How to Utilize Snapchat as a Marketing Tools

Snapchat is an invaluable tool that offers a myriad of marketing options that can be exploited in order to meet certain goals and objectives of a business. Businesses that seek online awareness through Snapchat have since devised ingenious ways of drawing attention to their posts or snaps. It turn, they have gained significantly especially because of the massive audience available at Snapchat.

The very its step to create online awareness through Snapchat is definitely to install a Snapchat app in your device. This will thus enable the posting and subsequent viewing of snaps. Additionally, this also helps a lot in understanding the trends in Snapchat and the features that are more likely to woe viewers more.

Online-based businesses or internet marketers are able to come up with creative Snap Ads, build impressive Sponsored Geofilters or offer their customers a chance to interact effectively with Sponsored Lens. These are new terms for those that are not familiar with Snapchat. Nonetheless, they are some of the most effective strategies that online-based businesses are able to implement in a bid to promote their products and services to existing and potential customers.

These strategies are discussed further below:

The use of Snap Ads as a strategy for building brand awareness

The use of Snap Ads is an effective way of catching the attention of prospected audience. A Snap Ad is merely a 10-second video always incorporated in stories and appears full screen. These short videos are meant to enhance user experience by giving them an opportunity to swipe up with the aim of viewing more detailed contents. Such content may include articles, mobile websites, long videos and even app install Ads.

On most occasions, viewers of Snapchat stories find it interesting to view stories that are combined with short videos that enhance their experience. It is for this reason that Snapchat users, especially marketers, are advised to incorporate such ads in a bid to capture the attention of their viewers while attempting to promote an item or service through Snapchat.

Snap Ads are an effective means of making posts or snaps more lucrative on Snapchat because of the swipe-up speed. According to a recent discovery, the swipe-up rate for the Snap Ads was found to be five times higher as compared to the ordinary click-through rates on other social media platforms.

This is a great advantage for Snapchat users because through this, they are able to go through more videos and other related content in a short period as compared to when they do the same on other social media sites. This is thus an invaluable means of attracting viewers to a given snap and subsequently promoting products and services to a larger audience.

A case study on the use of Snap Ads

One of the most popular music app known as the Spotify bought Snap Ads with the intention of promoting its annual ‘Year in Music’ campaign. This is a campaign in which Spotify users are able to view the total number and the genres of songs they have listened to on Spotify the entire year. This strategy was a success as the Ads of Spotify popped up on the Discovery Channel of Snapchat during which it highlighted different music genres every day.

As a result of this initiative, Spotify was able to earn twenty six million views. As if that is not enough, the music app also experienced a 30% increase on the number of subscribers. This was a significant increase. Since then, the mobile app has continued using Snap Ads and has, as a matter of fact, spiced up its marketing strategies on Snapchat using other means. If the use of Snap Ads was able to catapult Spotify to a different level as far as marketing of its product was concerned then it is almost definite that this strategy is valid for internet marketing.

Building impressive Sponsored Geofilters for promotion on Snapchat

Georfilter is one of Snapchat’s features that were incorporated into the app in 2014. This feature is important for availing certain special graphic overlays when the user of the application is in a certain geographical place like a city or event. As such, users are able to identify with their locations when they take snaps of images of videos of their surroundings.

There are two different types of Geofilters that can be utilized by businesses to take their marketing to the next level. One of the Geofilters is known as the On-Demand Geofilter that can be bought from as little as $5. The other one is the Sponsored Geofilter that is much more expensive and would ordinary cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars.

It is noteworthy that Geofilters have recently proven to be invaluable when it comes to uplifting new online-base businesses. They are always seen as small art graphics that usually appear over a snap. When Snapchat users in a given location take and post snaps, they are able to select specific Geofilters and use them to communicate where they are and at what time.

One ought to note that these Geofilters can also be used by Snapchat users to explain the reasons why they took the snaps and the geographical location in which the snaps were taken. A good example of the use of Georfilters on Snapchat is when a taco truck has a Cinco de Mayo even somewhere, Snapchat users are able to take snaps as they eat tacos and include fun geofilters.

These geofilters will in turn show their friends where they are taking the snaps from. Additionally, the geofilters are also able to tell whose tacos the Snapchat users are eating thereby helping in not only promoting the event but also the tacos being consumed at the event. In such a scenario, a less expensive On-Demand geofilter will be sufficient.

