be able to access their phone's camera by pushing a button, record clips up to 30 seconds long, edit them, and upload them. 

Twitter

Those who have an iPhone will also be able to upload and edit videos from camera roll. Twitter says that feature will be coming to Android devices soon.

When the videos are posted, people will see a thumbnail from the video with an instant-playback button. Video playback is supported on Twitter.com and Tweetdeck.

We've heard of Twitter's aspirations for video before: Re/code reported this month that the company was imminently releasing a video tool separate from Vine, the mobile video app Twitter acquired in 2012; Vine allows users to upload only six-second videos.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-group-messaging-and-30-second-videos-added-2015-1#ixzz3QDRVe9q7

Messaging App Snapchat Turns Publisher Portal

Mobile-messaging app Snapchat has gone from a way for friends to send disappearing photos to a way for publishers to distribute disappearing stories.

Snapchat has created a publisher portal within its app called Discover for media companies like Vice and ESPN to upload stories each day and sell ads against those stories. Each day publishers will post what are being described as "daily editions" that will include 5 to 10 stories from that publisher.

Discover is launching with 10 publishers in the U.S., including ESPN, Vice, CNN, Yahoo News, People andNational Geographic. Snapchat will also have its own channel within Discover.

After people navigate to the app's Discover section, they can click on one of the publishers' logos. That will open up that publisher's daily edition. People can swipe through each of the day's stories and view 10-second previews of each. If they like what they see, they can swipe up to check out the whole thing.

The ads will show up as people swipe between stories. BMW will be the first advertiser on CNN's Discover channel, and Ritz Crackers will be the first for Food Network's. ESPN's first daily edition will include a video of NFL star J.J. Watt and Katy Perry, a ranking of the Super Bowl's top 10 players, a SportsCenter Top 10 NBA highlight clip and photo gallery of the Atlanta Hawks. Daily Mail's Discover channel will have four launch advertisers: T-Mobile, Macy's, Stride and Oxygen Street Art Throwdown.

Vice will be pulling content from all of its 10 verticals including news and sports into a mix of stories formatted as text, photos and videos. The company has signed food-delivery service GrubHub as the first advertiser to run ads within Vice's Discover channel, according to a Vice spokesman.

A Snapchat spokeswoman did not respond to interview requests. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Snapchat's plans to launch a publisher portal last August. And Digiday reported many more details of Discover last week.

As Digiday reported, publishers will be responsible for selling ads against their Discover content and will split a percentage of the revenue with Snapchat. It's unclear how much the publishers are charging for the ads, but agency execs familiar with the matter said the Discover ads are cheaper than Snapchat's first two ad units.

In one sense, Snapchat is following in the footsteps of its social predecessors Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube. The company started as a way for people to communicate with one another. And now as more people have joined the service, it has expanded into a way for mainstream media companies to communicate with those people.

By bringing such high-profile media companies into the fold so early, Snapchat may shorten the time it takes for advertisers to get comfortable with and people to become aware of Discover.

"I think programming for the platform is going to be a challenge to get right, but for brands like Vice that clearly know how to tell compelling, modern stories, Snapchat could emerge as a major disrupter," said MEC's managing partner-digital content marketing for North America Gian LaVecchia

Now Advertisers Can Use Beacons To Make The Shoes You Were Looking At Inside A Physical Store Follow You Around The Internet

• LARA O'REILLY
 
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• JAN. 26, 2015, 12:41 PM
• 2,690
 
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BI IntelligenceBeacons will soon be able to help with online campaigns, not just location-based marketing.

By now you’ve probably heard of "beacons," and how they allow advertisers to send targeted messages and offers to shoppers’ smartphones as soon as they enter a physical store. Today a deal has been struck which is about to make beacons a whole lot more interesting — and useful — for advertisers for when the shopper steps out of that store.

