It may not be the first platform that springs to mind when you’re compiling your marketing strategy – but Snapchat for business is not something to be overlooked with its daily users exceeding 186 million.
While it might not prove to be the most effective platform for B2B campaigns targeting business decision makers, with people under 34 making up 71% of its users – It has paid off for many companies using Snapchat to be a cost effective way of making your brand go viral.
Let’s take a look at some of reasons brands are using Snapchat marketing
Snapchat Story Ads
This gives you quite a few varying options for ads depending what your end goal is:
- 10 second snap delivering your content to your specified audience for brand awareness, could just be a standard image or video
- Swipe up on content to go through to a landing page/website
- Take user directly to download an app
- Showcase a video
What I like about this, is that it’s just a quick swipe up instead of a ‘click’ or ‘tap’ through, seems like it makes the user journey a little bit easier.
Much like other social ad platforms Snapchat has the interface you’d expect when it comes to building your ads, and very easy to follow through to building, previewing and setting live. Although it does feel a lot more basic than the likes of Facebook.
Story Takeovers for employees/influencers
This can be a really engaging way of getting people to know and love your brand.
Getting the right influencer to take over your Snapchat for a day could be a great way to growth hacking your social presence!
Alternatively, a really powerful tool for engagement like this one from Cisco is finding your employee advocates within the business and letting them take over and showcase all the great things about your company.
Boosts employee engagement with your business, generates you some quality and relevant content to your audience, and its free.
Awesome!
Snapchat Sponsored Lens
Because if you haven’t sent a Snapchat picture of yourself as a man/woman/child/animal to your nearest and dearest where have you been?
Here we have the best performing campaign in Snapchats entire advertising history!
This custom lens ran for one day to celebrate Cinco de Mayo and ended up getting 224 million views – IN ONE DAY!
This would only be recommended if you have a huge budget to put up front as it’s got a costly set rate – but this campaign spent $750,000 and from that gained 224 million views in one day. Yes. You heard that right. ONE DAY. I make that a CPV of $0.003!
Snapchat Geofilters
My personal favourite of the Snapchat for business features.
Design your own filter with your brand/logo/campaign/event on it and pinpoint a location on the map to target and draw a fence around the radius.
Some other platforms allow you to target by a fairly small radius ie postcode, but this gives another level of precision.
What are the audience targeting options?
Although the demographic is interest-based and location-based and there seems to be a lack in detailed targeting in the interest based, demographic and location targeting of the main ad audience builder, the custom audiences and lookalike audience options are a welcome surprise.
The ability to add the Snap pixel to measure conversions and performance beyond the top-level statistics in the ads manager is also extremely handy. So, if you’re worried about spending your budget on a vague audience that could potentially be irrelevant it could be worthwhile to test out a list from your database and seeing how well Snapchat creates a matched audience for you and trial it from there.
Snapchat also provides some templates for filters & lenses, but Canva is a great resource that provides hundreds of easily customisable templates if you wanted to try one out without too much fuss.
With the level of flexibility and variation of ads Snapchat allows, it feels like a breath of fresh air to deliver something a little different to the standard sponsored posts on other platforms.
While it might be a bit of a gamble in terms of whether it delivers results for your business, you don’t need to lay many dollars on the table to find out if it will work for you or your business.
So why not give it a go and have fun experimenting with Snapchat for business’ offerings.
Are you going to try out any of the Snapchat ads for your business?
If so, let us know which you go for and if it works for you!
