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Showing posts with label Snapchat. Show all posts

Monday, February 20, 2017

Unusual Snapchat Marketing Campaigns That Actually Worked

Why should you create a marketing campaign with Snapchat? Snapchat’s chief strategy officer (CSO) Imran Khan will tell you. During a keynote presentation at Dmexco covered by Adweek, Khan pointed out that approximately 73 percent of Snapchat’s 150 million daily users are located in the U.S., Canada, or Europe. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of users create daily content, with the average person spending 25 to 30 minutes in the app. That’s a big opportunity for marketers.

If you’re not yet familiar with how to use Snapchat for business, check out our Snapchat for Beginners and Snapchat for Business guides to get a feel for it. Once you’ve absorbed the basics, head back over here for some marketing inspiration.

How are other brands using Snapchat? Let’s take a look at some of the most unusual Snapchat marketing campaigns that actually worked.

1. The Snapchat pop-up coffee shop campaign: Netflix Gilmore Girls revival

In October 2016, Netflix took over 200 coffee shops to recreate the fictional café Luke’s from Gilmore Girls. Each cafe served up free coffee in Luke’s cups to promote the four-part series that premieres on the video-streaming service in November. Snapcodes—unique, scannable codes—were printed on 10,000 cups that were distributed at the pop-up cafes.

Gilmore Girls fans and coffee consumers opened the Snapchat app and took a picture of the decal. Then Snapchat prompted them to apply the sponsored filter to their photos for one hour.

The Netflix branded filter included an image of a toaster and a sign from Luke’s. The filter was viewed 880,000 times. As Snapchat told Adweek, the one-day marketing stunt reached more than 500,000 people. Nostalgia for autumn-themed heartwarming television show + Snapchat = great marketing campaign.

Pro-tip: You may not have the resources to launch a Snapchat campaign of Luke’s coffee shop pop-up magnitude, but a custom Snapchat geofilter can be a big boost for your brick and mortar business or a one-time event. Geofilters allow Snapchatters to convey the when and where of their selfie in messages to friends. Where? At your dance party fundraiser. When? Right now. Look how much fun my friend is having, I should go too!

The best part is creating a customer filter is fairly easy and doesn’t need to be expensive.

Bonus: Download a free guide that reveals how to easily create and use a custom Snapchat geofilter to promote your business for as little as $5.

2. The Snapchat “Humans Can’t Resist” campaign: General Mills Tiny Toast

General Mills hasn’t released a new cereal for 15 years, so when they decided to roll out the new fruit flavored, Tiny Toast for teenagers, Snapchat was a natural platform to utilize.

Employing the talents of ad agency, New York Walrus, General Mills released a campaign starring anthropomorphic animals. The short video ads featured sheep, birds, and horses feeding or denying humans Tiny Toast. It’s clear that the humans will do anything to get the Tiny Toast. In one, a man enjoys Tiny Toast while a sheep shears his body hair. In another, a woman slams into a glass window trying to get at the Tiny Toast on a bird’s breakfast table.

As the chief creative officer of the campaign told Adweek, the role reversal of animals in control of humans played well with teenage focus groups. Each video spot was a short 15 seconds and only available on digital platforms including Snapchat.

Pro-tip: Creating a thoughtful, high-quality video ad is a worthwhile endeavor for the Snapchat marketer. You don’t have to break the bank to make a great Snapchat video, but you do need to break out of the box to dream up something that will grab the attention of your audience.

3. The Snapchat “Make That Old” campaign: Under Armour Curry 3

In conjunction with the start of the 2016-2017 basketball season, Under Armour launched a campaign to promote their new Curry 3 shoe.

The brand decided to introduce the shoe via video on its website as well as on YouTube and Snapchat rather than initially launching the spot on TV. Using the slogan, “Make That Old” referring to putting the slumps in Stephen Curry’s career behind us, Under Armour launched the campaign to great fanfare.

The millennials who will pay $140 for a Stephen Curry sponsored shoe are on Snapchat, so it’s a natural place to make a big push for Under Armour’s product.

Pro-tip: If you were thinking of investing in an expensive local commercial, good news, with Snapchat you can send the same message for free. That is, if you are selling to a young audience. Snapchat reaches 41 percent of all 18 to 34 year-olds in the United States. That’s a huge opportunity for a brand targeting young consumers.

4. The Snapchat Stories “Beauty and the Beast” campaign: LACMA and Disney

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) Snapchat manager teamed up with Disney for a bi-monthly Snapchat Story collaboration. LACMA and Disney launched the campaign with a re-telling of Beauty and the Beast over two days, two accounts, and 79 Snaps, utilizing the museum’s 130,000-plus collection of artwork and artifacts.

