Promoting events, destinations and companies through Snapchat Geofilters

Nowadays, there are multiple ways for people from all over the world to stay connected. In our own experience, Skype, Facebook and Whatsapp have been very useful tools to stay up-to-date of what our friends are doing, even though most of them are exploring different parts of the world travelling or by studying abroad. Additionally, Snapchat has introduced a new and fun way to discover our friends’ whereabouts. By using Snapchat Geofilters, we can immediately see which events they are attending or which city they are visiting. Look for example at the following pictures we received from our friends. One of them attending a Blue Jays baseball game in Toronto and another one having some beers at Oktoberfest in Germany. They didn’t need to tell us where they were, just sending a ‘snap’ using the appropriate filter was enough.

Author's friend on Snapchat, Laurine Phillipe

Author's friend on Snapchat, Benjamin Hens

It all started with Snapchat introducing filters for geographical locations, later on they also enabled these filters for businesses and private events. Now you can customize your own logo or brand on the application. This is an excellent way to create brand awareness, especially amongst youngsters who are more up to speed with this smartphone technology. Nevertheless, 30 percent of the Snapchat users is older than 35 and thus the app is not only reserved for the youngest generation. The article of John Lincoln, CEO of Ignite Visibility, emphasizes that it is a great way to get a competitive advantage in an inexpensive manner. You pay €4,5 per 1,860 square meter per hour to get your personalized filter up and running. There are some restrictions on maximum duration and geographical spread of the filter but Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of a social media brand consultancy agency, was able to achieve almost 230,000 views for only €0,24 per thousand impressions (CPM) through this medium. Definetely not bad for creating a lasting impression! After all, people consume these ads in a more thorough way than banners or other digital advertisements. However, Lincoln states that you have to act fast since he expects marketers to ruin the advertising opportunity by overcrowding events and areas with too many different filters.

People tend to spend a lot of time on their smartphones, taking selfies and looking at other people’s pictures through social media. Therefore, we think that this is a very smart way of promoting something since people do not necessarily perceive a Snapchat filter as an advertisement. After all, Snapchat is used as a tool for communicating with friends and filters can offer an extra dimension to your pictures. Moreover, they usually only cover a small part of the picture and thus your photo stays preserved. This way, it can also serve as a nice memory of the place you visited and you can save it for a personal photo album. It’s as easy as it sounds, you just take your picture through the application and then you decide yourself if you like to put a filter on top of it or not. In this manner, it is avoided that promotions are being forced on people since they can choose whenever they want to use it. We would define this as pull marketing, also dependend on how much time and effort people want to put in their snaps. 

Nowadays, this kind of advertising is also available for businesses and it can serve multiple purposes:

• Creating brand awareness by sharing your logo and company name
• Attracting young potentials by presenting your company as an attractive workplace
• Communicating the company culture through photos of your events and other activities
• Organizing a scavenger hunt by making people search for filters and locations in the surroundings
• Etc.

As shown by these bullet points, this marketing strategy offers numerous benefits in a fairly cheap way as long as you know how to customize your ad correctly. Depending on how appealing people find your filter, it can reach a lot of Snapchat users. The only effort for marketers is to design an attractive one and test it in the environment where it will be activated. After that, your customers will do the marketing for you. To us, this appears to be a witty digital version of word-of-mouth advertising. 

Businesses should grab the opportunity to introduce their own filter that enables customers to share their experience. So far, while travelling along the French Riviera, we have not yet encountered a filter created by a company. However, we could definitely see how this would work for restaurants, famous retail stores etc. 

To this day, our friends got to enjoy some of the beautiful sceneries in South France, accompanied by the relevant Snapchat filter of course!

Author's own

Author's own

Jana De Lobel & Valerie Eeckhout

Source Article: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278211

Support Article business on Snapchat: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/5-creative-ways-to-use-snapchat-geofilters-for-business/