Snapchat Marketing Resumes Original Content Production After Failed First Effort

skyword.com

An earlier effort to produce its own original content failed, but Snapchat won’t be deterred: The social media app has launched a second effort to publish its own cache of created content.

Several months ago, Snapchat shut down its channel within Discover (the app’s publishing channel where stories refresh every 24 hours), which at the time had been its channel for releasing original content and other Snapchat marketing materials. Other brands and publishers were still publishing content through Discover. Snapchat also laid off members of its in-house content production team. But as 2015 wound down, the company quietly restarted efforts to use Discover for its own content, according to Ad Age.

Without making a public announcement on its long-term plans, or even offering hints as to what its goals for the brand’s in-house content team might be, the company rolled out a sponsored content series in collaboration with Spotify, publishing original articles and videos to highlight the “Spotify Year in Music.”

Whatever Snapchat’s ultimate goals are, the revival of its Discover channel shows the company is not ready to give up on its own digital content efforts. That’s a smart move, and perhaps an essential one if it wants to keep pace with the competition.

Correcting Past Missteps

When Snapchat shut down its own Discover channel months earlier, it insisted it wasn’t giving up on original content. Instead, the company had decided it didn’t need to spend its own time or money on programming and advertising, as Bloomberg reported. After working with other companies to help them produce content for Discover, Snapchat scaled back its production efforts.

Now, however, that move seems to have been in the interest of reorganizing its production strategy, and perhaps taking a more grassroots approach to content marketing on its social media app. When the brand gutted its channel within Discover in October, some of the casualties were on the video production side, including a former TV executive who oversaw the creation of several network TV shows. In this new iteration of its Discover channel, the names attached are writers and editors from influential culture publications. In doing so, Snapchat may have also scaled down the cost of original content creation, limiting its overhead as it works to build back a need for a large in-house production team.

This seems to indicate Snapchat’s desire to serve more as a pop culture destination and less as a production partner for brands. The content is still produced via sponsors, as Spotify is currently involved and there is no indication that the company will produce its own standalone content without a sponsor’s involvement. But as Snapchat’s brand re-involves itself in the content marketing of partner brands, Discover is being positioned as a hub of quality content.

If Spotify is a test of an upcoming re-launch, it’s not hard to see why Snapchat has been so quick to reorganize on the content side.

Balancing Risk and Reward

In 2015, digital brands seeking consumers all learned an important lesson: Original content is the key selling point. There’s a reason Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon all have plans to double their original video series by the end of 2016: Despite massive catalogs of movies, documentaries, and TV shows, each platform has learned it will live or die by the original content it provides to consumers.

Amazon has even applied this content marketing strategy to its online store. Fast Company reports that Amazon is testing original content in the form of expert advice and shopping guides, hoping to provide better supplementary content to the online shopping experience. Amazon may be the largest online store in the world, but it has still discovered an opportunity into supplementing its store with compelling original content.

That example illustrates the value of content for Snapchat’s future plans, whatever they may be. While there’s no confirmation that Snapchat will continue producing Discover content after its sponsorship from Spotify runs out, the company has every reason to continue publishing and building an audience among its user base.

Like the examples above, Snapchat is a content destination. Even though we think of it as a social media app, users come for the content it provides. Every other digital publisher has found that original content is critical to its continued growth, and Snapchat marketing leadership is likely no different. The only difference between Snapchat and a company like Netflix is that it hasn’t yet figured out a winning recipe for its own content.

Snapchat’s new strategy appears to be more cautious than in the past, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It can continue testing and tweaking its strategy until it hits on a winning formula. Whether content proves an overnight hit or a months-long slog through several different phases of strategy, the only thing that matters is that brands continue trying until their hard work pays off.