Snapchat has been growing in popularity making it a great channel for marketers. The app has approximately 203 million daily active users proving that the platform has a worthwhile audience. While many marketers have shied away from Snapchat in the past, approximately 70% of millennials are on the platform making it a great app to reach that demographic. Snapchat users under 25 tend to be highly active users of the platform, logging on over 18 times a day and spending more than half an hour daily doing so. What’s more is that Snapchat ads are viewed up to a million times per day. Recently, Snapchat advertising options have been expanded for brands, and there are now options available to make purchases through the app.
What is Snapchat?
Snapchat is one of the most popular popular social media platforms. It is both an Android and iOS app. The app is based on the concept that any pictures, videos, or messages you send or receive are available for a short time period. After this period, they disappear and are no longer accessible to view.
Snapchat grew in popularity because of it’s unique selling proposition: the content posted on the platform disappears after someone watches it. The platform also popularized watching videos vertically instead of turning your phone around to watch it.
Snapchat Stories has several unique and fun features such as Lenses which are essentially face filters. They also have geofilters where you can tag your videos and pictures based on your location. If you’re hosting an event, you can create a custom geofilter that people can use to tell their friends about where they are.
When it comes to Snapchat marketing, brands can also do Snapchat takeovers. This is when either an influencer takes over your Snapchat account or when you takeover theirs. For example, if an influencer takes over your account they’ll be posting content on it as if it was their own account. You can set guidelines that they need to follow. However, these are usually successful as the influencer usually tells their audience to check out your Snapchat as they’ll be on that account for the day.
Example: Chubbies Shorts is a great example of how to run your Snapchat account as an ecommerce retailer. They regularly post funny Snapchat videos that feature their shorts without overselling them. There’s no ‘buy our shorts’ sales pitches. They’ve chosen a soft marketing approach instead. Their shorts tend to stand out in their videos because of how they’re used. For example, in one Snapchat Story, a man is wearing American flag shorts with a formal black blazer, white dress shirt and tie. Naturally, it captures attention.
Why Should I Use Snapchat?
Snapchat was initially all about sending pictures or videos privately, in a person-to-person channel. These snaps would last for a few seconds, after which they would be gone forever. But now you can use Snapchat for a range of different tasks, including instant messaging, live video chatting, creating avatars, and also for sharing photos and videos with a story mode that can be seen by all your followers. Snapchat has also recently introduced a feature called “memories”, which allows you to save your snaps and stories to a private area accessible to you. Other features include the ability to send money through an integration with Square Cash, create stickers that are city-specific, add filters and AR-based lenses to snaps, and showing your live location on a world map.
Snapchat Tips
Snapchat is a great platform to tell stories about your brand. It’s all about your Snapchat marketing strategy. The best performing Snapchat accounts tend to have funny comedy sketches and are light hearted and playful. While you can incorporate your products, it should be more about the brand story than the product one. How can you incorporate your products into a story. For example, with Chubbies Shorts, they created the story of everyday life with a funny twist. The shorts were almost like a background character – always present but never mentioned. You’ll want to make sure you have a good content mix to ensure there’s diversity in your content
Share your Stories on YouTube. Not as original content but as a short compilation video of your best Stories. This allows you to reach another audience who may not be on Snapchat, and drive new people to follow you on the account and buy from your store. For those struggling to build up their Snapchat following, this is probably one of the most effective ways to do this.
Add art to your Snaps. For Halloween, Sour Patch Kids doodled costumes onto their candy. They asked people to screenshot their favorite costume. With screenshots, Sour Patch Kids is able to measure the level of engagement on their account. Shonduras is another example of a user who added art to their Snaps. When on a trip to Disney, he doodled pictures of Disney characters onto his Snaps. You can also add emojis to your Snaps. If you’re looking for the meanings of Snapchat emojis, check them out here.
Experiment. When it comes to Snapchat marketing, there are so many ways you can experiment with your Snaps and Stories. By presenting your product in different ways when starting out, you’ll find which way resonates with your audience. Maybe funny videos work great for your brand. Or a daily mini vlog to educate your users. You can play around with emojis and drawings to determine the best way to capture your audience’s’ attention.
Let someone take over your account. If you have access to a popular Snapchat influencer, giving them access to use your Snapchat account for the day could do wonders for your Snapchat marketing strategy. They can promote your brand on their account and direct people to yours. With a takeover, the influencer has access to use your Snapchat as their own. Work with them to create the most effective way for a takeover. You can have them wearing your products while showing their day in the life or get them to create some fun content for your brand. If they’ve built a successful following, trust that they know what their doing. While you can have some recommendations, you should also have confidence that they can manage your account well. You can also takeover Snapchat influencers’ accounts as well. Be sure to plan this out well in advance if you have a special event, sale or new product you’re launching.
Track your Snaps. Check to see how many people opened your Snap, took a screenshot, left a reply, and the number of times your geofilter was used. You should also save your Snaps to determine which types of content were most effective. By using the data, you can improve your Snapchat marketing strategy to continue creating better content.