In the event that a campaign is less specific when it comes to location, say a nationwide campaign, Snapchat users in the entire nation are able to take snaps that show them appreciating the national event and subsequently add filters over it. It is during such scenarios that Sponsored Geofilters are used.

This strategy is highly effective because it has been noted that such a nationwide campaign is able to meet an estimated 40 to 60% of daily Snapchat users within a given country. This big percentage of audience reached is the reason why sponsored Geofilters can cost up to thousands of dollars.

A case study of the use of Sponsored Geofilters as a marketing strategy for businesses

During an event to commemorate Worlds AIDS day, RED (a non-profit organization) partnered with Snapchat to help spread the word about the event. The duo created two Geofilters that Snapchat users could use to exhibit their support for the event.

Every time a Snapchat user sent any of the Geofilters, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated a sum of $3 to the non-profit organization RED to assist in the fight against the deadly disease. Over $3 million was collected for the campaign.

It is worth noting that about 14 Snapchat users got involved in the campaign through Snapchat. Out of the total number of Snapchat users involved, 97% of them were aged between 13 and 34 years. In addition, more than two thirds of the total number of Snapchat users who involved themselves in the campaign remembered the campaign against AIDS.

As if that was not enough, Snapchat users who saw the filters correctly were 90% likely to offer donations to RED to assist in their campaign. According to the statistics indicated in this case study one can comfortably deduce that the use of Sponsored Georfilters in Snapchat can go a long way in assisting internet marketers and online-based businesses to attain the much desired online awareness.

The use of Sponsored Lens as a strategy for building brand awareness

One ought to note that Sponsored Lenses provide Snapchat users with the opportunity of playing around with the Snaps they have created. Sponsored Lenses enhance user experience while using Snapchat and are activated by merely pressing and holding on the faces on their screens. They come with an array of lenses including raising eyebrows that eventually trigger animations.

The lenses therefore give users the opportunity of customizing their snaps with the aim of meeting their own desires and satisfaction. Once a Snapchat user had customized his or her snaps with the help of Sponsored Lenses, they are able to instantly send them to their friends or even post them to their stories. It has been noted that customized saps using Sponsored lenses are not difficult to create as was thought.

On average, Snapchat users spend approximately 20 seconds to customize their snaps with the help of the Sponsored Lenses. This is quite doable and it is therefore advisable for Snapchat users to make use of it effectively in order to draw more attention and subsequently more traffic to their snaps.

The biggest advantage that has come with cyber world is the ability to get exact figures of the number of internet users at a given time and the sites they visit. This therefore makes it easy for analysts to come up with the exact figures of internet users that visit given sites at given times. As such, the number of Snapchat users can readily be identified for the purpose of ascertaining whether it can be an invaluable tool for marketing.

Aside from the statistics, there are also a number of advantages Snapchat has over other social media platforms that are also praised worldwide as good marketing platforms for businesses and internet marketers. According to the marketing strategies discussed above, one can immediately notice that all are chargeable.

This is an im0lication that internet marketers and online-based businesses who seek to create brand awareness on Snapchat through these means will have to pay considerable amounts of cash in order to succeed. Nonetheless, it should be noted that not all such businesses or marketers are willing or able to make such payments as quoted. This is not a major challenge. There are other ways of creating brand awareness on Snapchat without spending even money.

Non-paid strategies of creating brand awareness on Snapchat Provide incentives

The core value of most businesses is to connect with their target audience for their goods and services in the most convenient way. Businesses make use of a number of marketing strategies in order to meet their target margins. Snapchat can now be considered as one of the platforms that internet marketers an businesses can use to take their marketing and businesses to the next level when it comes reaching their potential consumers.

While the use of Snapchat for the purpose of marketing and connecting with consumers can feel overwhelming for internet marketers and businesses, one should note that it is always gainful to come up with an effective platform that offers opportunities of connecting with target audiences. It is only through this that marketers and businesses are able to keep their clients, acquire new clients and sell more.

An added advantage is always the use of incentives. Incentives are an effective way of creating brad loyalty for any business without taking much consideration of the marketing platform used. This definitely works for Snapchat marketers as well.

Offering incentives on Snapchat is quite a challenges and hence users must device critical measured of ensuring that their incentives work. This is because snaps not only disappear after they have been watched by a Snapchat user but are also available for only 24 hours. This is an implication that Snapchat must vigilantly follow snaps if they want a piece of the incentives that are offered on this social media platform.