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Back in 2011, Snapchat was synonymous with risqué teen behavior. News coverage repeatedly warned parents of the damaging effects the platform might have, and as a result, the success trajectory wasn’t looking good.

Since then, Snapchat has evolved into something so much more. And while it’s certainly not the cornerstone of every marketing strategy just yet, the channel has earned a reputation for fast growth and innovation.

Snapchat is now known as a platform for individuals and brands — one that allows users to create quick, lighthearted, and even educational video content without using valuable production resources. For brands, this means a new opportunity to show off their culture, share knowledge, and connect with their audience in a new and exciting way.

After reporting more than 100 million daily active users, and over 8 billion video views a day, we decided to give it a go: The official HubSpot Snapchat account launched in March 2016. And while we’re still getting our feet wet, we’ve already learned a lot about executing and iterating a successful Snapchat business strategy.

To help you get started, we’ve detailed everything we’ve learned (so far) below. We’ll start by going over the basics — how to set up an account, create a Snap, leverages effects, etc. — but you can click here to jump straight to the tips.

How to Setup Your Snapchat Account

The first thing you’ll need to do is download the app — available for iOS and Android — and create an account by entering your email, a username, and a password.

When creating a username, keep in mind that you’ve only got one shot: Snapchat does not allow you to change your username once you set it.

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Once your account is created, you’ll want to take care of a few housekeeping things:

• Set up a profile picture. Tap the at the top of the camera screen, then tap your Snapcode to open the camera. Point and shoot!
• Adjust your privacy settings. Tap the at the top of the camera screen, then tap the ‘Settings’ icon in the top right-hand corner. Under the ‘Who Can…’ section, adjust your preferences accordingly.
• Add Friends. Tap the at the top of the camera screen, then tap the ‘Add Friends’ option. From here you’ll have the option to add friends by username, address book, Snapcode, or location.

Snaps vs. Stories: What’s the Difference?

Snap

A direct message from one account to one (or several) other accounts. These messages disappear immediately after viewing, and can contain photos, videos, or images uploaded from your phone.

How to Create and Send Snaps

To send a photo Snap, open up the camera screen and tap or the anywhere on the screen to capture the photo. To send a video Snap, hold .

If you want to experiment with Snapchat Lenses — animations that can be overlaid on top of your selfie — simply press and hold your face until the Lens option appears below. You can then swipe left to browse through the options, like the one below.

Image Credit:Snapchat

(Note: Snapchat also offers Sponsored Lenses — like the Gatorade one featured in #4 on this list — but it’ll cost you. According to Financial Times, a Sponsored Lens could cost up to $750K in certain situations.)

Once you’ve got a photo or video, you have a few options before you hit send:

Image Credit: Snapchat

1) Discard your Snap.
2) Add emojis.

3) Add a caption.

4) Doodle!

5) Set a timeframe for your Snap.
6) Save your photo to your Camera Roll.
7) Add a Snap to your Story.
8) Select recipients and share your Snap.

Want to add filters, the time, the weather, or your current speed to a Snap? Swipe left or right on the preview screen to browse your options. You’ll also notice something called Geofilters appear as you swipe through. On-Demand Geofilters are available to businesses and individuals for purchase.

These special filters can be use for an event, business, or specific location — brand logos and trade-marks are permitted.

How to View a Snap

To view a Snap that has been sent to you, swipe right on your camera screen and tap once on the Snap. If you have several Snaps from the same friend, they’ll play like a flipbook.

You only have two opportunities to view a Snap:

Helpful tips:

• To skip a Snap, tap the screen once.
• To exit, swipe down.

Story

This is a photo or video that is viewable to all of your friends for 24 hours. You can create multiple photos/videos shown in succession to create a longer story. Most brands utilize this feature, as it allows you to reach a larger audience.

How to Create a Snapchat Story

To create a Story on Snapchat, follow the process for creating a Snap above. When you’re ready to send it, tap and select ‘My Story.’

