Guest post: How can businesses use Snapchat?
If your business isn’t on Snapchat, you’re missing out on loads of customers, leads and sales. As one of the most popular social media networks, Snapchat can be a great tool to enhance your business’s image, gain new customers, and sell your products or services. One cool feature that Snapchat offers is On-Demand Geofilters that make it easy for Snapchatters who are at your business – or some type of event sponsored by your business – to send their message to friends. These custom filters can be used on your followers’ snaps based on whatever custom location you decide on defining. Here’s how businesses can leverage Snapchat Geofilters for their own success:
- Use it as a way to get your business in front of customers and prospects. If Snapchatters are near your business or some type of sponsored event, they can see your unique and one-of-a-kind Geofilter and use it to customize their snaps. This will in turn have all their followers see your Geofilter and will entice them to go to your location and use it. Since users like discovering new overlays and Geofilters, they’ll be exposed to your brand and will be interested in what you have to offer, while exposing you to their own fans and followers.
- Use Geofilters Metrics on which to base future campaigns and marketing efforts. Once a Geofilter is live, you can easily view how successful it is thanks to the Metrics page. Here businesses can see important insights to the success of your Geofilter like how many people have seen it and how many Snapchat users are actually taking Snaps and using it. This will help if it was worth the spend and if the businesses should do it again in the future.
- Increase brand awareness. Even if a business doesn’t have a brick and mortar location, they can still benefit from these Geofilters since it can promote an event, a conference or just an office party to increase brand awareness to new customers and prospects. And they are amazing branding opportunities for things like concerts, festivals and any big gatherings that can help spread the word about the brand.
- More fun when visiting brick and mortar locations. If a business does have a brick and mortar location, they can easily provide a unique experience for customers or those who are simply nearby when creating custom Snapchat Geofilters. These give visitors a chance to personalize their visit while at or near the location. It’s a creative way to spread the world about seasonal sales, specials and more. But just remember that the location needs to be pretty honed-in because targeting a large area will come out expensive – which is okay for larger businesses/brands, but might be too expensive for smaller ones.
How To Design Your own SnapChat Geofilter
Now that you know how to successfully leverage Snapchat’s Geofilter feature, it’s time to learn how to create one.
It’s fairly simple and doesn’t take long to create…just make sure that your business has a Snapchat account. To get started, you go to the On-Demand Geofilters submission page (Snapchat.com/Geofilters) and then upload your graphical asset. There are templates that you can use to get started (Photoshop and Illustrator files), but if you’re not knowledgeable with design programs, you may be better off hiring an experienced graphic designer. Keep in mind with your design that the real power of Snapchat geofilter comes from people “screenshotting” your geofilter and then sharing that on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc . Once you’ve finished with the design of your image, you upload it to the page to see a preview of what the filter will look like for yourself and other Snapchat users.
Lastly, you just have to choose the dates you want the Geofilter to be available and then draw your fence for the areas you’d like it to be offered in (Snapchat’s Submission Guidelines state that the fence dimensions have to be between 20,000 and 5,000,000 square-feet). The larger your fence the more expensive it is. Small businesses will be more likely to leverage this at an event they are attending, presenting, or networking at to distinguish their brand. When you’re all done, you just pay for the right to have the Geofilter published. That’s it! Now go ahead and enjoy your Geofilter and any metrics like impressions that you want to look at after the fact!
Bio: Josh Kasten is the founder of Heck of a Snap, a custom Snapchat Geofilter company.