There’s no doubting that Snapchat is a growing powerhouse in the social media world. With 158 million daily active users, and 301 million monthly active users it dominates with millennials and Gen X. The average Snapchat user spends 25-30 minutes on the app per day, and checks it 18 times daily. In the constant battle for attention that marketers face, Snapchat makes sense as a medium to reach younger consumers.
Let’s walk through creating your first Geofilter through the Snapchat interface.
#1. Creating an On Demand Geofilter
Go to Snapchat On-Demand and click “Create Now”
You’ll need to login with an existing Snapchat account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to sign up for one. You’ll then be prompted to either “Use Your Own” or “Create Online”.
If you go the route of creating your own, you’ll need to download the template files and open them up in either Photoshop or Illustrator. You cannot include URLs, phone numbers, hashtag, more than two lines of text, emails, or cover the majority of the screen with the filter. It has to be a transparent PNG file so it can be overlayed on someones camera image. There’s a lot of restrictions, but you can’t beat the brand awareness you get if you tie it to an event.
If you go the route of creating your filter using their online builder, you’re really limited in what you can create. It’s much better to just get the design files and find a designer to do it for you if you’re not experienced in designing creative assets.
#2. Pick Dates Your Filter Will Run
You can choose the date and time your filter will be active once you click “Next”. Specify it down to the hour, or else your cost are going to be sky high. Normally, these are run best for 3-4 hours during events so there’s not much reason to run it nonstop for a few days on end. It’ll just increase costs with no additional return.
#3. Define Your Area
Once you get to the next page, you’ll be setting the area you want your filter to show. The average price I’ve seen is $5/per large building/per hour. You just click and draw a geofence on the area you want it shown and check the upper left hand corner to see the total price and sq. footage.
Your geofence must be between 20,000 and 5,000,000 sq. feet. Your price is determined by location, size, and duration so tweaking any of these will change the cost. Some areas may be grayed out and cannot have a filter on them (Quicken Loans during the RNC was one of these, other huge events can be as well).
#4. Checkout & Review
Once you’ve drawn your fence, and it’s lit up green you can click next and finish the checkout process. You should get an approval email within about 48 hours to see if it’s approved or not.
After your filter has run, you can log back in and access your dashboard to view metrics around it. Conversions are how many people went and used your filter in the area, and views is the number of people who viewed it.
Overall, campaigns on Snapchat are a great way to reach younger audiences and spread brand awareness. While you won’t drive site traffic, and don’t have a ton of metrics to measure (still better than traditional media, though) by it’s still worth it to at least test.
Have you run a campaign on Snapchat before? Leave us a comment below with how it turned out for you!