How to View a Snapchat Story

To view a user’s story, swipe left on your camera screen and scroll down to ‘Recent Updates.’ Tap a user’s name once to open their story. (To view your own Story, tap ‘My Story.’)

Stories are available for 24 hours (unless it’s deleted). During that 24-hour period, you can watch the Story as many times as you want.

Helpful tips:

• To skip to the next Snap in a Story, tap the screen once.
• To skip to the next Story, swipe left.
• To exit, swipe down.
• To save a Story, follow the instructions here.

How to Use Snapchat for Business: 6 Tips From HubSpot’s Snapchat Playbook

1) First, create a personal Snapchat account.

Before you begin Snapchatting on behalf of your brand, you may want to create a personal account to mess around with. Follow accounts your audience might follow. Add your friends and family. Just start using it. While this isn’t a formal prerequisite, it can help you understand the intricacies and nuances of how real people use the platform — which will ultimately help you make better decisions and create better content.

At HubSpot, we’ve found the best performing content looks and feels like the native content being created by the average Snapchat user. So use your personal account to play around with the front facing camera, explore different filter options, and dress up your Snaps with doodles and emojis. The more Snaps you send and engage with, the better your understanding of how the platform works will be.

2) Create a plan for measurement.

Here’s the truth: Talk to any social media manager and they’ll tell you Snapchat analytics are a pain in the rear. At the end of the day, you’re limited to views (), screenshots ( ), and replies. That’s it.

You can’t even get a total follower count: Snapchat replaces what would be your follower count with a score that reflects the sum of the messages you send and receive.

All this aside, you can use context to put things into perspective. Here are a few tips we’ve picked up along the way to help us better understand our Snapchat performance:

• Looking at your retention rate (what percentage of people watch each frame of your story) will allow you to compare stories to each other. Which are performing better? We’ve learned there’s a sweet spot around 90 seconds — any longer than that, and people start to lose steam.
• Looking at the percentage of people that dropped off after the second Snap will help you gauge general interest. If 30% of our audience dropped off after the second Snap, we probably missed the mark.
• Reviewing qualitative feedback can help you better understand your success. If people are sending you chats telling you they love your latest post, you’re probably on the right track.

Another tricky part about Snapchat analytics? In order to accurately collect numbers, you need to log in and write them down or screenshot them exactly 24 hours after you took the first Snap. Otherwise, they disappear forever. (We learned this the hard way. A few times.) You can find your views & engagements on the “Stories” screen.

At HubSpot, we record the following information on each Story:

• Story Title: What are you calling this Story?
• Number of Snaps: How many individual Snaps are in your Story?
• Length of Story: How long is your Story from start to finish?
• Views on first Snap
• Views on last Snap
• Retention rate: What percentage of people who start your Story view through the end?
• Engagements: How many people screenshot a Snap and send a direct message in reply?

3) Source content and ideas from your team.

Finding the time to come up with creative, engaging content ideas for Snapchat can be a big challenge — especially if you’re the only person on the job.

To combat this, we turned to our collective team to gain perspective and source ideas. This is an especially interesting tip if you work at a company with global offices, as it can help you piece together interesting stories from all over the world.

Here’s how we approached this outreach:

• First, we sent out a company-wide email asking for anyone who wanted to be featured on Snapchat. This gave us a massive list of people who were interested in being on camera or creating Stories themselves.
• We then created an internal Slack channel for all those who were interested. We used this platform to ask for volunteers for specific shoots, and to source general ideas.

If you’re struggling to gain internal support, you might want to consider explaining how certain teams could benefit from getting involved with the company Snapchat account. For example, our social media team is working closely with the culture team to leverage Snapchat as a recruitment tool. By creating stories that showcase what life is like at HubSpot, they can get the word out about our culture, while also helping us lighten our daily content load.

4) Focus on variety.

