Mastering Snapchat Marketing: A Marketer's Playbook

Most brands that tried Snapchat in early 2015 approached it the way they approached every other platform: repurpose the same polished content, post it and hope. It didn’t work, because Snapchat’s audience could smell a repurposed ad campaign in about two seconds and swiped past it. The brands that got traction did something different: they made content that only made sense on Snapchat.

This is a working playbook for doing that, built around the specific formats Snapchat offered in 2015.

Understand what you’re working with

Snapchat’s core mechanic, disappearing photos and short videos, forces a different kind of content than Facebook or Instagram. There’s no feed to scroll back through, no permanent post to polish and re-edit. Content is vertical, fast and consumed in the moment. The audience skews young, largely under 25, and they use the app dozens of times a day in short bursts rather than one long session.

That combination means your content has to be immediate and a little rough around the edges. A perfectly lit product shot reads as an ad. A quick, vertical, slightly imperfect video from behind the scenes reads as content.

The formats worth learning

Snapchat Discover, which launched in January 2015, gave a small group of media partners, including CNN, ESPN, Vice, Cosmopolitan and National Geographic, their own branded channels inside the app. Discover isn’t open to most advertisers directly, but it’s worth studying because it set the visual and pacing standard the whole platform followed: bold typography, vertical full-screen tiles and content built to be swiped through in seconds.

Geofilters, rolled out for brands starting in early 2015, overlay a design onto a snap based on the user’s location. A retailer can put a filter over its store, an event can put one over its venue. They’re cheap relative to most ad formats and they work because users apply them voluntarily, they’re decoration, not interruption.

Lenses, which arrived in September 2015, turned the front-facing camera into an interactive effect using face tracking. Taco Bell’s Cinco de Mayo lens that May, which turned users’ faces into a taco, became one of the most-viewed pieces of branded content the platform had produced up to that point, not because it was clever advertising but because people wanted to send it to their friends.

Stories, both personal and, later in the year, sponsored, let a sequence of snaps stay visible for 24 hours instead of vanishing instantly. This is the format closest to a traditional content series, and it’s where a brand can build a narrative across a day rather than a single moment.

Building the playbook

1. Post like a person, not a press release. Vertical video, natural lighting, a real voice. If it looks like it came from a studio, it’s already lost the audience.
2. Use geofilters for physical moments. A store opening, an event, a pop-up. They’re inexpensive and they turn attendees into unpaid distribution.
3. Save lenses for something worth sharing. A lens only pays off if people want to send the result to friends, which means it needs to be fun or funny, not branded for its own sake.
4. Build a Story with a beginning and an end. Don’t just post disconnected snaps. Give the day’s Story a shape, even a loose one, so people who catch it partway through want to see how it resolves.
5. Consider an influencer takeover. Handing your account to a personality your audience already follows, even for a single day, tends to outperform brand-produced content because it doesn’t feel like advertising.

What to watch

Views and screenshots (a rough proxy for content people wanted to keep) are the available signals in 2015, since Snapchat’s own analytics for brands were still limited. Completion of a Story, whether people are watching most of it or dropping off after the first snap, tells you more than raw view count.

The honest takeaway

Snapchat in 2015 rewarded brands willing to look a little unpolished and behave like a person the audience already follows, not a company running a campaign. The format punishes anything that feels like it was made for another platform first. If you can’t commit to making Snapchat-native content, you’re better off not being there at all.