Building a brand from the ground up is challenging and takes relentless determination to get everything up and running and stay afloat. As most small business owners know, just ‘opening up’ is only the beginning of your journey and there is a lot that goes into growing your business. Marketing is paramount to connecting to the right consumer base but with so many different platforms out there, it can be hard to choose the right one.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ formula to growing a business, but at the very least, most basic marketing strategies can help you achieve a baseline and can be applied to most business types. Social media is a great tool to utilize when starting your marketing journey as it can be very cost-effective. In this blog, we will walk through 9 marketing strategies that have proven to help drive small business growth using Snapchat. Snapchat is a great platform to use to tap into a large user base that isn’t necessarily too overdone and can be a great way to find niche communities that correspond with your brand. Let’s dive in!
1. Establish Your Brand
Customers want to know what your company does, what you stand for, and how you stand out amongst your business peers. It’s important that your company mission, business name, and marketing materials are consistent throughout and that they all clearly convey the essence of your brand. Small business owners can leverage a number of online design and creative tools to sustain the look and feel of their business and build creative assets that are consistent. Snapchat has free tools that help you build advertising creatives, as well as the ability to repurpose existing marketing materials in an effective and inexpensive way. Some of these include but are not limited to:
- Snap Publisher: Design ad creative from scratch, or use of their templates. Convert your existing video asset to vertical videos for full-screen mobile ads. Snap Publisher is free to use and makes creating ads for mobile easy and simple.
- Instant Create: Create an ad in 5 minutes or less by importing photos directly from your website. Instant Create allows you to publish engaging creative on Snapchat without additional design resources.
2. Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience can help you make true connections with potential customers and help persuade them to buy your product, invest in your service, and come back for more. That being said, every business caters to a certain demographic that has unique needs, characteristics and qualities, and therefore all businesses require marketing plans that are specific to their target market. Snapchat Ads can target Snapchatters based on their online and real-world interests and behaviors, target by location, whether that’s multi-country, metros, or point radius around a specific address, and reach users by certain demographics such as age, gender, language, device type, and more. When using Snapchat Ads, you are able to access Audience insights that show you have Snapchat users engage with your ads, so that you can create more relevant content and find tangible sentiment to grow your reach.
3. Build Your Online Presence
It goes without saying that today’s world is heavily influenced by what’s online. Having an online presence is essential to getting discovered by those searching and browsing online, quickly and easily. Depending on your business, it may be beneficial to create a profile or listing on a platform where potential customers are looking for products like yours.
Grubhub utilizes both ads and Snap filters to broaden its online presence.
4. Track Online Traffic & Behavior
Having real-time insight into what actions your customers are taking online alone the buying journey is key to optimizing your digital marketing and getting the highest return on your advertising investment. For businesses advertising on Snapchat, the platform recommends implementing the Snap Pixel. The Snap Pixel tracks and captures data on how Snapchatters browse your website after seeing your ads. This can be beneficial for not only analyzing how your campaigns are doing but how your website landing pages are performing as well which will provide valuable insight into what’s working and what needs tweaking.
5. Test & Measure What’s Working, & What’s Not
For any business, it’s important to establish a regular reporting system when running marketing strategies and advertising campaigns. Split testing through Snapchat’s Ads Manager allows you to run A/B tests in your ads campaigns and various variables within your campaigns in order to find out what’s working and what’s not. A/B testing can show you what types of ads are resonating with your target audience and why which can give the information you need to maximize your return on investment for your budget to grow your business to the utmost potential.
6. Showcase Your Key Selling Points
When it comes to consumers buying or signing up for your services/products, customers want to know how your product or service will benefit them. When advertising your product, make sure your key selling points are front and center when promoting any type of sale or potential sale and it is essential that you include a strong message within your ad creatives. Including any relevant offers or specials are encouraged when promoting a sale, and can help provide the potential consumer with an extra incentive to buy your products. Here is a quick guide on ad creative guidelines depending on your business type:
- eCommerce or retail: Feature the products you sell front and center to drive purchase intent.
- App and games: Shadow the app UI, features, and benefits within the ad creative.
- Local businesses: Bring attention to key visual features of your storefront or location. Highlight what services or products your business specializes in.
Pottery Barn Teen shared a carousel ad to help drive sales on bedding
7. Leverage Testimonials & Word of Mouth
Leveraging word of mouth is an easy and inexpensive way to attract new customers, gain brand trust and credibility, and convince potential customers to give your products or services a try. Including a spoken testimonial helps Snapchatters better understand your products, relate to your brand, and see how your business can add value. Using user testimonials can help grab the attention of potential customers as unboxings and product or service reviews create trust with the brand and create an incentive to buy the featured product or service.
8. Nurture Customers Through the Buying Journey to Covert
Marketing is all about building brand awareness, educating potential customers on your product or service, and converting those leads into new customers and repetitive buyers. Once you use Snapchat ads, you can begin to assess how customers are engaging with your ads and how to move them from engaging to buying. Retargeting is the best and easiest way to move potential customers from awareness, to consideration, and then into the purchase phase. Running re-engagement campaigns is the best way to make the most of your digital ad spend, on any advertising platform. With that being said, marketing can be broken down into three different phases for attracting potential customers: awareness campaigns gather the utmost amount of exposure possible, consideration campaigns educate and engage the potential buys, and finally, conversion campaigns built to make the actual sale.
9. Think of Digital Advertising as an Investment, Not a Cost
Digital marketing is one of the best and most inexpensive ways to market your small business. It allows you the ability to maximize your ad spend by allowing you to optimize your online campaigns over time, as well as testing your creative approach and brand messaging so that you can find the most effective strategy for your business. To summarize, digital marketing is a great way for small businesses to reach a maximum number of potential customers in a quick and cost-effective way.