If you want to maintain an engaged audience, it’s important that you commit to consistently posting great Snapchat content. What makes a Snap or Story great? For starters: Variety. Snapchat users like to consume stories and information in different formats, and the app provides a lot of room for creative application.

For example, here are a few ideas and formats we’re currently testing:

• Video vs. stills
• Graphics/drawing/emojis
• Selfie cam style video vs. point and shoot
• Sound vs. no sound

By testing different types of content, we can start setting up some best practices that we can share across the company. Here are some early findings:

• Short videos rule. Our highest performing videos are all under 60 seconds long.
• Pay attention to timing. Things like newsjacks or live coverage of major company events tends to perform well.
• Cast a wider net. We’ve incorporated content from our Sydney & Dublin offices, which helps us build out a global perspective. This initiative has been really well received by our Snapchat audience.

Looking for inspiration? Check out what 10 of the best brands on Snapchat are doing to engage their audience.

5) Look for creative ways to build your audience.

On most social networks, it’s easy to browse around and find stuff that might be interesting to you. For example, on Instagram you might search for a particular hashtag or look for photos tagged with a specific location. Snapchat, however, does not make “discoverability” easy. And as a result, building an audience requires you to get a little creative.

When we launched HubSpot’s Snapchat account, we leveraged other company channels — blog posts, social media, etc. — to attract followers. As a result, we got some momentum going. Trouble is, keeping that growth moving has proved to be a challenge.

To avoid stalling out once the initial excitement has faded, we recommend developing a long-term promotional plan to keep your audience up to date on what’s to come.

Some more tips for increasing your reach:

• Leverage partners or influencers. Invite others to be featured on your account, and ask them to spread the word to their network.
• Newsjack. We’ve done a few “HubSpot Hot Takes,” which is essentially our version of a quick reaction to industry news. This has gotten our account mentioned by people on other social platforms, which helps spread the word.
• Join the conversation. Find an opportunity to get involved in a relevant event and leverage that audience. We recently did a takeover from Social Media Marketing World, highlighting some speakers, sessions, and key learnings from the conference. We posted about the takeover using the #SMMW16 hashtag and saw a noticeable spike in followers that day.

6) Don’t get too caught up with perfection.

This one is hard for many content creators to stomach: We like to edit, adjust, tweak until the last second. But if you’re doing Snapchat right, it’s not gonna be perfect.

Stories should feel quick, off the cuff, and not overly produced. In fact, one of our highest performing stories was just a quick video of me sitting in a chair reacting to a Facebook platform announcement in real time. I saw the press release, ran to an empty room, and fired off a few quick snaps explaining the change. That’s it.

Keep in mind that the photos won’t be professional-grade … and they don’t have to be. Your focus should be on finding a way to create authentic, compelling moments and stories, so try not to overthink it.

Have you seen success on Snapchat? What does your strategy look like? Share your experiences below.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

Of all the interview questions out there, this might be the most difficult.

These days, career paths aren’t linear. The age-old corporate ladder model of putting in a few years as an individual contributor, becoming a manager of a small team, and climbing your way through senior management or director roles is not right for everyone.

To say the least, career development is complicated. And often, a lack of open conversations around the personalization of career planning makes it worse. Maybe you’re unsure how to bridge the leadership gap between your current role and becoming a manager. Perhaps you know you’re not suited for managing people, but you don’t know how to advance your career otherwise. Even as a director, it’s easy to feel stuck in the trajectory of upper management.

To help you plan confidently for your next five years, HubSpot has launched a brand new career assessment called The Next Five. Tell us your interests, strengths, and working style, and we’ll help you identify a next step that’s right for your long-term professional goals.

The Next Five, however, is not your average quiz. With your result, we’ll include a detailed plan that encourages you to rethink the idea of a career path. Each tip is paired with customized articles, ebooks, videos, and more that will help you score visibility for your work and bring value to your company.

No five year plan? No problem. With The Next Five career growth assessment, discovering your next step has never been easier.