According to FastCoCreate, writers and editors from Disney condensed the story of Beauty and the Beast while the LACMA team selected and illustrated the artwork.

“Adapting an 84-minute classic in just under 80 snaps took upwards of three months to plan, including mapping out a route in the museum to Snap and caption every piece of art in real-time,” reports FastCoCreate.

The result? Some funny, magical content and a huge boost in engagement for both Snapchat accounts.

Pro-tip: Stories are compilations of Snaps that create a narrative. Stories appear in chronological order with a beginning, middle, and end. Just as you would tell a bedtime story to a child or write a script for a movie, your story must have an engaging plot. Check out our guide to crafting the perfect Snapchat Story for more tips.

5. The Snapchat Tennessee Tourism Campaign: Garth Brooks Giveaway

The Tennessee Department of Tourist Development launched a Snapchat account and offered 5,500 free tickets to a show in Nashville hosted by country music star Garth Brooks. Along with the giveaway, Tennessee Tourism created content and video Snaps featuring a local radio celebrity talking about Garth Brooks. Tennessee also had filters at different places in the state that are meaningful to the country star.

The budget for the initiative, which supports the state’s ongoing “The Soundtrack of America: Made in Tennessee” program, was $100,000, AdAge reported.

Pro-tip: Giveaway free stuff for a limited time. Snapchat is the perfect platform to create scarcity. People love to feel like they are getting a great deal on something exclusive. Sharing coupons on Snapchat is an excellent way to build brand loyalty. Snaps disappear after you’ve watched them, and Stories only last 24 hours. A Snapchatter has to vigilantly follow your business on Snapchat and act quickly if they want the coupon or deal you are offering.

If you’re inspired by these Snapchat marketing campaigns but need help bringing your employer on board, check out our post about how we pitched Snapchat to our boss and then go ahead and take your Snapchat game to the next level.

Hootsuite’s on Snapchat! Click this link on mobile to go directly to Hootsuite’s profile or scan the Snapcode below to add Hootsuite as a Friend on Snapchat.

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Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Snapchat Demographics That Matter to Social Media Marketers

Snapchat may not be as familiar to marketers as Facebook and Instagram, but its dedicated user base can’t be ignored. Think about these two facts for a moment: The entire population of the world is 7.4 billion people. Snapchatters watch more than 10 billion videos every day. (That’s way up from the 2 billion per day they watched in May 2015.)

Of course, the entire world is not using Snapchat—yet—but more than 100 million people do use it every day (spending an average of 30 minutes a day inside the app), and there are 200 million active users worldwide. And Snapchat’s user numbers are still growing fast: eMarketer forecasts that by the end of this year, Snapchat will have a larger user base in the U.S. than either Twitter or Pinterest.

With all those people posting all that content, it’s important for marketers to get a sense of the most important Snapchat demographics segments so they can plan a marketing strategy that maximizes the app’s unique characteristics, rather than just getting lost in the noise.

With that in mind, we’ve pulled together the key details social media marketers need to know before they start Snapping.

Bonus: Download a free guide that reveals how to easily create and use a custom Snapchat geofilter to promote your business for as little as $5.

Snapchat age demographics

Data from the Statistics Portal backs up the common assumption that Snapchat is still dominated by the young: 60 percent of users are under 25, and nearly a quarter (23 percent) have not yet graduated from high school.

By far the largest Snapchat age demographic is 18- to 24-year-olds. This age group makes up 37 percent of Snapchat users. But well-past-college-aged 25- to 34-year olds make up about 26 percent of Snapchatters, and about 12 percent of users are aged 35 to 54.

Still, Snapchat is not currently a player in the Baby Boomer market: Only two percent of users are over 55.

Apart from how each age group is represented in the Snapchat universe, though, it’s worth looking at Snapchat’s penetration rate in each age category, since these numbers can tell a different story, especially since penetration in the older demographics is growing fast—more than half of new users signing up to Snapchat are over the age of 25.

Three years ago, hardly anyone over age 25 was using the app—just five percent of smartphone users aged 25 to 34 and a tiny two percent of those over 35. But today, well over a third (38 percent) of 25- to 34-year-old smartphone users and 14 percent of smartphone users over the age of 35 use Snapchat. They’re gaining fast on the 18 to 24 group, for which Snapchat’s penetration rate is 69 percent.

According to Snapchat’s own figures, on any given day, 41 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds use the app.

Marketers should keep an eye on changes to Snapchat age demographics and be flexible when planning a longer-term strategy. Variety reported that almost a third of the 13- to 24-year-old Snapchatters they surveyed said they used Snapchat specifically because their parents did not. As more parents start to use the app, marketers need to keep an eye on how the younger user base responds.

