The Only Snapchat Hack You Need for Marketing

It’s no question that in the last 6 months, I’ve been hot on Snapchat. And, in those six months, I’ve been getting a ton of questions asking me what the best Snapchat hacks, tricks, and tips are to dominate the platform.

When people ask me, “Should I put a filter? Does it need to be black and white? Should it show the weather? Should I fast forward? Should I face swap?” All those things are tactics—the techniques that will help you make the best content possible. And yeah, I can give you some hacks for those tactics, but those aren’t the right questions to be asking.

What you should be asking is about the religion of your strategy: What do you want most to happen? Who do you need to speak to in order to make that happen? How is your audience likely to react?

The biggest truth and the best “hack” is when you can speak to the religion of what your tactics are trying to accomplish—the big picture of what you want to make happen.

When you are able to understand what you want the outcome to be, you can then figure out who you need to be speaking to. Only then can you reverse engineer what you need to produce in order for them to get excited. Once you do that, you have the audacity to question what tactics you need to get there.

For example, let’s say you are a local high school and you want to sell tickets to the spring play. You should then produce content for the parents and the students in that school district that both drives awareness and also promotes calls-to-action. Engaging Snapchat Stories, stunning Instagram photos, and Facebook advertising will get you there, but you have to be able to reverse engineer what you want to happen: getting people interested to attend your high school play.

Marketing is all about religion, not tactics.

It’s not about using a custom geofilter or what’s the best length for a Snapchat video. It’s an enormous mental shift about believing in what you do and understanding how to do it. Because, once you believe in what you’re trying to accomplish and you understand what the north star is, it gives you the ability to decide which tactics are right for you and your brand. You can be as tactical as you want, but you need to understand your marketing purpose first. It’s what separates salespeople from brand marketers. Salespeople utilize tactics, brand marketers believe in the religion.