Contents
1. What is Snapchat?
Snapchat is a popular social media app that allows users to share images and short videos. In recent years, this app has grown increasingly popular, especially among young users.
This social media platform has quickly gained a massive user base worldwide: Asia (176M), Europe (116M), North America (113M), South America (23M), Africa (37M), and Oceania (8M).
But that’s not all! Snapchat’s influence extends well beyond its popularity. Delving into the world of e-commerce, this dynamic platform has witnessed a remarkable e-commerce growth rate of 17%. Snapchat shows the strongest sign of growth in Central Eastern Europe at the rate of 22%, closely followed by Africa & the Middle East at 20%, and Latin America at an exciting 19%. Expansion in North America, Western Europe, and Asia Pacific stands strong at 18%, 17%, and 16%, respectively.
2. Why should businesses advertise on Snapchat?
Currently, Snapchat is still a relatively new platform for promotion and advertising with untapped potential. Advertising on this platform is not as overplayed and saturated as on Facebook or Instagram, resulting in lower competition. This presents an advantage for businesses to build their brand and promote their products.
If you are involved in e-commerce, especially in the POD industry, Snapchat is a platform where you can maximize its strengths.
Diverse user groups and specific targeting
Snapchat is particularly popular among Gen Z and Millennials. This social media platform has registered over 280 million daily users worldwide. Approximately 75% of its users are 18 to 34 years old, which is an ideal target audience for your e-commerce marketing campaigns. Thanks to this ideal demographic, Snapchat provides an incredible opportunity for businesses to reach a large number of potential consumers.
To draft a highly-focused and targeted campaign, you can specify the target audience for your ads depending on demographic factors like age and location. Moreover, Snapchat also categorizes users based on their interests, behaviors, and lifestyles, allowing businesses to reach their target customers more effectively.
For example, Snapchat allows you to set your ads campaign to target people with specific interest categories like Parents & Family, Cosmetic, Men & Women’s fashion clothes, eyewear, shoes, accessories, Automotive, Home Decoration, Pet Lovers, Sports (Football, basketball, baseball), and more.
Furthermore, Snapchat optimizes ads based on specific time frames throughout the year. This feature comes in handy for POD businesses that run seasonal campaigns on occasions like Valentine’s Day, Mothers/Father’s Day, Summer Holiday, Back to School, Black Friday, Halloween, Christmas, and New Year Buyers.
Significantly, surveys show that Snapchat users are willing to spend more compared to people who do not use Snapchat.
For example, Snapchatters are willing to spend 20% more on new outfits and 22% on new shoes compared to non-users.
Therefore, if you are running a business and want to target specific customer groups, Snapchat is an ideal platform to create and build your own customer community.
Diverse advertising formats and bidding options
Snapchat provides diverse advertising formats, including:
- Single Image, Video Ads,
- Collection Ads
- AR Lens Experiences
- Dynamic Ads
- Story Ads
These types of ads have a high potential for user interaction, helping businesses build engagement and brand recognition.
Additionally, Snapchat offers local advertising tools that allow businesses to target users within a specific area, enhancing the ability to attract local customers and build relationships within the local community.
Authenticity and personalization
Snapchat creates a fast-paced and intimate community for content sharing. As a result, users tend to trust and engage with real-time content more compared to other platforms.
Diverse interactive content
Snapchat offers various interactive features such as photos, stories, and more. By utilizing these features, businesses can create diverse and engaging content to interact with their customers.
Snapchat integrates multiple features within one app, including Map, Chat, Camera, Stories, Spotlight, and more.
Brand integration
Snapchat allows businesses to create a Public Profile for Business to verify their identity and provide accurate information to their customers.
Creating a Public Profile is entirely free. After being verified by Snapchat, your business profile will feature a yellow star next to your business name, which gives your business legibility and ensures customer trust. Having a verified profile will help increase brand awareness and establish a closer connection with customers.
In conclusion, to succeed in using Snapchat for business and advertising purposes, it is essential to understand your target audience, create creative content, and effectively utilize advertising tools to reach your target customers.
Types of Snapchat Ads
In order to leverage the strengths of Snapchat Ads, you must understand the types of Snapchat ads and when and how to use each ad type. Here brief introduction on each ad type on Snapchat:
Single image/video
Full-screen ads that can be linked to your website or app download. These ads will be placed when users are browsing content like User Stories, Publishers, Creator and Our Stories
– Format:
- Videos, photos, GIFs, or cinegraphs (any of the following file types): .jpg, .png, .mp4 and .mov.
- Resolution: 1080 px x 1920 px
- Ratio: 9:16
- Length: 3-180 seconds
– Best practices:
- Keep your ads short, ideally between three and five seconds.
- Don’t forget CTA text to encourage users to swipe up to take action.
Lenses
Lenses is a very powerful advertising format that leverages interactive augmented reality (AR) to create impressive and interactive ads.
