Brand awareness refers to whether customers can recognise a brand, influencing whether a consumer purchases a product (Keller, 2008). If a customer knows about a brand, they are more likely to consider in the consumer purchasing decision process (Baldauf and Cravens, 2003). To increase brand awareness, it is important to engage with consumers, Snapchat has become a popular way for brands to do this.
Snapchat currently has over 100million active users, with 400 million snaps per day (Dredge, 2013). This makes Snapchat one of the fastest growing social networks. Snapchat has claimed to be the best social media platform to reach 13-34 year olds (Carter, 2016) therefore a popular way to engage with a younger target audience. It allows for a person, or brand to send photos and video’s to their friends and followers. These can last for a maximum of 10 seconds per clip, before they disappear. Snapchat has a range of colourful filters, face swapping effects, and messaging functions; making it a fun and interesting app (Benner, 2016).
Functions for brand promotion
Product launches:
Snapchat can help promote live events, with many brands using Snapchat to promote new product launches. In particular, the fashion industry has taken advantage of this, streaming behind the scenes at fashion events, catwalk shows, and offering snippets of new collections before being launched. For example, Burberry allowed snapchat followers a sneak view of their fall collection before London fashion week.
See link to Vogue, for more information on Burberry’s Snapchat.
Promotional codes:
One way which brands keep their followers interested and watching their content, is by offering promotional or discount codes to followers who watch a full story on Snapchat. For example, ASOS regularly offer flash discount codes for via their Snapchat story. The down-fall of this, is that codes are not unique to individual followers, therefore users can screen shot promotional codes and send to their friends. In turn, this means that ASOS would not have accurate analytical data to identify how many of their followers used the promotional code.
See link attached for more information on ASOS using Snapchat to promote discount codes.
Brand awareness:
Snapchat has recently introduced a function which allows a brand to advertise ‘snap ads’. This is a 10 second, vertical advert that appears between users’ stories. Snapchat then allows for a user to swipe upwards to access more in-depth contents about the product. Brand awareness is key to online sales, as Lewis’ AIDA model (Attention, interest, desire, action) suggests, a potential customer needs to be aware of a brand and their products in order to consider purchasing (Hasssan, 2015).
See link for more ways to increase brand awareness.
Add a filter:
Geo-filters have become a highly effective way to increase new business. This allows users to press and hold on their face, and a filter appears. Moving your face usually triggers’ the filter to change and do something out of the ordinary, for example ‘spitting a rainbow’. Once finished, users can send the image or video to their friends.
Example of a branded snapchat filter
Superbowl Sunday:
America’s Super bowl Sunday is now not only known and watched for the NFL final game, but also for the adverts. Gatorade created a Snapchat filter, which allowed users to ‘dump’ a virtual cooler, filled with Gatorade over the head of themselves, like NFL players would traditionally do to their coaches. This allowed fans to join in with the excitement of the game. As a result, the filter had 160 million impressions; more than the 111.9 million who watched the game. Increasing Gatorade’s brand awareness (Digiday, 2017).
The downfall of snapchat:
Unfortunately unlike other social media platforms, it is difficult to extract analytical data from Snapchat as it doesn’t have functionality to like, share or re-tweet posts therefore. However there are some analytical methods to track effectiveness such as:
Unique views:
These are the number of people who have viewed a post. This can show how popular a post is by the number of users opening and viewing what a brand has posted.
Screen shots:
One way to track consumer engagement is through screenshots, screenshots are most helpful when measuring the success of a promotional code as many users will screenshot the code for reference. Brands are then able to track how many users used the code in comparison to the number of followers who viewed the promotional post. Therefore, tracking the effectiveness of the campaign.
Completion/ fall off rate:
Most brands promote on Snapchat through their stories. To drive brand engagement it is important that users view all the stories posted. The number of users who watch a story is presented on Snapchat, therefore it can be seen the number of users who watched the first story versus the last story and see what the completion rate was in comparison to the drop off rate.As Snapchat continues to grow it is expected that their analytical tools will become more sophisticated and follow in the footsteps of other social media platform’s which have been established longer, such as instagram and facebook.
Invasiveness:
A further disadvantage of using adverts on Snapchat is that they may become invasive to users. Snapchat has recently introduced paid adverts, which interrupt a users viewing of friends stories on Snapchat. This goes beyond the ads on the ‘discover’ section of Snapchat, which gives users the opportunity to view adverts and scroll up for more information, even being able to forward articles to friends. These discover adverts are optional to the user, whereas the adverts between stories are skip-able, but intrusive.
Although Facebook and Instagram users are familiar with adverts, they are able to scroll past, without heavily impact on their user experience. Whereas the Snapchat adverts flash before the user, having to proactively close the advert themselves. Therefore becoming intrusive and distracting. These adverts can be skipped after 1 second; therefore brands may not see a high ROI for the adverts used on Snapchat users can close them instantly.
Strengths
- Fun filters for increased user engagement
- Show users live footage
- Market promotional codes
- Increase brand awareness
Weaknesses
- Few measureable analytics
- May be intrusive to users
- More users skip the adverts than view them
References:
Baldauf, Artur, Karen S. Cravens, and Gudrun Binder. “Performance Consequences Of Brand Equity Management: Evidence From Organizations In The Value Chain”. Journal of Product & Brand Management 12.4 (2003): 220-236. Web.
Benner, K. (2016). How Snapchat Is Shaping Social Media. The New York Times. [online] Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/technology/how-snapchat-works.html?_r=0 [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].
Carter, T. (2016). How Snapchat is building the future of social media. [online] Marketing Land. Available at: http://marketingland.com/snapchat-building-future-social-media-heres-181479 [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].
Digiday. (2017). Gatorade’s Super Bowl Snapchat filter got 160 million impressions – Digiday. [online] Available at: http://digiday.com/marketing/inside-gatorades-digital-ad-playbook-snapchat-facebook/ [Accessed 17 Apr. 2017].
Digital Marketing Institute. (2017). Will Digital Make Or Break ASOS?. [online] Available at: https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/analysing-asos-digital-strategy [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].
Dredge, S. (2013). Ten things you need to know about Snapchat. The Guardian.
Hassan, S. (2015). Strategic Use of Social Media for Small Business Based on the AIDA Model. Procedia, social and behavioral sciences, 172, pp.262-269.
Huang, R. and Sarigöllü, E. (2012). How brand awareness relates to market outcome, brand equity, and the marketing mix. Journal of Business Research, 65(1), pp.92-99.
Pike, N. (2015). Burberry On Snapchat. Vogue. [online] Available at: http://www.vogue.co.uk/article/burberry-streams-show-on-snapchat [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].