For years now, businesses have been using inbound marketing as a way to attract,convert, close, and delight new customers online. But what if it’s not “customers” that you’re after? What if you’re targeting volunteers, donors, or members?

In other words, what if you’re a nonprofit? 

The good news is that inbound marketing still works for nonprofits. The better news, is that we have a new ebook explaining how.

 A Crash Course on Inbound Marketing For Nonprofits provides an overview of how the inbound methodology helps organizations attract, connect, engage, and inspire their constituents, and runs through 8 steps to marketing greatness:

1. What moves the needle in the digital age
2. The inbound methodology for nonprofits
3. Creating audience personas
4. Building a strategy around your personas and organization’s goals
5. SEO strategy to grow website traffic
6. How to educate and convert website traffic into known contacts
7. Nurturing constituents to drive action
8. How to double down on retention and re-engagement 

Click here to snag your free copy of the ebook now >> 

Want to spread the word to other nonprofit marketers? Click here to share the ebook on Twitter! 

Retention marketing is focused on creating value from customers you already have, rather than solely focusing on acquiring new customers. Retention marketing is most powerful when you customize your strategy based on your own store’s lifecycle. While not every tool will work for every business, here are the top retention tools available, and when you should use them. 

How to Select Retention Tactics

There is no single retention tactic that is the best for every store. The ideal strategy will depend on the stage your business is in. The later in your journey you are, the more you should be investing in retention marketing.

Retention marketing tactics are complementary; you will see the most success when you use a few of them in tandem to develop your own strategy. For example, a loyalty program becomes extremely effective when you pair it with retention emails reminding existing customers of point balances and opportunities to get rewarded. It all fits into a bigger customer retention strategy. 

5 Retention Marketing Tactics That Work

These aren’t the only retention marketing tactics out there, but these are the tactics that we’ve seen customers have the most success with, as part of their retention strategy.

1) Amazing Customer Service/Experience

Let’s start basic. Your customer service and customer experience are one of the most signficant contributors to customer retention. If a customer didn’t enjoy shopping with you, they will not be back. Or, if they had a post-purchase concern that was not addressed, they won’t want to shop with you again.

If you’re looking into more advanced customer retention tactics, the most important one is to ensure your service and experience are top notch. Looking for inspiration? Check out these tips to improve your customer service.

2) Support Systems

Support systems allow you to provide that top notch service your customers are craving. It also allows you to turn customers with problems into loyal, lifetime customers. Many questions occur after a purchase. By answering them appropriately, you can nurture these customers into a profitable, lifetime customer.

Tools like help desks and live chat systems allow you to add a human touch to the support of your online business. A human touch is exactly what customers need to come back again and again. 

Live chat software is one of the easiest ways to give your store a human feel. Customers like to deal with other people not automation, since it makes them feel valued. Depending on the level of support you need to provide, you can start small with limited live chat and move up into larger help desk software when you’re working across a larger team. 

3) Retention Emails

Many of you are likely already using email marketing to sell your products, but likely not doing it with a retention marketing mentality. Instead of using email to showcase your latest products and sales, strategically use it to encourage past customers to come back and shop again. 

For example, if you know your average time between purchases, you can segment your customers based on last purchase date. If customers have gone longer than the average time without purchasing, you can give them an extra nudge to come back and shop again.

The best part of this tactic is you can use your current email service provider to send these retention emails, you just need to target segments of your audience. 

4) Personalization

Every merchant should be using personlization in their marketing efforts. No one likes to be put through a generic process, or talked to like they are just an order number, especially if they have bought from you already! 

From adding a customer’s name to all communication, to personalized product recommendations and cross-sells like those you see on Amazon, there’s a ton of ground to cover with personalization. Regardless of the level of personalization you decide to implement, it is crucial to create a customer experience that fosters customer loyalty. After all, a happy engaged shopper is one that has a higher purchase frequency.

5) Loyalty and Reward Programs

A loyalty and rewards program is one of the most effective customer retention tactics at your disposal. It allows you to reward points to shoppers to encourage them to come back. This creates a switching barrier they will need to ignore if they want to choose a competitor in the future. 

