At ADWEEK’s Social Media Week, Snap’s global vp of of smb and mid-market, Sidharth Malhotra, revealed three things he’s noticed to help sellers overcome the totally fragmented path consumers take—at least on Snap.
“We’ve all been taught the marketing funnel. But it’s a problem,” he said, adding: “The journey is no longer linear.”
The value of the traditional funnel has long been up for debate, with both detractors and fervent supporters.
Snap claims you don’t get new consumers from oversaturated channels
Malhotra argued that ad buyers are wasting money on oversaturated channels, where diminished returns are hidden by dashboards that blend many metrics together. And metrics like return on ad spend or cost of return don’t show whether advertisers are actually getting a return on the dollars they spend.
Of course, Snap doesn’t have the overwhelming popularity it used to, especially with TikTok’s surge in recent years. But he indicated that a lot of the ad buyers who are dumping spend into the ultra-hot social media platforms are putting their ads in front of repeat buyers—the age-old problem of marketing to people already in line to buy.
Malhotra pointed out that “40% of U.S. users on Snapchat aren’t showing up on TikTok and 80% aren’t showing up on Pinterest.”
His argument was that Snap is a good place to get first-time customers.
Don’t hard sell when people are chatting with each other
For Malhotra, Snap is a chill place. “We lean into comfort,” he said. With that in mind, he advised that ads on Snap shouldn’t “interrupt the conversation” by showing a high-quality 30 second video ad.
“Switch gears by going low-fi,” he said. “It looks like an attentive conversation that drives clicks immediately.”
Snap is trying to pitch itself as a place for so-called “conversational commerce” to happen, where smart brands can show up, integrate themselves in the discourse with a subtle video, and grab a new sale. His strategy was to align Snap with AI answer engines, where consumers are gravitating but where the ad landscape is still being worked out.
“Chat and AI is where conversational commerce is going next,” said Malhotra.
His goal is for Snap to be a major part of that.
