How can your small business benefit from using mobile social media applications?
For this post I want to share an example of how a mobile social media application can be used by small businesses in order to drive your business products and or services. As I mentioned in previous posts the first steps for any business deciding to tap into any social media platform is identifying your target market and goals. For this case study let’s say your business target audience consists of young adults 18 – 34 years old, Millennials. In identifying one of the best or top used mobile social media platforms used by this demographic we come across the mobile application Snapchat which serves more than 100 million daily active users. Snapchat started in 2011 and has grown tremendously among the Millennial audience as of 2014 and 2015 (Jackson, 2015).
What’s so different about Snapchat?
What separates Snapchat from social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is a time constraint placed on the content posted. Whereas Twitter and Facebook will store your published content Snapchat will publish your content for a limited period of time before expiring. The trend here is that the time constraint opens a world of marketing possibilities for your business, specifically for promoting discounts and coupons (Jackson, 2015). One company which successfully took advantage of the mobile application back in 2013 was 16Handles, a frozen yogurt chain in New York City. Check out their Snapchat promo below:
I want to point out that what made this campaign so successful was the fact that the company did not push an advertisement on their audience. Instead they encouraged their community to engage with their product and business by having customers send them a message when they were actually in the store in return for a discount that could range from 16% off to 100% off. The campaign created a sense of time sensitivity – urgency, adventure, excitement and interactivity for its teen audience. Another important element was that the community manager of 16Handles, Adam Britten, noticed that his customers were sharing their Snapchat usernames and thus chose the platform based on watching and listening to their target market (Cicero, 2013).
Snapchat sounds great for my business but how do I measure ROI?
One of the simplest ways to measure your ROI for a Snapchat campaign is with Promocodes. Like the 16Handles example, the use of coupons and or promocodes will allow you to truly evaluate how many customers used your coupon and or participated. Coupons can be designed to evaluate which products your customers are more interested in buying along with what store locations may be more popular than others within the same geographic locations. It’s a very clear measurement for determining the return on your overall Snapchat campaign investment. Keep in mind there are other aspects involved for measuring ROI with Snapchat which include measuring Drop Off Rates, Enquiries and Engagement Rates (5 ways to measure Snapchat marketing success, 2016. To learn more about these measurements click here.
Summing it all up
So this week was about taking a closer look at social mobile applications and how to creatively make them work for your business along with how to measure your success with social mobile campaigns using platforms like Snapchat. Definitely check out these resources for getting started with Snapchat and let me know what you think!
- A beginner’s guide to snapchat, click here.
- Creative ideas for Snapchat marketing, click here.
- More ways for measuring Snapchat ROI, click here.
References:
5 ways to measure Snapchat marketing success. (2016). if.blog. Retrieved from http://immediatefuture.co.uk/blog/5-ways-to-measure-snapchat-marketing-success/
Cicero, N. (2013, Jan 2). First Brand Shapchat Campaign Launched by 16 Handles. Social Fresh. Retrieved from https://www.socialfresh.com/first-snapchat-promotion-16-handles/
Jackson, D. (2015, Sep 23). Snapchat Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide. Sprout Social. Retrieved from http://sproutsocial.com/insights/snapchat-marketing-guide/
newtosocialmediablog 
This was a cool post to read! The Snapchat discount code is clever and intriguing. I am surprised I haven’t heard of that done more often. I also only use Snapchat for personal reasons. I don’t follow many businesses so I should think about doing that.
Supplying links to outside sources is a good idea as well. It gives the choice to read further if you want. Instead of supplying information and summarizing what you had read, you were able to talk about other important topics but allowing more navigating outside of your blog.
Good ideas all around!
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