How we reached tech conference attendees with a $20 Snapchat Geofilter
I’m always keeping my eyes peeled for the next interesting avenue for engaging with our audiences and potential audiences for our newsletters, such as JavaScript Weekly.
One of Snapchat’s biggest features is filters. These let you manipulate how the videos and photos you take in Snapchat look. Going another step further, geofilters are available only in certain geofenced areas. For example, if you’re in downtown SF, you’ll see a downtown SF overlay available to use.
Marketing didn’t really tie in with this until the release of On-Demand Geofilters…
It immediately struck me that these filters could be used to target certain users. And where do lots of our subscribers and potential subscribers congregate? Conferences!
EmberConf 2016
The Ember core team host their annual conference, EmberConf, in Portland, Oregon.
This year they and their beloved mascot Tomster (see image) held a two day event full of meet ups, keynotes and other wonderful activities.
We couldn’t physically attend, but we had a little trick up our sleeves to make our presence known: an On-Demand Geofilter.
We quickly checked the dates and times of the event, where it would be held, and set to work creating our first filter.
Creating the Geofilter
Creating the filter itself was pretty easy. Our Creative Director Jess Thompson got to work and came up with something simple and sweet — a 1080x1920 transparent PNG was all Snapchat required.
The Snapchat terms and conditions didn’t allow us to include a URL or anything directly pointing to us, so we included our logo and the name of our newsletter instead.
Once we were happy, I went on to Snapchat’s site to figure out how to get them to run the filter and, importantly, how much it would cost.
I was not prepared for the result.
Ordering the Geofilter
Uploading and previewing was easy.
As was picking the dates we wanted the filter to run.
And, lastly, geofencing the area we wanted the filter to appear within.
The main problem we had was that initially we decided to cover the entire convention centre. While you can see a cost of only $22.73 in the screenshot above, when we first covered the entire convention centre for 3 days, the total cost came out to… about $13,000!
Luckily, Snapchat lets you drill down by date, time, and geofence to very specific areas. So we worked out where the main auditorium was, the times of the main day, and got it down to the smallest area possible for just 12 hours. This brought us to around the $20 mark.
The results
On the day we were pretty nervous as we didn’t have any direct way of testing if the filter would work. Luckily we discovered a couple of people we knew (Elaine Greenberg and Tracy Lee) that would both be actively Snapchatting at the event, so we got them to give things a try.
There was a bit of a delay, but at 8:05am Pacific time, we got an email from Snapchat saying things were live and we began to see people using the filter and sharing their pictures to Twitter.
It’s a bit early for us to do any research into ROIs, or anything like that, but the mere fact that our filter resulted in numerous tweets (and this is just a selection) is a great indicator that people were actively using it on Snapchat and that it was $20 well spent.
Snapchat’s own metrics don’t tell much of a story, but at least demonstrate it was used:
Would we do it again? Yes. In fact, we are doing it again. There are so many programming conferences that it’d be crazy not to, and if we spent more effort coming up with a clearer message to go into the filter, I think we could get some significant interest with the media-savvy, social media oriented developers who will increasingly use Snapchat.
If you decide to give this a go, feel free to hit us up for advice, share your results with us, or anything like that.
It’d be great to see this develop as a way to make events even more fun for attendees, but also to reach new audiences and create new talking points.
