Snapchat is a Marketing Gold Mine. Here’s Why.

Snapchat has been a mystery to marketers over the last few years. Many advertising and marketing professionals tend to promote on Facebook and ignore Snapchat completely—even though it’s a popular—and growing—social media channel with 186 million daily active users. With features like goal optimizations, event geotargeting, and pixel tracking, Snapchat has become a useful marketing tool. Along with many recent updates to its advertising platform, Snapchat has improved its tracking and optimization tools with their self-service ads manager The new ads manager aligns more closely with other social media platforms and gives advertisers more options to maximize their campaigns Snapchat also enhanced the elements everybody already loves—like stories, geofilters, lenses, and Discover pages—to increase its marketing and advertising effectiveness.

Buy the Book — How To Turn Down a Billion Dollars Book

For example, purchaser lists from your customers became more dynamic with lookalike audiences, Discover pages increased in size, and geofilter design and accessibility improved.

But this social platform can do more for your campaign than just providing a place to advertise Let’s dive into five specific features that make Snapchat a compelling marketing gold mine that’s worth your time and investment

Cost People want to advertise on Snapchat because Snap Ads are so reasonably priced.

The cost per 1,000 impressions (or views) for Snap Ads are some of the most affordable of any social platform Our agency has delivered CPM costs between $3-$6 based on the Snapchat campaign objective. The Snap ads appear on users’ phones as they view their friends’ stories or scroll through Snapchat- or brand-created content. Ads can be simple promotions, or they can include an interactive feature to increase engagement with your brand. These elements make Snap Ads perfect for raising brand awareness and driving purchase online. Entertaining, interactive filters track facial features and transform users’ faces into something new and fun. Lenses range from cute animals to grumpy faces to humorous face swaps, and you can now develop your own sponsored lenses for Snapchatters to tinker with. Movie studios, for example, will often times promote new film releases by creating 24-hour sponsored lenses that let users transform themselves into movie characters. By generating sponsored lenses, you excite Snapchatters and expose them to your promotional messaging and products in a fun way they’ll remember. Geofilters let Snapchatters apply graphic overlays—including temperature stamps, time stamps, and color filters—to their own photos Additionally, you can develop your own sponsored geofilters to target densely populated locations and display messages and images on users’ screens. You don’t have to advertise across a large area to make this marketing strategy successful, though. The Empire State Building, for example, is very densely populated, but since it’s a tall building, its geofilter only needs to target a small portion of the surrounding area. This feature helps you increase the chances of Snapchatters being exposed to branded messaging without it costing you a fortune. Influencers are credible individuals who have large, engaged audiences that they know well. They know what type of content and messaging will resonate the best with their followers, so they promote brands and products they believe these people need or want. One of the best strategies is building a collaborative partnership with an influencer—instead of focusing just on product placement—shows you want to establish a relationship with them rather than use them for their power and influence. This can greatly improve your marketing measures and increase your presence, reputation, and following on Snapchat (and other social media sites). The Discover page makes Snapchat a more entertaining and personalized social media platform for individual users. The page gathers stories from friends, creators, and publishers in one central location It also lets you collaborate and work directly with publishers like MTV and the Wall Street Journal to advertise more naturally within various content types. The next time you build a marketing plan and shy away from Snapchat, think about all the opportunities and features you’ll miss. Facebook and Instagram work well for social media marketing, but they might not offer all the tools you need to meet your goals. With Snapchat at your disposal, you give yourself the best chance at a successful social media campaign.

By Josh Thompson on May 8, 2019

Josh Thompson is Senior Social Media Strategist at Portent —a Clearlink Digital Agency.

Josh is Facebook Blueprint Certified and has worked in social media advertising for seven years