Why Your Startup Should Spend Time (And Money) Marketing on Snapchat
If you don’t know about it already, Snapchat now has custom geofilters. Yes, those cool different pieces of art that you can add to your photos to make them fun. To you, they make your photos more meaningful with a symbol or location added, but to marketers, they can be a big advantage. If your company hasn’t started to utilize Snapchat, get on it! Here are more reasons why.
How are your Facebook ads working? Probably not the best numbers you’d like to see. Plus, I can almost guarantee that they’re not worth the investment. But, Snapchat’s custom geofilters are CHEAP. And, they feed off of interaction. Your Facebook ads might get reach, but reach isn’t interaction. For a Snapchat geofiliter, the user has to actually put the filter on and then send it to people.
How cheap?
Currently, custom geofilters are $5 for every 20k square feet. Just recently, we used a NuGrad custom geofilter for 4 hours in one building on campus, and it was $5 total. This is what it looked like. I’m just a college student, but $5 for 4 hours of advertising is a pretty good deal. Especially when you are targeting college students. But, the prices will rise, it’s just a matter of time. So plan ahead for filters and get them out before the change occurs!
The cool thing about these geofilters is that anyone can make and submit them. If you’re a business and you’re going to use a logo, you’ll have to pay to make one. But, if you’re making one for a university, park, or something public, it’s free. Here’s a snapshot from Snapchat’s guidelines:
Even though you’ll probably have to pay, it’s so much cheaper to advertise. Plus, you’ll be reaching a different audience. I can speak from experience, about 90% of people from the ages of 14–28 have a Snapchat and use it DAILY. Sure, they might not be checking Facebook or Twitter on the hour, but Snapchat is checked constantly.
How do I make a Geofilter?
This is very easy! When I first started making Geofilters, I actually used Gary Vaynerchuk’s article for reference.
First, you head to Snapchat’s Geofilter website. This is where you’ll pick if you’ll be designing a community filter or on-demand. If you’re doing this for a business, you’ll pick on-demand.
Next, follow the parameters and start to make a design! Make sure you’re creating on Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop for best result. But, know that you can’t add links, Twitter handles, or email addresses in your filter.
- Make sure the pixels are 1080 by 1920
- The file is under 300KB in its size
- The file is saved as a .png
- The background is transparent
Hint, make sure that the drawing/logo doesn’t take up a lot of the screen. Let’s remember, Snapchat is for the person, not the filter. No one wants a huge filter that will take away from precious face time.
Once you have your design submitted, pick the dates and times that you want your filter active. Obviously, you want the times that will be the busiest. The more traffic the best. When marketing, throw some hype about the filter in a certain location. If you have a good following, it’ll be successful.
Now, you get to choose the area that your filter will be active at. I’m sure that you’ve used Google Maps. Snapchat just embedded a Google Map on their site. You just draw a map around the building or area that you want your filter to be applied to. Remember, they charge by square footage!
Now, you submit and pay! They say that it takes up to 2 days to process it, but it took my filter only an hour and half to get its acceptance.
What Now?
Hype the hell out of it. Make sure that all of your friends in that area use it. Use your network and make sure you get the best ROI as possible!
Metrics aren’t up to par as other social media platforms, but they still give you the basics. When you go back to Snapchat’s website, go back to the portal to make a new filter. Once you log into your account, hover over your name, and then click metrics. Select which campaign you want to see, then you have the data.
It gives you the amount of uses and the amount of total views.
Wrapping up, with Snapchat’s new update, even more people will be using it for communication. If you aren’t already using Snapchat to interact with users, you should. Thanks to new custom geofilters, marketing to users on Snapchat is easy makes any company standout compared to their competitors.
BG