According to a study with Deloitte, products that offer AR experiences for customers increase the conversion rate by 95%. AR technologies can help customers to experience products without going to the store, which is incredibly helpful for ecommerce businesses.
Lends Web Builder powered by Snapchat will help you build your own branded AR lens using available 3D objects, animation, and effects. Snapchat users can interact with your branded AR Lens and create their own Snaps. This way, you can encourage interactions with your customers and boost your brand awareness.
– Best practices:
- Snapchat has some specific guidelines on how brands should build their own Lenses. To launch your own Lenses, make sure to follow their requirements:
- Your Lense should feature visible brand logos or brand names. It is recommended to put your logo on the top left or top right, below the top UI elements.
- Branding is required for both Face Lenses and World Lenses.
- When designing your lenses, place your brand logo on visible spots that aren’t blocked or hidden by other UI elements.
Story Ads
Story Ads will show up in the form of one single tile on users’ Discover feed. Through this ad format, you will be able to reach your target audience and prompt them to look into your collection of up to 20 snaps. In addition, through these ads, customers can swipe up to engage with the ads and go further down into your sales funnel.
– Format: Format requirements of Story Ads are similar to Single images and video. But for the title assets that will show up on the Discover feed, there are some specifications that you should follow:
- Logo format: Use .png file, resolution: 993 px x 284 px
- Image: .png, resolution: 360 px x 600 px
Collection Ads
Collection Ads is a useful format to showcase your products to your audience. With Collections ad, a series of four tiles will be shown underneath your ads. Viewers can tap on the products they are interested in and read more information.
This format is perfect for e-commerce businesses with various products. With just one ad, you can promote multiple products to your target audience. The more products you have, the more chance your customers will click your links.
– Format: In addition to the main ad videos and images, it is also required to provide a thumbnail image for each product.
- File format: .jpg or .png
- Resolution: 160 px x 160 px
- Attach each thumbnail image with the required URL.
Commercial Ads
Commercial Ads are the type of unskippable ads that will be shown when users are browsing Snapchat’s curated content. This type of ads can be up to 3 minutes long, but only the first six seconds are unskippable.
– Format:
- File format: .mpv, or .mov
- Resolution: 1080 px x 1920 px (Ratio: 9:16)
- Length: 3-180 seconds
– Best practices: This ad form is most suitable for campaigns with longer messages or educated promotion content. You will have more time and exposure with your audience to deliver your messages.
Dynamic Ads
Dynamic Ads can take any of the formats such as collection, story, single, or video ads. However, the main difference lies in how these ads are distributed to the audience. With dynamic ads, you can remarket your products to customers who have already visited your website and abandoned their cart.
This approach is widely used by marketers across different social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. It has proven to be highly effective as these ads target customers who have already shown interest in your products. With the help of Dynamic Ads, you will be able to move interested customers closer to the end of your sales funnel.
Depending on the goals of your campaigns, you can select ad types that are most suitable and likely to yield the best results for the given goals.
Tips for Running Snapchat Ads
Craft attractive, catchy copy for your ads
The short attention spans have become a signature trait of the younger generation. In order to capture the attention of Gen Z and millennials on this app, your ads should be short and brief. It’s recommended to include your important message for CTA in the first two seconds of the ads.
Also, adjust your voice and tone to fit the target audience. Coupled with attractive visuals, you will be able to successfully appeal to your audience.
Split-test your Ad campaigns
Not only on Snapchat but any other advertising platform, doing split tests is a crucial step to make your ads better and better. By doing split tests, you will know what works better as well as gain many insights into your customers’ preferences and behaviors. It gives you guidance to improve your ad content over time, hence, increasing the conversion rate for your campaigns.
With Snapchat, you can adjust variables such as
- Ad creatives
- Audience
- Placement
- Goals
There are different sets of goals that you can use to determine the winning options with the lowest cost per goal. It could be the cost per swipe-up, cost per app install, cost per share, or cost per story opens.
Dig into Audience Insights
To help brands and businesses better understand their audience, Snapchat provides Audience Insights where you can find useful information about your audience. From these useful insights, you can adjust your campaigns accordingly.
Use retargeting strategy
On Snapchat, you can use retargeting ads for the audience who has already interacted with your ads. You can set up your campaigns from Ad Engagement Audience section. With this feature, you can design specific customer touchpoints with respective ads as a way to move your audience through the funnel.
For example, you can start with a video or single-image ad to introduce your products and create the first brand impression. If users show any sign of interest and interact with the ads, you can retarget them with the second ad that highlights your brand’s positioning and status. This is the second phase of the funnel – consideration. And if you succeed in tempting an engaged audience with these second ads, you can pull them to the last phase – conversion. At this point, you can pull out attractive offers like free shipping or discounts to encourage them to make the purchase.
This is a very simple example of how you can set up your retargeting strategy on Snapchat. You can develop more intricate strategies that are suitable for your business and audiences.
As the advertising cost on other platforms increases, Snapchat appears to be a promising and highly potential place to promote your business, especially e-commerce business like Print on demand.