Targeting that large 18- to 24-year-old demographic and the growing population of slightly older users, FOX used a Snapchat sponsored lens to drum up excitement for its midseason Empire premiere. Superimposing Snapchatters with a pair of gold headphones, sunglasses, and a microphone, the lens also prominently displayed information about the show’s airtime. The campaign reached 27 million Snapchatters, who spent an average of 20 seconds playing with the Empire lens, creating a 16-point increase in brand awareness and an eight-point increase in tune-in intent. Empire was the most-watched show on its premiere night, and took top spot for the 18- to 49-year-old demographic coveted by TV advertisers.

Snapchat gender demographics

Snapchat does not publish gender information for its users, and reliable Snapchat gender demographics data can be hard to come by. But unless things have drastically changed in the last three years, you can bet most Snapchatters are women and girls. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2013 that roughly 70 percent of Snapchat users at that time were women, a figure that came from Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel himself.

A Harvard survey from fall 2015 confirmed that a significantly higher percentage of women use Snapchat than men, with 42 percent of the female 18- to 29-year-olds surveyed saying they had a Snapchat account, compared to 31 percent of male respondents. That survey also showed Snapchat was the fastest growing social network among all respondents, so those numbers have likely increased in the last year.

That high usage among young female users made Snapchat a natural fit when bareMinerals launched its Blemish Remedy acne product. With a campaign dubbed “Zit Happens,” the makeup company created a how-to Snapchat video showing girls how to hide their pimples. Thirty percent of the 1.9 million Snapchatters who saw the videos swiped up to learn more and spent an average of 30 seconds learning about the product. bareMinerals saw the search traffic for the Blemish Remedy product on its website double after the campaign.

Top Snapchat Demographics That Matter to Social Media Marketers | Hootsuite Blog — *Image of bareMinerals Snapchat ad via Snapchat.*

Snapchat location demographics

Snapchat has its highest penetration rate in Ireland, followed by Saudi Arabia and Sweden, according to the Global Web Index, with India, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and France rounding out the top 10.

The Global Web Index figures, which are based on internet users aged 16 to 64, show that Ireland has a Snapchat penetration rate of nearly 20 percent, compared to about 10 percent in the United States.

If those numbers seem low, it’s because they include users up to age 64 (remember that only two percent of Snapchat users are over 55), and because they include users who only access the internet from a computer—putting the mobile-only Snapchat out of reach.

Back in 2013, AllThingsD reported that 25 percent of smartphone users in the United Kingdom used Snapchat, along with 50 percent of smartphone users in Norway, based on numbers from Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel.

With that diversified global reach, Snapchat is a good platform for campaigns with a global message, like (RED)’s global one-day-only Geofilters marking World AIDS Day. For each use of a Geofilter, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $3 to (RED) for its work in the fight against AIDS.

The campaign reached 14 million Snapchatters and had 76 million total views worldwide—and those who saw the filter were 90 percent more likely to donate to (RED), even apart from the money raised by sharing the Geofilter itself.

This summer, (RED) launched another unique global campaign with The (RED) Kitchen Snapchat cooking show, in which celebrity chefs shared bite-sized cooking lessons with Snapchatters around the world as part of the Eat (RED) Save Lives initiative.

Other Snapchat demographics

The fall 2015 Harvard survey of young (18 to 29) Americans reveals a few more interesting Snapchat demographics that marketers should take note of:

College students are more likely to have Snapchat accounts: 53 percent of college students surveyed said they had a Snapchat account, compared to 46 percent of all 18- to 24-year-olds.
Snapchat users have no particular political affiliation: 39 percent of Democrats, 37 percent of Republicans, and 35 percent of independent voters said they had Snapchat accounts.
40 percent of young Snapchat users identified as White, 25 percent identified as Black, and 34 percent identified as Hispanic.

Snapchat demographics takeaways

Snapchat users are young, female, and well distributed throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East. While Snapchat use among adults up to age 55 is growing fast, Baby Boomers are still a tiny fraction of the Snapchat user base.

As Snapchat demographics start to shift, it will be interesting to see if the young people who currently love Snapchat as the social network their parents haven’t discovered yet continue their love affair with the app. For now, they’re highly engaged, posting like crazy, and willing to interact with brand content that speaks to them.

Now that you understand who’s using Snapchat, you can start using Snapchat for business, develop a Snapchat strategy to target your brand’s key demographic, discover some Snapchat hacks to make your Snaps stand out from the crowd, and learn how to craft the perfect Snapchat Story.