A rewards program allows you to not only encourage repeat customers, but other profitable actions as well. You can reward points for actions like social shares, social follows, registrations, and referrals. A loyalty program essentially becomes a hub for all your customer retention activities. 

Loyalty programs have been popular in retail for a few decades now, for good reason, and they are even more effective when implemented online. Building an online loyalty program is faster than building it in-store, and there are some great tools out there to help you out.

Retention Tools Are Important

Just like you need to invest in acquisition channels, you need to invest in retention tactics for your retention marketing strategy. As you develop your retention strategy and incorporate these tactics, you’ll begin to see the returns on your investment with happier, more loyal, customers. 

You’ve worked your socks off to get as much press coverage as possible. You’ve created blog posts, been included in news articles, and even made an appearance in a few features. A successful campaign is something to be proud of, so sit back for a minute and admire the fruits of your labour.

Done? Now it’s back to business.

Squeezing every bit of value out of a PR campaign is something very few of us actually do. It’s very easy to call a close on proceedings once the press grab hold of your campaign, but there are a still a few things you can do to turn your PR campaign from 90% to 100% effective.

Check out these seven helpful tips for becoming the ultimate PR completionist below.

7 Ways to Get More Value From Your PR Campaigns

1) Add extra SEO value to organic coverage.

If all goes to plan once you’ve sold your press release into the media, your story will gain traction — and consequently get picked up by more and more media outlets. Some of this you’ll be expecting, some you won’t. This is a happy side effect of a successful PR campaign. And to ensure you don’t miss any of this coverage, we suggest checking out Fresh Web Explorer and Google News.

Fresh Web Explorer is a tool created by Moz that lists any recent pages that feature a keyword you input into the search bar. Whilst it doesn’t track every mention, it’s a good barometer for how successful your initial campaign has been.

It works best using a variety of keywords. The above graph displays the mentions for the keywords “Money Advice Service” and “moneyadviceservice.org.uk.” As you’ll notice, we can clearly see the date where the press release was sent. Following on from that, we can see a smattering of other mentions, which could be from publications a bit late on the up take.

Once you’ve looked at Fresh Web Explorer, look for any further authoritative mentions using Google News. This function shows articles featuring a keyword from a selected time scale from outlets judged to be “newsworthy.”

Once you’ve sifted through and found coverage relating to your campaign, it’s time to see if you can help optimise this for SEO by getting any missing links added in.

Of course, some publications will have a no link policy, however the vast majority will, and all that’s necessary to get one added in is an email asking nicely — something like this …

***

“Good morning,

I hope you’re well. I’ve just finished reading one of your articles entitled [insert title here] — an interesting and enjoyable read!

I’ve noticed during the article you mentioned [insert campaign or company name here]. I was wondering if you could add a link to [insert link here]. Hopefully this will give your readers additional information if they wish to research them further.

Let me know if you can help!

Kind regards,

Alex Jones”

***

The trick is to make the link sound beneficial to their readers, if you don’t get that across, there’s little chance that a journalist will take the time to go back and add one in.

2) Ask the media outlet for a social share.

There’s never any harm in asking your contact for a quick post via social media to accompany an article surrounding your campaign. Unsurprisingly, top publications will have an impressive social media following — a sizeable percentage of which may not head to their main website for weeks at a time, and would miss an article just placed online with no social media support.

The best time to do this is straight after the article is live. That’s when a quick request to your contact to ask their social media manager for a share could make all the difference to the viral ambitions of your campaign.

3) Share a PR success story through your company blog.

A big publication running a story about your campaign is a major boost to your credentials. Why not show it off? PR is not just about brand awareness. It’s also about proving to your existing customers that you are a premier company and a trusted source of information.

If you have a blog where you typically share company news, write up a quick article to highlight the accomplishment. For example, after motoring magazine Auto Express picked up a survey ran by one of our clients — Jennings Motor Group — they decided to share this success to their users in the form of a blog post online.

