LinkedIn has become the default platform for B2B creator marketing. If a founder wants to build an audience or a brand wants to partner with B2B creators, LinkedIn is usually the first place marketers look.
However, recent Snapchat research finds its audience is as business-savvy as anyone else, if not more. Maybe much more.
Which raises the question: is LinkedIn still the go-to B2B creator marketing destination, or is Snapchat a rare opportunity to meet a B2B audience on new ground?
In a famous MIT Sloan article, “The 20-year-old entrepreneur is a lie,” an analysis of 2.7 million U.S. founders who started businesses between ‘07 and ‘14 found that the average founder age was about 42.
Today’s 42-year-olds are older millennials, which means today’s founders may be as smartphone-savvy as any demographic. And older millennials don’t limit themselves to LinkedIn.
According to Pew Research, most U.S. adults use YouTube, while 37% use TikTok. While it’s true that adults under 30 were more likely than older adults to use most of these platforms, 25% of all U.S. adults reported using Snapchat, a higher percentage than Twitter (21%).
Conclusion: Yes, the adults are still the B2B marketers, but today’s adults also grew up with their own smartphones. And they’re often deeply immersed in platforms like Snapchat and TikTok.
Snapchat commissioned GWI to conduct a survey of U.S. professionals aged 18-45 who qualified as decision-makers, entrepreneurs, or small- to medium-sized business owners. The results were surprising. Snapchat users have genuine decision-making power and are more, not less, likely to be in executive management.
Snapchat ran the numbers against non-Snapchat users, and found that active Snapchatters are:
In other words, Snapchatters aren’t only a highly relevant B2B creator audience; they’re a more willing one.
The top industries for Snapchatters included e-commerce, online retail, freelancers, content creation or influencer activity, local services, and handmade crafts.
These users were also surprisingly forward-thinking. 2.4x more Snapchatters than non-Snapchatters were likely to be excited about AI, and they were 2.1x more likely to use AI tools in business. And, 64% of Snapchatters agreed that new tech like AI is transforming how they work.
But there’s also a gap. Six out of 10 Snapchatters think Snapchat could play a role in helping entrepreneurs grow.
Clearly the demand for B2B content is there. B2B marketing isn’t only a thing on LinkedIn. This just leaves one question: if that’s all true, where’s the content?
The obvious response to Snapchat’s statistics is that B2C marketing is plentiful on Snapchat, but B2B examples are far more rare. This would ignore the slate of tools Snapchat has been pushing for a few years now, starting with Creator Collab Campaigns in 2023.
The tools included Creator Discovery API, allowing creators to share metrics and analytics related to public stories, saved stories, and Snapchat Spotlights. Additionally, Snapchat enabled midroll placement for creator-driven Stories. Per Snapchat, “growing year-over-year” content viewership made this a much more appealing way to get views on the platform. Finally, the suite of tools included a paid partnership tag for more influencer outreach.
“Among small- to medium-sized business owners specifically, there is a clear demand for entrepreneurship and startup stories,” reported Snapchat. “As well as the opportunity to hear directly from experts, content creators, and CEOs.”
Good viral content doesn’t “look” like B2B marketing; it should be more organic than that. This means that even if Snapchat may have a B2B-leaning audience that rivals LinkedIn, the format lends itself to different storytelling methods.
For example, Starplex earned hundreds of thousands of views when it shared the reason it turned down a $3.2 million offer from Shark Tank. Tales of small business success have also gone viral, as have “30 years of business advice” posts that wouldn’t be out of place on LinkedIn.
This indicates a strong market for business content on Snapchat, which echoes the audience demographic surveys. But if Snapchat’s going to be a LinkedIn alternative, how can B2B brands actually use the platform to get attention?
When the survey asked what kinds of business content audiences wanted to see more of, there were multiple answers: creator content, tutorials/how-tos, entrepreneurship and startup stories, and news/industry updates.
That creates a to-do list for anyone in B2B: advice-led Stories and behind-the-scenes “how we built this” content will be a natural fit on the platform. As Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel advised entrepreneurs: don’t be afraid to be creative.
