Snapchat has become one of the fastest-growing social media apps on the planet. Currently, millions of Snapchat users connect with their friends with photos and short videos via Snapchat every day.
Snapchat is unique because the photos and videos that users share with their friends are deleted shortly after they’ve been sent. This gives users a unique reason to engage with their friend’s content and pay close attention to what’s happening on screen before it’s gone forever.
This kind of platform has opened up a world of advertising opportunities for businesses. There are now a number of ways businesses can market themselves or their product through the Snapchat app.
How Does Snapchat App Marketing Work
Snapchat has a total of three different advertising mediums on its application. Each medium offers its own benefits and has its own drawbacks, but all three offer equally impressive levels of user engagement.
Snap Ads
The first Snapchat ad type is ‘Snap Ads’ – this is the most typical type of advertising available on the Snapchat advert. Snapchat users have the option to create a short video or bundle an album of photos into their ‘story.’ This is a feature that is highlighted for all of their Snapchat followers to see, for 24 hours.
Snapchat’s goal here is to encourage users to publish the story of their day, each and every day. With Snap Ads, a small video advertisement can be played between stories when a Snapchat user is following their friend’s stories.
Snap ads need to be full-screen vertical videos with up to 10 seconds of playtime. Audio is an option. Snap ads can be interacted with when a user swipes on the ad. The content that displays when the user swipes is entirely up to the advertiser.
This method is the most useful ad type for driving impressions, clicks, and new user acquisition.
Whilst Snap Ads can be performance-driven, the other two types of Snapchat advertisements give businesses the opportunity to focus on their brand.
Sponsored Geofilters
With sponsored Geofilters, Snapchat users can add filters or live artwork to their photos and videos when they are near a location of your choice. For example, if Snapchat users are at your venue, they could add a branded image to their picture. This method cannot drive clicks to links, but it can increase brand awareness.
Sponsored Lenses
Sponsored Lenses takes Snapchat brand marketing even further. Businesses can create branded lenses that allow users to manipulate their face and share it with their friends. Sponsored lenses have proven to be a great option for growing brand awareness.
Targeting Options and Price Compared to Other Ad Platforms
Ad targeting is an incredibly important part of today’s marketing, especially on social media. With Snapchat emerging as a new advertising platform, some marketers are wary about what kind of targeting options Snapchat will have to offer when compared to its competitors.
Currently, user targeting within Snapchat is very limited. Instead, Snapchat has outreached to third parties to provide targeting based on user IDs traced through mobile details and customer email addresses. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, Snapchat does not gain details about their users through user engagement and provide that to their advertisers.
Targeting options are available, but they’re limited currently. This is something that Snapchat will certainly need to work on to improve its advertising game. Here’s to hoping we’ll see some improvements later this year.
The pricing for advertising on Snapchat is hard to track, firstly because Snapchat is often adjusting their ad prices, and secondly because Snapchat usually sticks to selling entire campaigns as opposed to selling on a per-ad basis.
It’s rumored that currently, Snapchat is offering Snap Ads to those looking to invest at least $10,000. Sponsored lenses are suggested to cost between $450,000 to $700,000 per day, depending on what day the ad is being shown. Whilst this is a big investment, it’s important to note that many large brands have benefited massively from Snapchat campaigns. For example, Taco Bell’s sponsored lens brought in 224 million views.
Sponsored geofilters are suggested to cost far less than sponsored lenses, but definitive pricing is currently unknown.
Suitable for Indie Devs or Only for Big Brands?
With Snapchat’s brand-heavy advertising options, high pricing, and limited user targeting control, it’s easy to think that Snapchat’s is solely for the big guns like Starbucks, McDonald’s or Coca-Cola.
This, however, isn’t true whatsoever. Whilst sponsored geofilters and lenses may be more suited for growing branding for larger businesses, the Snap Ads are suitable for any advertiser. The engagement rate on Snapchat’s platform is incredibly high, so Snap Ads offers a new alternative for indie devs to market their applications.
With such a large, active user base, indie devs are sure to be able to benefit from Snap Ads, especially if they’re marketing a social app or mobile game. Snapchat ad options are proving to be expensive, especially for smaller businesses, but if your development team has grown far enough to be putting a sizable chunk into marketing, Snap Ads could prove to be a valuable investment.
Growth and Importance in 2017
Snapchat has only recently started to implement advertising options on its platform. It is without a doubt that their presence in in-app marketing will grow in 2017. So far, Snapchat has only been testing the waters. We believe Snapchat will start to size down its advertising offers this year to open the doors to businesses with smaller marketing budgets.
Sponsored lenses and geofilters may remain a game for big brands, but Snap Ads could potentially become a feisty rival to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram ads.
Snap Ads
The first Snapchat ad type is ‘Snap Ads’ – this is the most typical type of advertising available on the Snapchat advert. Snapchat users have the option to create a short video or bundle an album of photos into their ‘story.’ This is a feature that is highlighted for all of their Snapchat followers to see, for 24 hours.
Snapchat’s goal here is to encourage users to publish the story of their day, each and every day. With Snap Ads, a small video advertisement can be played between stories when a Snapchat user is following their friend’s stories.
Snap ads need to be full-screen vertical videos with up to 10 seconds of playtime. Audio is an option. Snap ads can be interacted with when a user swipes on the ad. The content that displays when the user swipes is entirely up to the advertiser.
This method is the most useful ad type for driving impressions, clicks, and new user acquisition.
Whilst Snap Ads can be performance-driven, the other two types of Snapchat advertisements give businesses the opportunity to focus on their brand.
Sponsored Geofilters
With sponsored Geofilters, Snapchat users can add filters or live artwork to their photos and videos when they are near a location of their choice. For example, if Snapchat users are at your venue, they could add a branded image to their picture. This method cannot drive clicks to links, but it can increase brand awareness.
Sponsored Lenses
Sponsored Lenses takes Snapchat brand marketing even further. Businesses can create branded lenses that allow users to manipulate their face and share it with their friends. Sponsored lenses have proven to be a great option for growing brand awareness.
Who is the Audience and What Apps fit Them the Best?
Almost half of Snapchat users are 18 to 34-year-olds. Despite this mostly-young user base, growth for Snapchat users 25 and over is growing faster than under 25’s. A huge portion of Snapchat users, over 60 million, are from North America. They’re social, active on social media platforms, and incredibly clued up when it comes to mobile usage and new emerging technology.
Snapchat has such a large daily user base that it would be hard to generalize the entire audience, but we’re mostly talking about students, those still early in their career paths, and those that have grown up in the era of the internet.
Social apps, games, and applications with engaging content are all going to appeal to the majority of Snapchat users.
