Attention Brand Managers & CMOs: 3 Tips on Leveraging Snapchat’s New Discover Feature for an Enhanced Customer Experience

As a Brand Manager, you know your high value markets are using social media and new messaging apps such as Snapchat to talk about you, your brands, and their experiences, all in real-time.
Snapchat’s new Discover feature that delivers curated content opens up new avenues for branded content. As a graduate student at Northwestern University in the IMC program and from my past work experience as a Marketing PR and Social Media strategist, I found two articles to support this topic, that I think you’ll find interesting.

The first article was one I found was Snapchat Adds News, Entertainment Content To Messaging Service on Business Insider, which originally appeared on Reuters. This talks about news from January 2015: Snapchat – the most actively growing social messaging service has partnered with CNN, ESPN, Yahoo, Warner Music and 7 other media companies to feature videos and articles on its cellular messaging service. The social messaging app views itself more as a blend between a media company and a messaging platform, and wants to position itself away from social media company by giving power to the editorial staff that chooses what public content the users see. This is interesting because the app is going the traditional route, choosing curated content over socially generated content, possibly lending itself more credibility by doing this.

Source: https://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/tag/tom-fishburne/

The second one I liked is an infographic followed by a write-up on The Shrinking Attention Spans of the humans by NBC News' Alexa Keyes (@alexa_keyes). Did you know that as humans, our average attention span is 8 seconds?! That of the average goldfish is 9 seconds! (National Center for Biotechnology Information: the U.S. National Library of Medicine)

This poses a great challenge to content producers and distributors. As marketers, we no longer have the luxury of time when it comes to making an impact!

Based on these two articles and on my grad-school learnings at Northwestern, here are 3 Action Items that all Brand Managers & CMOs should consider, given the volatile & dynamic media environment:

• Invest in Quality Content - Content is still King and customers will still invest their time if you give them a compelling enough reason to.

•  Provide An Experience - Let your audience take-away more than just a message.

• Leverage Celebrity Power - Get a celebrity to endorse your brand by taking over the Snapchat channel as a guest editor for a day. Offer sneak peaks & other exclusives!

Real-time engagement is the way to go, and with plummeting attention spans, marketers are not left with much time to make an impact. Leveraging Snapchat’s new feature may be the best way to reach out to primarily women, between the ages of 13-25, considering this demographic dominates Snapchat’s 100 million and growing user base.

Yashna Malhotra is a Masters student at Northwestern University’s Medill School, studying Integrated Marketing Communications. She is also pursuing a specialization in Media Management from Kellogg School of Business.

She is an experienced Social Media and Public Relations professional with three years of work experience with prestigious brands in the realms of hospitality, lifestyle, fashion and non-profit in Mumbai, India.

If you have a question or would like to connect, feel free to reach out to me:
Email: yashnamalhotra2015@u.northwestern.edu, 
Twitter: @YashnaIMC
Professional: Linkedin