How do you start your Snapchat video marketing strategy ?

Do you want to rejuvenate your branding? It's sometimes easy to lose perspective, and you may want to give it a fresh start.

Well, you're in luck: since Snapchat has grown in popularity among a very large and young audience, it's become a golden opportunity for change.

This growing social platform bets on the mobile content format, and especially value engaging video content. But how do you succeed on it ?

Checksub has good video marketing experts, so we'll give you the basics on how to get started marketing on Snapchat. We'll also give you tips on how to create truly engaging video ads. Follow the guide!

Why Snapchat Video Marketing?

You've probably already heard about Snapchat, a social media that leverages the verticality of mobile content to create new kind of user experiences. With a system of "snaps" (images or videos sent that are immediately erased when played), it's a platform that relies on short, natural, and offbeat content to reach an audience that's mostly young and connected.

Here are a few figures that show the reach of Snapchat:

• 250 million active users worldwide
• An average usage of 30 minutes per day
• 79% of users routinely make purchases directly on their cell phone.

Here are also several reasons to consider it for your brand video strategy:

• With its rather young audience, often less accessible on other marketing channels, you can directly target the generations that will define tomorrow's consumer culture. This is an opportunity to rejuvenate your brand.
• The rather short and authentic types of content will stimulate your imagination and define a more modern and fresh image of your products.
• The platform is one of the best ways to promote innovative and original products, close to the daily life of users (such as the brand of truffle hot sauce TRUFF, or the game Fusebox Love).
• The importance of video on the platform will make you think further about video content strategy regarding, knowing that in a few years 80% of the content consumed will be video.

Here are the reasons. Now where do you start to launch your Snapchat strategy?

Video Promotion on Snapchat: the different possibilities

Snapchat provides several ways to promote brands and create content. Here are the interesting possibilities to reach an audience through videos:

• The Story feature, as on Instagram, allows you to share animated videos with existing subscribers which can redirect to your website.
• Snap Ads allow you to integrate video ads from a few seconds to 3 minutes on their feed or between user conversations, taking advantage of the increased engagement of the vertical format.
• The latest and greatest feature is the Snapchat Discover format, which deliver video content directly to a wide audience. The contents are organically visible on the Discover feed selected by an algorithm. It is often longer and more elaborate content, which takes the form of content series.

Which features to choose? It depends on your objectives:

• Brand awareness and user acquisition in general
• Rate of commitment around the product, with visits to your application, e-commerce or website
• Conversion target: number of actions and purchases on the product catalog

Snap ads in all their forms fulfill all these objectives very well by taking advantage of a more engaging format compared to ads on other social networks.

But the greatest opportunities in terms of video strategy lie in this new Discover feature. A growing number of media, video creators and companies have taken advantage of this channel to deliver fun, engaging and interactive content.

There is still a lot of potential for success on this platform that you may benefit from. In fact, users spend 35% of their time on the Discover tab.

Which Snapchat users are you targeting?

Before thinking about the type of video content you want to create, you need to know the audience you want to target on Snapchat :

• What is the age and occupation of my ideal viewer?
• What is the need or problem that drives them?
• Which are his or her tastes and preferences in terms of video content?
• Which are his or her favorite video platforms?

In general, on Snapchat the available audience is very well-defined:

• 71% are under 34 years old, which makes it a privileged platform to target young consumers such as millenials and Gen Z. This audience is inclined to consume more modern subjects (lifestyle, engaged videos, interactive documentaries, etc.).
• 70% of the users are women, which means that the content must be adapted to their tastes.
• The specificities of the platform mean that the more humorous and immersive content is the most appealing.

Engaging Snapchat Video Content: Some Tips

By learning from this, you can start to design video content that is best suited to the platform. Here are a few tips based on the feedback we've received:

• Leverage the verticality of the video format to make content more immersive and original.
• Don't hesitate to create colorful graphics and text information to add value.
• Adding subtitles is essential if you want to add interviews, share user snapshots, or make an animated series. You can use our automatic subtitling solution
• Tackle rather young subjects (lifestyle, cooking, beauty, video games, series, etc.).
• You can easily call your audience into action through integrated questionnaires and surveys.

What are examples of successful Snapchat video strategies?

Many brands have already embraced Snapchat to generate successful ideas with promising results in terms of ROI and engagement.

Domino's Pizza's stunning advertising campaign

Domino's Pizza launched its "New Bigger Better" giant size pizza campaign on Snapchat with surprising videos. They tell through several zany situations the consequences of carrying pizzas that are now much heavier. Using the vertical format, they played with gravity to provide to the viewers a funny and directly engaging experience.

Macrobeauty's expert advice

Macrobeauty, a fashion and lifestyle media, has rolled out on the Snapchat Discover feed by providing expert beauty advice to its subscribers. It invites manicure and make-up specialists to its Stories Discover to explain their processes and invite the audience to do the same. In this way, she has succeeded in attracting a loyal audience.

T-Mobile Discover Series

With its "don't lose what you don't use" campaign, T-Mobile promoted in a light and comical way its data mobile new subscription service that keep them for the following month. Consisting of a series of offbeat and deliberately badly played spots, this one shows young people losing something that is dear to them on a daily basis. This video content managed to touch the hearts of its audience in an authentic and fun way, playing with the spontaneous side of Snap Stories.

NFL Snapchat Discover

To engage its community on Snapchat, the NFL is the first sports league that decided to broadcast the highlights and news of the American soccer season on Snapchat Discover. With its Discover story formats, it summarizes the day's events and takes us behind the scenes of the players, games, and teams. The result has been stronger interaction with a community that embraces Snapchat. Fans don't hesitate to share on the Stories and POV platform to show their experience on the stadiums.

That's it for us. Your turn to give a chance to this original and promising social network!