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September 06, 2016 at 12:30 AM
It’s no secret that I love to use Snapchat to market to my audience and clients. However, recently I have grown to love this platform even more thanks to a huge change the site made earlier this year.
This change allows everyday users and businesses to create their own custom-made, on-demand geofilters. If you are new to snapchat, a geofilter is a custom design you can lay over a photo to indicate your location. (They are only available in certain locations.) For example, when you are on Dauphin Street in Mobile, Alabama, you can swipe right or left and a “Dauphin Street Mobile, Alabama” filter will display, letting your friends know where you are and what you are doing.
What’s so great about this? Anyone can upload their own custom-made filter set to their own preferred geolocations. This is a great tool for crafty marketers — not so much for lazy marketers — because it takes a little bit of finesse to fully use the tool to its potential.
First, you have to design a filter that someone will want to use; it can’t be just industry specific or too spammy. Second, Snapchat will not let you use any kind of call to action, such as links, logos (in most cases) or social media handles. This makes it difficult to use for marketing for anyone not willing to think outside of the box, yet very profitable for those willing to employ some clever thinking.
I have been generating sales for months using this new feature. The first hurdle a marketer may encounter is creating the customized geofilter. You have to either know how to design a filter or pay a graphic designer to design one for you. For do-it-yourselfers, an iPhone app called Confetti allows users to make filters. In my case, I used the app and employed a graphic designer that specializes in geofilters to design and correct my filters for $20 each.
In one case study, we designed a filter for a St. Patrick’s Day 2016 block party at a local restaurant. The filter featured a “Happy St Patrick’s Day” message along with a picture of the Mobile, Alabama, leprechaun and a tagline at the bottom that said “By Alfa Insurance Bradley Flowers.” The area I targeted was a 189,734-square-foot area around the restaurant for 9 hours. This cost me $35.58 in Snapchat fees. The process to set the filter up is self-explanatory — the site provides a step-by-step explanation to get you started.
