Nowadays, more and more brands are switching from traditional marketing to digital marketing, and among all digital media, marketers especially prefer social media apps. According to a research conducted by RBC, about 95% of advertisers promote on social media platforms, and most of them claim that they spend more than 20% of their marketing budget on social media platforms. However, not all platforms are equally popular. Unlike Instagram and Facebook whose advertising business are growing exponentially, Snapchat is not having a good time. In the same survey, RBC revealed that among all marketing professionals, only less than 25% have conducted advertisements of any form on Snapchat.
I think there are several reasons behind it. Firstly, there’s no ‘like’ function on Snapchat. Since “the average American does not exist in current marketing world”, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube use ‘like’ to determine what a user is likely to be interested in. According what the users like, they can use algorism to display advertisements that they believe will be more likely to attract attention of the specific users. Thus, advertisements on these media could yield a higher click through rate, and therefore, higher return on investment. Since Snapchat does not possesses such a feature, advertisements are shown randomly to users. Therefore, the ads are surely not as effective.
Besides, Snapchat’s userbase is too narrow comparing with other media. Despite the fact that there are more than 173 million daily users on Snapchat, about 90% of Snapchat users are between 13-24 years old, according to Ominocore Agency. The consequence of this is that only brands targeted to teenagers or younger consumers will be likely to pay to advertise on Snapchat. Also, consumers under 24 years old have much weaker purchasing power comparing with those who already work, which further limit the scope of products that should advertise on Snapchat.
In addition, because of the feature of Snapchat, video advertisements on Snapchat have time limit, and users are not able to go back to the advertisements when the videos are done playing. Brands are concerned whether enough awareness can be generated from Snapchat. In contrast, Instagram makes the advertisements like it’s posts from account that users follow, and therefore when users find the ads interesting, they can click into the brands’ official page and learn more.
To address the issue, I think one thing that Snapchat could do is to promote more heavily on its face tracking filters and lenses. This feature is what makes Snapchat stand out from other social media platforms. Actually, a lot of users only use the lenses to take a selfie, but not other functions of Snapchat. Therefore, Snapchat could partner up with brands and come up with lens of the brands. This has proved to be effective. In 2016, Snapchat came up with a lens for Taco Bell on Cinco de Mayo. As a result, this single lens had more than 220 million views in one day.
Please share what are reasons why advertisers prefer other social media over Snapchat, and how should Snapchat solve this problem. Thank you.
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