Not only does this give you a boost in the eyes of your existing customers, but for potential customers browsing the website, this creates a link between an editorial authority and your company. That can only be a good thing.

4) Turn national recognition into local coverage.

Local publications love installing pride into their communities. So when a business based in their area comes to national attention, it’s an opportunity to do just that.

All we have to do in PR is make the local journalists aware of the story, and make sure that local angle is emphasised. It’s a technique well utilised by some already, as the headlines below prove.

5) Experiment with Facebook Ads.

Let’s face it: The Facebook Ads platform has become a vital addition to any marketer’s arsenal, which includes people working in PR. Putting a social advertising budget behind a new campaign is a well-covered area already, so I want to talk to you about using this platform in a slightly different way …

We’ve already talked about the benefits of sharing a great piece of coverage from your company blog, and Facebook Ads serve as a great way of building on that strategy. The simplest way of doing this is using the “boost” function on a regular Facebook update. There are three audience types you can target: people who Like your page, people who Like your page and their friends, and people you choose through targeting.

Boosting to “people who Like your page” is a great way to reinforce your authority to your existing audience. Likewise, boosting to “people who Like your page and their friends” gives you a chance to reinforce your authority and build your audience through existing channels.

The third option, however, allows you to try something different. By selecting a new audience to target, based on a selection of criteria, you have the chance to introduce your brand to a new audience by showing them a great piece of PR.

The idea behind this strategy is that a post including an article where a national publication talks kindly about your brand installs a sense of authority and creates a great first impression. And when you’re looking to introduce a new person to your brand, who doesn’t want to make a good first impression?

6) Explore Reddit and other related forums.

Internet forums can sometimes feel a bit outdated. However, there is still a lot of value to be gleaned from using these effectively — especially when it comes to Reddit.

Also known as the “front page of the internet,” Reddit is home to a variety of “subreddits” for almost every subject you can think of — from marketing to knitting. 

If you find a thread that aligns with your campaign, you can craft a post to draw more attention to your content. However, it’s important your post isn’t seen as too much of a plug or an advert, otherwise moderators will take it down. It’s also important that you choose the right thread to post in. Uninteresting or irrelevant posts will be “voted down” by users and could generate negative feelings towards your brand.

Get your audience right, however, and the rewards are potentially massive: Reddit saw over 200 million unique visitors last month (April 2015). Well worth a quick post, right?

7) Leverage PPC.

We’ve touched on how your social media team can help boost your campaign using Facebook Ads, now let’s talk about how the online advertising and PPC guys can join in.

From split testing titles of campaigns to focusing on raising brand awareness rather than driving sales, there are many interesting PPC strategies to be explored. For the sake of this example, we’ll be focusing on raising further brand awareness for an ongoing campaign. And because our goals are not primarily sales driven, we can target non-commercial terms that are (for the most part) a lot cheaper — even though they still have substantial search volume attributed to them.

When planning this type of strategy, you should lean on a keyword research tool such as Google AdWords to get started. Using this tool, you can uncover variations of a specific word or phrase to target, the average monthly search volume, and the suggested bid price. For this example, we’ve used they key term “Mortgage Calculator” relating to a campaign we ran with the Money Advice Service.

Once you’ve selected your keywords, it’s time to set a budget. As an example, I’ve set a relatively small budget of £50 (around $72) a day, which gives us the following daily forecast …

Because the average cost-per-click on our selected keywords is so low — £0.29 or 42 cents — our estimated daily costs come in a lot lower than our daily budget accommodates for. This means we can proceed to target further keywords and remain within our budget … or save the remainder for a later date.

Of course, how much you utilise PPC when working alongside PR depends on the budget available. For those with the means to do so, PPC can help you get your campaign in front of a highly targeted audience.

Have you got any more tips that can help optimise your PR efforts? Let me know in the comments below!