How to Set Up Paid Snapchat Geofilters
Snapchat, one of the best social media marketing tools for engaging millennials, just made a big announcement: brands can now sponsor geofilters.
Geofilters are one of the coolest things about Snapchat, giving it’s 100 million active daily users the ability to add a special stamp with the name of a place, event or brand image to their own photo or video messages. Now, anyone, including brands, can easily make their own geofilters and pay for placement.
(Wondering if your business should be on Snapchat? Here’s an article explaining why you probably should be on Snapchat if you’re marketing to millennials)
Once you have a Snapchat account, here’s how you do it:
Design and Submit your custom Snapchat Geofilter
It’s important to keep in mind, you’re designing your filter for a very specific location and audience, (under 5M square feet for each paid placement). It’s also crucial to keep the designs within Snapchat’s technical and creative guidelines.
Next, log in to the new On-Demand Geofilters area using your Snapchat account information to upload a custom filter for approval.
Select When to Run Your Geofilter
Similar to Facebook’s ad platform, you then choose the dates and time you’d like to run your paid Snapchat geofilter. The longer your geofilter runs, the more you’ll pay. The specific cost (per square foot, per hour) is determined by the density of average Snapchat activity that goes on in a given area. More on this below.
Choose Your Location
While it helps to determine a location for your promotion during the design phase, setting up geofencing is the third step in sponsoring Snapchat geofilters. By drawing an area on a Google Map within their platform, you can select the exact location your geofilter will run. Just click to place pins and drag your shape to cover your desired area, which needs to be over 20,000 square feet and under 5M.
The more square footage you choose, the higher the cost. As mentioned above, not all square footage is created equal. When placing a geofilter over a university campus pictured below, the hourly cost per 1,000 square feet is $0.06, (($294.07 / 4,901,119 sq. ft) * 1000).
When highlighting a location just outside of that same college campus, we get a price of $0.03 per 1,000 square feet, or (($144.54 / 4,818,161 sq. ft) * 1000).
What is the variable affecting this pricing differential? Our best guess is that it’s most likely the density of average Snapchat usage per the area.
Pay and See Your Geofilter Come to Life
The last step is entering payment information and designating your geofilter is for business use, (personal geofilters can’t include company logos or brand images).
After placing your order, Snapchat can take anywhere from a few minutes to a full business day to review your geofilter, ensuring it’s within their creative guidelines. Regardless, you’ll have to wait at least 24 hours after approval for your paid Snapchat geofilter to come to life.
It’s surprisingly simple for both small and large companies to take advantage of Snapchat’s most recent innovation in making ads on its platform more accessible.
Our clients have experienced tremendous success on the platform as it continues to grow, and your company will too with the appropriate steps. If your company is already marketing to millennials, I’d highly recommend adding Snapchat to your approach whether you tap a social media agency or not. Why not start with testing geofilters before the novelty no longer exists?
Attention on many social media platforms has a short lifespan, so it’s important to choose where you invest your time and resources wisely. Snapchat and its paid geofilters are a smart next step for brands focused on marketing to millennials. While the platform’s messages may disappear in just a day, Snapchat’s young and growing user base won’t be going anywhere, anytime soon.
Budgeting and ROI Strategies for Paid Snapchat Geofilters
Making sure that a paid geofilter is a good choice for your business starts with considering the cost of implementing one of these filters. Snapchat has several pricing tiers based on the size of the geofenced area and the duration that you’d like to have the filter available.
The smallest geofence starts at $5 for 20,000 square feet per hour. Of course you can always go up from here and larger areas can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour depending on the size of the area you’d like to cover.
To ensure you’re maximizing ROI, set clear goals on the purpose of your geofilter. Are you raising brand awareness, driving traffic, promoting a product etc.
After you have a good understanding of your goal, start to analyze your target audience’s location patterns and Snapchat usage. You always want to run geofilters during high traffic times in the areas your audience visits frequently.
For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness you can try geofencing major events (think music festivals or sporting events) or high traffic locations like malls.
If your goal is to use geofencing to help with a product launch, put a geofence around your retail stores for people who are already interested in your brand. Either way it’s crucial to monitor analytics and like view and usage metrics to optimize future spend.
And of course, just like any other aspect of your marketing strategy, make sure you have an annual budget and create a geofilter strategy that you can implement and measure its effectiveness.
Leveraging Advanced Audience Targeting for Paid Geofilters
Doing your research when it comes to the demographics you want to target is paramount to a successful implementation of Snapchat’s paid geofilters. As with most platforms Snapchat lets you filter by age, gender, language, and location, but you can get much more granular through advanced interest, behavior and “Snap Audience Match” targeting.
Advanced interest targeting will let you define audiences based on interests like sports, music, food etc. Behavior targeting is based on user activities like shopping, travel, binging shows.
Snap Audience Match maps existing customer data like emails/mobile IDs to Snapchat users allowing super precise retargeting.
If you want your campaign to be hyper focused, think about layering multiple targeting parameters. An example would be targeting males 18-24 who follow sneaker influencers and have shopped for athletic wear in the last 30 days.
Design Tips for Engaging and On-Brand Snapchat Geofilters
If you’re going to invest your money and time into a paid geofilter you want to make sure that it’s not only representative of your brand, but also memorable and fun for your audience to use.
Meaning…don’t just slap your logo on a filter.
Look to large brands with successful geofilters for inspiration. Incorporating animation and interactive elements will add more dimension to your filter and customizing it for specific holidays, events, or location will create novelty in the eye of the user.
Always use high-resolution graphics and follow Snapchat’s latest asset specs to ensure a smooth experience for the user. A/B test multiple design variations and analyze metrics to see which versions of the filter perform best with your target audience.
Integrating Paid Geofilters into Omnichannel Marketing Campaigns
Remember that geofilters are just a part of an overall marketing campaign. Integrating them into your omnichannel strategies will help with maximum reach and effectiveness.
Using your branded geofilter on your socials and digital channels while promoting events, offers, or launches in the geofenced area will incentivize users to share their geofilter selfies/stories. Promote your geofilters by sending an access link to your email lists and run retargeting ads to people who engage with your filter.
If you want to branch out into collaborations with influencers, a paid geofilter offers a great opportunity to start working with others who can help drive more reach and engagement to your campaign.
If you’re going to have staff at an event promoting your geofilter at in person locations like stores, festivals, sporting events is a great way to create more engagement with it.
The key is using paid geofilters not as separate tactics, but as another touch point in your brand experience.
With Snapchat still being a popular app for social sharing, chatting with friends, and keeping up with trends, it can be a valuable opportunity to keep your business top of mind with users.
If you are ready to take advantage of Snapchat geofilters and design a strategy that will help build brand awareness, following, and make more sales…
