Pro Tips: Snapchat Shares Insights into Key Platform Marketing Approaches, and Trends Generating Results

While TikTok may have taken its mantle as the cool kid on the social media block, Snapchat has established itself as a key connection platform for many users, with the app’s privacy focus and content nous helping it carve a niche in the social media landscape, and succeed where many others have fallen short.

Snapchat’s achieving particularly significant success in driving audience engagement, and building a platform that aligns with modern community-building approaches. Users looking for smaller, more private groups, where content won’t necessarily stick around to haunt them, have formed solid bonds in the app, while younger audiences continue to download the app in big numbers, as they seek a space to share more intimate engagement, or catch up on the platform’s growing library of Discover shows.

Indeed, according to Snap, it now reaches 75% of Millennial and Gen Z users, while Snapchat users also spend over 30 minutes per day in the app, on average.

These are impressive figures, and while it may not have the reach of Facebook, it arguably has more resonance, and influence over those engaging via Snap.

Which also presents opportunity, and if you’re looking to tap into Snapchat for your marketing efforts, and boost your brand among younger audiences, then these tips will help. We recently spoke to Luke Kallis, Snap’s VP of US Advertiser Solutions, to get his insights on the latest trends that he’s seeing, as well as examples of how marketers are generating results with the Snapchat audience.

Q: What ad/promotional elements are seeing the best response on Snapchat right now?

LK: Ads on Snapchat perform well across the entire marketing funnel, and Snap offers a broad range of goals, bidding options, and end-results for ad optimization – from awareness and shares to clicks, visits, purchases, and more.

Snap’s advanced measurement, reporting, and optimization capabilities have been a cornerstone of the ads platform, helping marketers optimize campaigns to deliver the best possible results. From Brand marketers looking to raise awareness at the top of the funnel, to performance marketers seeking conversions, advertising on Snapchat is a compelling way to meet any objective.

We also believe that for advertisers of any size, seeking any objective, there is deep, long-term value in reaching our audience of 13-34 year-olds. This audience is passionate and engaged, and many are at the ages when they’re beginning to build brand loyalties as they go through major life milestones.

Our community opens the Snapchat app 30 times a day on average and globally, the Snapchat generation carries over $4.4 trillion in purchasing power. As a whole, these considerations are driving the best results in the app at present.

Q: What’s the key to an effective marketing strategy on Snapchat?

LK: We find that marketing on Snapchat is most effective when brands leverage multiple ad products tied to a defined advertising goal.

For example, for brands looking to raise brand awareness, a great way to achieve that goal is by combining an AR Lens with Snap Ads, and/or Commercials (video ads). This type of multi-product execution tends to achieve stronger overall results than any individual ad format in isolation.

Q: What’s the most common mistake you see brands make with their Snapchat approach?

LK: While AR Lenses are often seen as a great short-term activation to boost brand awareness, some overlook the longer term brand value of AR tools.

Many brands are actually finding success running what we refer to as ‘always-on AR’,  where they keep AR Lens campaigns running beyond a single moment, and these campaigns are seeing really positive results.

We all know that AR stands for ‘Augmented Reality’, but at Snap, we believe it also stands for ‘Additional Reach’ and ‘Accelerated Results’. When added to a Snap Ad campaign, AR reaches an incremental 31% of our audience who are using the camera.

Similar to a Super Bowl commercial, Lenses work well for both splashy, one-off moments, and for driving high-impact lower funnel results when run continuously as part of a brand’s broader Snapchat multi-product advertising strategy.

Q: What’s a good example of a brand that’s achieving strong results with Snapchat marketing?

LK: Driving efficient, impactful results for our brand partners is a key part of Snapchat’s value proposition and we’ve seen many great examples of brands that are driving success on the platform.

A few of those include:

• Smile Direct Club leveraged our Goal-Based Bidding (GBB) Click optimization for AR, which drove 49% of Snap customer leads in Q2, and was the most effective ad unit at driving traffic for their business compared to other social channels. The success of the Lens ultimately encouraged Smile Direct Club to include AR Lenses as part of their long-term business strategy.
• DAZN launched a multi-product campaign that utilized AR Lenses, Snap Ads, Story Ads and Commercials, in order to drive awareness for its live sports channels, installs for its app, and subscriptions for its streaming service. DAZN leveraged our new GBB App Install optimization for AR, which not only drove incremental installs, but also reached millions of unique Snapchatters. The overall campaign resulted in lifts in both installs and subscriptions, and drove more Snapchatters to its platform.
• Booking.com employed a strategy that used Dynamic Ads to reach new customers on Snapchat. By utilizing our Dynamic Ad solution for travel, they were able to pull images directly from their product catalog that displayed relevant and visually appealing destination photos and features. This helped Booking.com unlock an incremental audience within the United States, which resulted in a positive lift in bookings across both their website and their app, and delivered a cost per incremental booking (CPIB) of approximately 36% lower than their goal.

Q: What would be your top tip for someone starting out with Snapchat marketing?

LK: Our self-serve ad platform makes it incredibly fast and easy to get started advertising on Snapchat. We offer a wide variety of tools to help any size business build compelling, creative ads – even for augmented reality Lenses that all deliver proven business results.

You can learn more about Snapchat’s various ad tools and options here.