120 West Superior Street
Fort Wayne, IN 46802
260.422.4499
talk@b-y.net

Shaking up your media mix: Snapchat geofilters

Strategy

The answer might surprise you, especially if social media is not your forte. But, as you may have guessed from the title, the answer is Snapchat!

Background

CEWE Photoworld created this sweet graphic that compares photo sharing between Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. As you can see, Snapchat outpaces every other social platform with its nearly 9,000 photos shared per second, and this rate continues to increase.

Snapchat counts 200 million+ users, with over 100 million daily active users who spend an average of 30 minutes inside the app each day. And, Snapchat continues to have a majority female user base. As females are key decision-makers, Snapchat’s value is in its unique user demographics.

Furthering Snapchat’s unique user base, on February 29 at Morgan Stanley’s Tech, Media & Telecom conference, Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel announced that more than half of all new Snapchat users are over 25 years old. Snapchat’s user demographics might skew younger than other social media users, but it’s not an app exclusively for the Millennial and Centennial crowd.

Spiegel’s main announcement at the conference, though, was that Snapchat now receives 8 billion video views a day, rivaling that of Facebook. Snapchat isn’t even five years old, whereas Facebook has existed for 12 years. 

With a statistic like that, partnered with Snapchat’s maturing audience, businesses aren’t going to be able to exclude Snapchat from their media mix for much longer.

But how do you incorporate Snapchat into your marketing plan? While you can create a Snapchat account and give your clients and customers a behind-the-scenes look into your organization, there’s a more effective way to tap into Snapchat’s audience.

Business geofilters.

Opportunity

On February 22, Snapchat opened up geofilter submissions to all businesses. Prior to this year, Snapchat geofilter submissions were only open to artists and designers creating filters for their community. This resulted in cities, landmarks and universities having Snapchat geofilters, but no commercially branded filters were allowed (unless you were McDonald’s or Gatorade and had $750,000 to spend per day on a national campaign).

Now, businesses can submit branded geofilters for areas ranging from 20,000 to 5 million square feet. When a Snapchat user is within your geofence, your geofilter will appear as an option for that user’s photo.

Users receive Snapchat geofilters best when they are inherently relevant to a physical location, so organizations with brick and mortar locations will benefit the most from creating Snapchat geofilters. However, Snapchat geofilters would be a welcome addition to campaign-based events. For example, if your organization was sponsoring a 5K race, a geofilter covering the race route would be a strategically sound advertising tactic.

Given Snapchat’s unique user base, geofilters are a creative, cutting-edge tactic for increasing brand awareness and cultivating positive brand sentiment. According to Snapchat, users are drawn to the platform for three primary reasons:

1.) Snapchat gets the importance of perspective. Photos that are shared through the app “provide a personal window into the way you and your friends see the world.”
2.) Snapchat users are able to share their lives in real time. Photos in Snapchat stories provide friends of any given Snapchat user the most current glimpse into their life.
3.) Snapchat provides its users total self-expression. “Snaps are a reflection of who you are in the moment – there is no need to curate an everlasting persona.”

Therefore, by being present through a Snapchat geofilter, organizations are able to contribute to a user’s in-the-moment experience and gain exposure to that user and his/her followers. This connection fosters positive brand sentiment between Snapchat users and the organization, and it increases a brand’s reach within a very targeted geography.

Application

B&Y has a brick and mortar location. Employee Appreciation Day was quickly approaching. And, Snapchat had just opened up geofilter submissions to businesses. So, a B&Y filter for Employee Appreciation Day was designed.

We wanted to create a fun way for employees to interact with B&Y in a way they never had before, and we wanted them to share their B&Y love with their friends.

                                                                     alltogether_halfsize-9794569

As you can see, we had a little fun snapping selfies with our custom filter – and positioning the camera so that the mustache was positioned just right.

And at the end of the day, we were able to track and see how many times our filter was used, as well as how many views our filter received. Because we are a results-oriented agency, it was crucial that we could track and measure results. Now we can compare approximate CPMs with other social media ads and strategically use this advertising option in the future.

If you’re interested in forging ahead with this new advertising medium, drop us a line at digital@b-y.net. Between our research, strategy and design expertise, we’ll be able to develop a solution for you.