What You Need to Know to Create the Ultimate Snapchat Experience

You’re in line at Starbucks; you pull out your phone. You’re waiting for your doctor’s appointment; you pull out your phone. You’re watching Netflix; you pull out your phone.

We check our phones 221 times a day. In those quick moments, we’re looking for content we want: Personalized, immediate, relevant, and easy to digest on our smartphones.

Why does this matter for your Snapchat strategy? To successfully use the platform, you have to keep that mobile mindset, well, in mind. You won’t be able to approach it the way you might your website or even your Facebook page.

The most effective use of Snapchat harnesses – and expands on – its greatest strengths. As of this summer, the app had 250 million daily active users consuming content built for mobile, whether it’s photos from friends, Discover articles, or the immersive video Snap ads. Snapchat provides an easy, immersive, engaging, way to create and share mobile content. It turns everyone into a mobile marketer.

Built for mobile, not for advertising

Snapchat’s platform was built specifically for efficient communication on smartphones. It wasn’t a consumer data play, and it wasn’t about setting up algorithms meant to drive ad revenue. Its original purpose gave users a non-intrusive, truly mobile-first experience.

As a result, Snapchat’s ad formats maintain the integrity of a truly mobile first experience. As full-screen, immersive ads, they sustain visual attention longer than other platforms.

When creating your Snapchat strategy, both organic and paid tactics will help you sustain and capitalize on mobile, consumer attention.

Creating your organic Snapchat strategy

Now that we’ve looked at why Snapchat is successful and explored the key components of the mobile mindset, it’s time to dive into creating your strategy!

At risk of stating the obvious, make sure your audience is on Snapchat. If your customers are between the ages of 12 and 44, using Snapchat gives you a great opportunity to reach them.

Aside from that, think about how you can use the strengths mentioned above – mobile first, visual attention, and ease of creation – for your brand. The best organic Snapchat marketing brings the human side of your brand to the forefront. Authenticity and relevance are key to success.

Piloting paid advertising on Snapchat

Most marketers understand the value of Snapchat as an engagement tool. Many marketers have been skeptical of Snapchat as a performance marketing tool. Since this past summer, however, Snapchat’s advertising capabilities have significantly changed.

Most significantly, the release of Snap Ads – vertical videos that allow users to swipe up for more content – along with new creative partners has opened the door for data-driven, lead generation-focused marketing campaigns. Marketers can choose to send users to longer video, app installs, or a web page.

To make Snap Ads most effective for your marketing campaigns, remember consumers’ mobile mindsets. Put yourself in their shoes. If you swiped up to a landing page with a long form or too much content, would you leave it immediately? If you got sent to the app store to download something while out and about and using your data, would you leave it? If you got sent to longer video – especially video without subtitles – would you bother watching?

The key to advertising success on Snapchat is driving users into content that has the same strengths as the platform: Interactive, mobile-first, and immersive.

In a mobile state of mind

Snapchat can be your gateway to sustaining consumer attention on mobile. All you have to do is create your content to meet consumers’ mobile mindset. Any content you share on Snapchat or drive your audience to from Snapchat should be built for mobile, relevant, and interactive. Remember that on mobile, you compete with texts, social media notifications, news alerts, and more. In 2013, Apple announced that 74 trillion push notifications went through its servers. That means you want to reach consumers via a channel they frequently use (Snapchat) and create content that they won’t immediately leave for something better (a notification from a friend).

With that in mind, go experiment! You can easily test both organic and paid Snapchat content and see what resonates with your audience. Given the hold Snapchat has on consumer attention, the only thing you can do wrong is not give it a try.