Marketing a business requires the ability to adapt and stay up to date on a wide variety of marketing tools to keep in touch with current customers and find new prospects. Snapchat is rapidly becoming a new social media advertising tool that marketers have to pay attention to if they want to reach millennials.

According to a recent article by Bloomberg, Snapchat has 150 million daily users, which is even more than Twitter! Nearly one in five Americans will use Snapchat this year alone, and eMarketer states that the mobile app is anticipated to grow by 27 percent. Around 44 percent of Snapchat users are between the ages of 13 and 24, according to a survey by Variety.

Needless to say, the audience potential for Snapchat is huge!

However, before investing your time, energy and even budget into Snapchat, you should learn more about the app’s marketing potential and whether it’s a good fit for your brand. Here are a few things to know about Snapchat advertising and how you can use it to grow your audience:

Promote your business

B2C businesses could benefit by using geofilters to promote themselves to people in a local community. By using an inexpensive, on-demand geofilter to promote an event, like a President’s Day sale, you’d raise awareness from all sorts of people in the surrounding areas of your store. People snapchatting in the area will see and possibly use the filter, which their friends would in turn see, thus spreading the word about your sale to a potentially larger audience. A key to your success is to market the right product or service to your target millennial audience; no sense in running a special on retirement centers to twentysomethings!  

The option to create a sponsored national geofilter is also available, but you’ll have to be prepared for a big hit to your budget. Sponsored geofilters can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars; according to Snapchat, however, national geofilters typically reach 40 to 60 percent of the daily Snapchat users, which explains the higher price point. This is a great way for large businesses to advertise, but it’s not a practical option for smaller businesses.

Unique content

Thanks to Snapchat’s features that allow you to use filters, unique drawings and text to enhance a photo or video, you have the ability to create unique and engaging content. To stay top-of-mind with your followers, you should add these photos and videos to your “story,” which allows those who are following you to see your “snaps” for 24 hours. Doing so is completely free, so any small or medium businesses (SMB) are able to afford keeping their prospects interested and engaged at a fairly low cost — just the time you spend coming up with entertaining content!

To appeal to the younger audience that uses the platform the most, businesses need to create a steady stream of fun pictures and videos. Fresh, unique and funny content is more much shearable than outright sales overtures. Create a nice video of the inside of your store, or take funny pictures of staff to humanize and personalize your brand; that may in turn make prospects more likely to do business with your company!

Engage directly

One of the best things about using Snapchat for business is personally getting to send messages to those who reach out to you. If a follower sends your business a “snap” responding to a story or of them at your store, you have the ability to respond to them individually with something fun and personalized. In any social media platform, it’s important that companies converse with their audience, and Snapchat makes that engagement simple and entertaining like no other social media platform can.

Personalize your brand

Your audience needs to understand that there’s more to your company than a logo and a transaction. There’s so much more that goes into your company’s culture and history, but sometimes it can be hard to show that side of your business to customers. Snapchat is one of the best ways to connect more personally with prospects and humanize your brand. Show your unique company culture, traditions and products that make your brand special in a fun way and you’ll be rocking the Snapchat game in no time!

Get started!

Want to be ahead of the game and appeal to millennial consumers? Consider setting up a Snapchat account for your business and then put the account info on your business card. Who knows how many more young people you can reach if you just make the jump? Again, make sure your brand is in alignment with the buyer personas typically found on Snapchat or you will surely end up firing blanks. Knowing they can can ‘snap’ you with you on any pre or post-sale questions could give you a truly unique advantage over the competition.

About Kris Bushong: Kris is a student at Texas State University in San Marcos and a marketing communications intern at Swyft. She supports clients with digital marketing, social media, blogging and tech PR activities. Swyft provides digital PR and marketing services in Austin, Denver and Houston and for any national brands seeking rapid, sustained growth. Some of the services provided include content marketing, social media strategy and ad buys, email marketing, and media relations.