Norway-based startup media platform and ad server Unacast and California-based Total Communicator Solutions (a company that specializes in location-based marketing and claims to have more beacon installations than any other company. It counts P&G among its clients.) have today announced a global partnership to launch what they claim is an industry first: The ability for brands to “re-target” online and mobile ads to shoppers based on the actual items they have been looking at in-store.

Here’s how it will work: A shopper with a retailer’s app installed on their phone and Bluetooth turned on walks into a shoe store. If they’ve opted in for beacon messages, they’re greeted with a personalized message on their phone’s display.

They walk over to the men’s shoe department and are then served with a new message about the new line of designer brogues that have just arrived in-store.

And here’s the new bit: A day, a week, or a month later when that same customer goes online to have a look at a YouTube video. They are served a pre-roll video ad for that very same brand of brogues they were looking at in-store. They check the headlines on a newspaper website: Again, the very same shoes he was looking at appear in an ad, which says they’re available to buy now.

That’s huge. Until now, the utility of beacons has been limited to allowing retailers and brands to communicate with shoppers whilst they are in the store. Now beacons are acting as the data collector to inform post-shopping ad campaigns.

Unacast is looking to sign up more beacon companies (known as proximity solution providers/PSPs) to create a global network to anonymously group and standardize beacon data to allow advertisers and retailers to retarget consumers online, based on their offline interactions.

Norway, where Unacast is based, has some of the strictest privacy laws in the world, so it’s quite the feat to be able to pull off a network like this. It manages it because all the data collected via beacons requires consent from the consumer within a retailer or brand’s app, and the company never shares a users’ location data with third parties, beyond their client (or third parties their client approves of.)

Unacast was found in Oslo last year by Thomas Walle Jensen and Kjartan Slette, who were previously part of the Spotify competitor WiMP Music’s management team. 

The beacons market is set to be massive. BI Intelligence forecasts there will be 4.5 million beacons active in the US by 2018, with the majority of those (3.5 million) installed by retailers.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/total-communicator-solutions-unacast-beacon-retargeting-2015-1#ixzz3Q1sJfkeP

YouTube TrueView Ads Update Coming In April: What You Need To Know

Ginny Marvin on March 20, 2014 at 11:54 am

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YouTube’s TrueView video ads have become a wildly efficient way to reach large audiences at relatively low cost. Google has continued to refine the somewhat confusing options for TrueView ads and is set to make another change starting in April. This latest move is an effort to simplify the buying process while giving advertisers a full set of targeting options.

Google already axed the in-slate ads that showed in videos that were ten minutes or longer awhile back. Now, it will reduce the number of ad formats from three to two by rolling up TrueView in-search ads — the thumbnail ads that display in YouTube search results and are targeted by keywords — with the other thumbnail ad option, TrueView in-display, which show in the list of suggested videos. In-search and in-display both use the same creative assets, the only difference is where they run.

The two ad format options that will be available are in-stream and in-display. An overview:

1. In-display – These thumbnail ads will now be targeted to show either in the suggested videos list in the right rail or in search results. Advertisers are charged on a cost-per-view basis.
2. In-stream – These ads run as pre-roll before another video on YouTube. Viewers can choose to skip the ad after a few seconds. Advertisers are only charged if a viewer watches for 30 seconds or to the end of the ad if it’s shorter than 30 seconds.

Targeting Changes

The ad format change sets the stage for an update in how ads are targeted. After April 15, advertisers will select a network (YouTube videos, YouTube search or the Google Display Network) at the campaign level rather than at the ad level.

Advertisers can then target audiences with the following settings:

• Keyword
• Demographics
• Interest
• Topic
• Remarketing lists

These options apply to in-display ads as well, so ads set to run on YouTube search pages can now be targeted with more than just keywords.

Again, targeting will occur at the campaign level, and advertisers can combine dimensions such as keywords and demographics to narrow their audience targets.

Starting next month, advertisers will be able to update existing video campaigns. On May 15 all campaigns will automatically be transitioned to the new functionality. All historical reporting will remain intact.