“I think one of the most important things today is really nurturing creativity,” Spiegel said on The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett. “I think creativity is really the X factor, certainly in the age of AI.”
Maybe Snapchat’s unique brand of social media creativity doesn’t overlap with LinkedIn’s often-polished stories of corporate thought leadership. But the topics do.
It’s this platform that many brands are flocking to.
B2B-friendly tools certainly help. While Snapchat might seem like an obvious choice for B2C and ecommerce, its recent success stories include financial services and real estate, too. One example is PSI Real Estate, a brokerage firm in the United Arab Emirates.
Many of its clients are investors, so it turned to Snapchat’s platform tools to create a new campaign: a cost-per-action campaign, specifically triggered when potential leads filled out a form.
Villas and townhouse tours made for natural eye-grabbing posts on Snapchat. The brand then used Snapchat’s suite of lead-generating forms to convert that attention into potential leads.
This isn’t another “VistaPrint found success on Snapchat” case study. Instead, the interesting thing about VistaPrint’s experience was that it turned to Snapchat when other channels felt saturated. It’s too easy to fight for clicks with a high CPA (cost per acquisition) in traditional media channels.
And given VistaPrint’s audience (often entrepreneurs and smaller businesses looking for custom printed supplies), Snapchat’s demographics were an off-beat but pitch-perfect fit. The slightly younger crowd on Snapchat offered exposure to a fresh audience.
VistaPrint moved to Snapchat with three specific and new strategies. First, it was willing to target previously untapped audiences. What had worked for their demographics in the past on other platforms, like Meta ads, didn’t have to be copied directly over to Snapchat.
Second, VistaPrint was happy to create Snap-native content, rather than pulling its creative from previously successful campaigns.
And finally, it used Dynamic Product Ads, which allowed Snapchat’s algorithms to match products from VistaPrint’s catalog to the most relevant users on the platform.
The results: 130% year-over-year increase in incremental profit while beating VistaPrint’s return-on-ad-spend goals by 197%. VistaPrint was so pleased, it committed to a full year deal with Snapchat.
VistaPrint found success because it blended a B2C-style offer with the freshness of finding a new B2B audience. Rather than copying and pasting an old ad campaign from Meta, it changed its strategy to suit the platform.
But that highlights how businesses are often having success with the kind of founder-led story approach that works on other platforms like LinkedIn.
It’s the rare unsaturated market: Snapchat’s audience is hungry for B2B discovery, while too many entrepreneurs ignore the platform simply because it’s Snapchat.
The overlap has more tangible value than many B2B marketers might think. According to Gartner, 90% of B2B buyers use social media when considering a purchase.
Gartner concluded that “Digital marketing leaders should create engaging, high-performing social media content by teaching customers what to value about their brand, tailoring posts to different platforms and incorporating user-generated content.”
For B2B buyers, it’s all about trust. Over 90% of buyers at least somewhat trust peers in their industry, per Forrester.
LinkedIn itself has also weighed in on the subject, noting that 83% of B2B buyers say credibility matters more than traditional brand messaging. It recommends matching up with vetted creators who influence buying decisions, then running both organic and sponsored content to highlight a brand’s story.
It may be a LinkedIn-oriented strategy, but there’s no reason it can’t work on Snapchat.
Founders are people too. They don’t put on one hat while browsing LinkedIn and then forget all about B2B when they browse Snapchat or TikTok.
Maybe they’re on Snapchat during lunch, or unwinding after work. As Snapchat’s demographic surveys show, business audiences are there—they just need someone to market to them.
While B2C marketing—product how-tos, behind-the-scenes videos—is still a natural fit on Snapchat’s platform, there are other natural fits for B2B marketing. Founder stories, for example. Career and entrepreneurship advice. Snapchat’s own users say they’re hungry for this kind of content.
The issue is that while B2B founders and creators view Snapchat’s platform as more B2C-native, they’re missing out on a potentially fresh audience for campaigns, social networking, and trust-building.
Maybe it’s time to think less about what the platform can do and start thinking about bringing the B2B message to a new audience.