Snapchat Advertising Costs
If you’re looking to advertise on Snapchat, here’s a breakdown of Snapchat advertising costs at each level of their ad platform.
Snap Ads
The recent offering from Snapchat includes Snap Ads. These are mobile video ads that can be best explained as 3-10 second full-screen vertical video ads. Snapchat users can swipe up while the ad is playing in order to watch a longer video, to read an article, to get redirected to a website, or to install an app. These Snap Ads pop up between friends’ stories, between Snapchat’s stories or publishers’ stories. The interesting part is that the swipe-up rate for Snap Ads is 5X higher than that of the average click-through rate for ads on other comparable social platforms.
A popular success story of Snap Ads, that Snapchat itself published, is that of Now 61. Now That’s What I Call Music! relied on Snap Ads to promote its 61st edition of the Now! series. With their Snap Ads campaign they reached a shocking number of 3 million people.
The Snapchat advertising costs for Snap Ads start at around $3,000 per month in ad spend, which doesn’t include the agency fee, or the cost to create the creative that you would run as the ad.
Sponsored Lenses
Snapchat is known for its lenses and face filters. With the introduction of Sponsored Lenses users can play around with the filters and interact with the ad.
The most popular Sponsored Lenses till now was that of Taco Bell, which they created for Cinco de Mayo. This Snapchat advertising decision worked out in their favour and they received a shocking amount of over 224 million views. The average user played with the filter for around 24-seconds before they shared it with their friends. It was also named the top campaign in the app’s entire history (till now).
Their Snapchat advertising costs are estimated to be around $750,000 for the filter that lasted 24 hours. Other popular brands that have used sponsored lenses famously include L’Oreal, Budweiser, Fox TV, Malibu Rum, Michael Kors, Gatorade, and many more.
The Snapchat advertising costs for Sponsored Lenses vary from day to day.
Sunday – Thursday: $450,000 per day
Friday and Saturday: $500,000 per day
holidays and special events: $700,000
Nationwide Sponsored Geofilter
Another new offering from Snapchat includes Nationwide Sponsored Geofilters. McDonald’s had the first one that focused on their well-known tagline ‘I’m Lovin’ It’. The main purpose of these Sponsored Geofilters was to allow brands to communicate with their local Snapchat users directly, while not having to focus on the ‘where and when’ of their users.
The Snapchat advertising costs for Nationwide Sponsored Geofilters is currently not known but it is estimated to be about one-fifth of the cost of Sponsored Lenses.
Snapchat Discover
When it comes to Snapchat advertising costs, the Snapchat Discover ads are the most expensive offering. They’re usually reserved for publishers or big brands like Lionsgate and MTV.
Snapchat also recently revealed that Cosmo, which is one of their leading publishers, gets several million views per day from their Snapchat Discover feed.
The Snapchat advertising costs for Snapchat Discover start at $50,000 per day.
Snapchat Marketing Tools:
Snapchat On Demand: For those looking to create geofilters, this is Snapchat’s very own tool to help you create and upload them. You can add your own design or choose from one of Snapchat’s templates. You can pick a time and set the parameters of what areas your filter reaches. Afterwards, you can submit the geofilter for review to Snapchat which usually only takes about a day. Some brands choose to add their name and logo somewhere in the design so that they increase their brand recognition.
PepperFilters: This is another Snapchat geofilters brand. You can start from scratch or choose your own template. There are over 100,000 graphics to choose from ranging from animals, food, beauty products and more. You can also choose from a range of fun fonts such as Brusher, SF College, and Grand Hotel. There are also fonts with a glow effect.
Snapchatters: This tools helps you find the best people to follow on Snapchat. They hand-pick some of the best people to follow on the platform. As a marketer, reaching out to relevant Snapchat users can work part of an influencer marketing strategy or with an account takeover day.
GhostCodes: GhostCodes is great for finding Snapchat users by name or category. Categories include sections like business, fitness, news, vlogger, beauty, pets and more. If looking to find a Snapchat influencer to partner with GhostCodes does show how many followers each person in the category has.
Snapchat Resources:
Oberlo’s The Ultimate Guide to Snapchat Marketing details why you should be on Snapchat as a store owner. It also outlines how to use the features within the app, Snapchat Marketing tips and how to measure your Snapchat marketing success.
Shopify’s Snapchat Marketing: The Key to Discovering and Engaging Your Most Loyal Fans dives into how to master Snapchat marketing. Snapchat had many marketers struggling to find ways to make a splash on the platform. Fortunately, this article breaks down how to market on Snapchat through content marketing and by using geofilters and other features.
Snapchat Influencer:
Todd Endres, a social media manager, recommends Snapchat Geofilters he says “It’s a fairly basic concept that can yield great name recognition, but I was surprised how few actually employ it. The practice consists of designing a Snapchat filter that you then upload to their website. You pay for square footage as well as the length of time it remains active. I encourage my clients to try and get their entire event floor for whatever they’re doing but it can add up if the area is large. Simple designs are encouraged and easy, great way to get easy engagement!”
