By Patricia Lundy
As a digital marketer, it’s too easy to become overloaded by too many different applications, channels, and platforms. You need to prioritize which ones are your best assets and which ones you should leave behind.
The best example of this can be seen with the app Snapchat, which is now worth $20 billion dollars. Some B2B companies pride themselves on being active on the platform and dedicate serious marketing efforts and budget to creating content for it. This blog examines the app and what it can reveal to digital marketers about app overload as well as their marketing strategy.
The Undeniable Influence of Snapchat
A couple of weeks ago, Twitter announced it would be adding Snapchat
like sticker emojis to its photos. Now when you tweet a photo of your company end of quarter party, you can add a champagne emoji sticker to your photo. If you click on the sticker itself, it will bring you to the feed of how other people have used the same champagne bottle sticker, sort of like a hashtag. It’s clear that Snapchat’s immense popularity—its user base puts forth about 10 billion videos bedazzled with stickers, drawings, and filters, on the channel each day—has put pressure on Twitter to get hip. But at what cost? Do stickers fit in line with Twitter’s current audience and how their platform is best used?
Examining this a little more closely illuminates what many marketers are faced with: trying to bring their brand onto a channel that may or may not be in line with their brand’s story or customer base.
Does Snapchat Fit Your Brand?
People younger than 25 account for over 70% of Snapchat’s users. While younger people are generally more apt to be on social media than older folks, Twitter’s young base is still older than Snapchat’s: 37% of its user base is 18-29 year olds, and its next largest user base at 25% is 30-49 year olds. Income is another useful marker of audience, and while it is not the be all end all, it can provide information on what career stage members of your customer base might be in.
On Twitter, 27% of its user base makes more than $75k, and another 27% makes between 50 and 75k. 21% makes $30-49k and 20% makes less than $30k. What this means is that 54% of users on Twitter make over $50k. On Snapchat, 60% of its users make less than $50k.*
If millennials and even younger adults comprise a large portion of your audience, it’s worth considering having a presence on Snapchat. Snapchat even boasts that its platform is the best place to make a playful impact when it comes to advertising. But if you’re a B2B company who is targeting the c-suite—folks making well over 50k and who, for the most part, are not millennials—Snapchat is not such a strategic platform.
What You Can Learn from Snapchat
There is an itch marketers feel they need to scratch, and that itch is being on every single platform. The thing to remember is that more isn’t better. If you are trying to target customers with buying power, targeting them on a platform that their kids are more likely to be using can put a drain on your time, money, and people.
This isn’t to say that you should ignore what’s going on with Snapchat and how the platform is influencing other platforms such as Twitter. If we re-visit the statistic that Snapchat’s user base puts forth about 10 billion videos on the channel per day, this can provide some good insight. Video is becoming a dominant form of content. It’s a trend not isolated to Snapchat, but can be seen in Facebook’s video efforts and Instagram’s, and even in Twitter’s attempts to be more interactive. This should make marketers think about how to incorporate video into their marketing strategy; it’s becoming a pervasive form of content on almost every platform. These are the kinds of valuable insights that can be gleaned from channels such as Snapchat without having to devote resources to that channel.
Next Steps
If you are already on Snapchat:
- How much money are you spending on content and advertising?
- Is this money going toward the audience you want to reach?
- Are these marketing efforts taking away from resources that could be spent on channels that have a greater ROI?
If you are thinking about getting a Snapchat or evaluating a similar platform for your company:
- Is your customer base active on Snapchat?
- Will the kind of content you put on Snapchat resonate with your audience?
- Is there another platform that could be more strategic for you to use instead?
Resources are precious for marketers. It’s important to be picky when allocating yours.
*Statistic Sources: