Use Snap Ads To Improve Branding

Snapchat has a dynamic ecosystem where people are more willing to engage with your brand. This is a platform where you can use ads to get the word out about your brand. Because Snapchat uses video, ads become more engaging than other ads on platforms.

You should also be creative enough to get users to click your ad.

Strategies To Leverage Snap Ads

It is important always to keep your audience in focus when creating ads. The content you create has to be relevant to them. This can make the experience more authentic, making them more likely to spread the word about you. It also needs to address a common pain point they have with your niche.

• The first thing you need to do is install Snap Pixel. It helps you track several metrics about your ad.

• You need to choose an advertising goal with ads. It could be website visits, app visits, app installs, or something else.

• Remember to choose the budget and the target demographic. This dictates to whom your ads are going to be displayed.

Here's a screenshot of Snap Pixel:

Leverage Contests And Giveaways For Buzz

Something that all parties can agree on is that contests generate a lot of interest. It is one reason why brands worldwide work on creating relevant contests for their brand.

A well-crafted giveaway can be integral to the success of a brand or product. It has high engagement numbers and is shared around a lot as well.

Tips For A Successful Snapchat Contest

Remember a few things when creating a contest for your Snapchat account. Keeping it engaging is perhaps the most important thing. The next would be to keep the content relevant to your users. Finally, be transparent about your selection process for winners.

• Create contests easily with Woobox. It can help you come up with great promotions and contests.

• Another alternative for running contests would be SweepWidget. It has powerful features that can help.

• Remember to track your participants and winners on the Snapchat platform.

Here's a screenshot of Woobox:

Share User-Generated Content

Something that brands should do on social platforms is User Generated Content (UGC).

It refers to sharing content created by users on their feed. This is proven to increase engagement for the brand and get new users on board. It could also be a part of your contest phase, and the featured person could get a prize.

Focusing On UGC

Sharing content that users create can set a positive cycle of engagement for your brand. People like the limelight of being featured on a brand page. It is a great feeling to be validated by a brand they follow. On your side, you must ensure that you only feature content that aligns with your brand.

• Make sure that you curate every piece of content that users send.

• Have internal checks in place to prevent people from being featured consecutively. It can become boring for others.

• UGC can build brand loyalty and increase word-of-mouth marketing.

Snapchat's spotlight showcases user-generated content:

Advertise Your Products With Snapcodes

An important part of the Snapchat marketing experience is Snapcodes. These act like QR codes that we find on products and websites. It can add more details about the product that a user is checking out.

They can also click on these codes to get more information about it or buy it. This can help drive more traffic to your business's sales or landing page.

Tips To Create Snapcodes

Snapcodes have been around for a long time now. It is a quick and easy way to improve your brand reach without resorting to images or text. You can also share it easily between people. The key here is to add Snapcodes to products that might be relevant to your users.

• Creating a Snapcode is easy. You can do it right on the gear menu of your Snapchat profile.

• You can also leverage snapcodes for your offline sales. Print it out on your business cards.

• To get more popularity for your Snapcodes, run contests with it.

Here's a screenshot of a snapcode:

Ensure Content Reflects Your Identity

Content is the lifeblood of every marketing campaign, which is no different here. But you must ensure that anything you put out on Snapchat aligns with your brand identity.

Simply put, if a person aware of your brand sees the content, they should be able to identify it. This is a good sign that your content is connected with your brand.

Strategies To Improve Branded Content

Content creation takes a huge chunk of your time during marketing. This makes it important to audit your content creation before doing the work. Ensure that you've ticked all the boxes for branded content strategies.

• Canva is a great tool for editing images for your snaps.

• Snapchat has a variety of built-in tools to edit and create content. You can draw over them and add captions and stickers.

• Upcoming Director Mode for Snapchat promises even more content creation features.

Here's a screenshot of Canva:

Align Your Snaps To Your Audience

Something that most brands forget on Snapchat is that you're creating content for your audience. It doesn't matter if you think they're good enough.

The final say is with your people, who should be grading your effort. Ensure that you work to get in touch with people's expectations from your brand. Take inspiration from competitors in your niche for snaps.

Keep Snaps Close To Your Brand Identity

Marketing is a complex ecosystem; sometimes, brands can lose sight of what makes them unique. This can result in disconnects between the brand and expectations from the users. In the long term, this can result in a loss of brand identity.

• Create a consistent look and feel for your snaps. This can help audiences identify you better.

• A step to improve brand identity is to upload your own Snapchat Filter . You can control how long it lasts.

• Encourage UGC, which is aligned to your brand, for even more engagement.

Here's a screenshot of a custom Snapchat filter by Nike:

Engage Your Followers On Your Feed

One of the better ways to improve engagement is simply by responding to user comments. Any brand will have a significant number of people commenting on their snaps.

It's a great idea to engage them consistently to encourage their participation. It can also give your brand the image that you are communicative.

Strategies For Follower Engagement

Engagement is a metric that you need to work on to ensure that your brand can compete in the market. The more you engage with people, the more of them you will attract. Having a team who can do this consistently for your brand is a good idea.

• Implement cross-functional teams to engage with your followers regularly.

• Remember to be civil and open about anything you want to discuss when engaging them.

• Don't be averse to taking suggestions they offer for your brand.

Posting questions on Snapchat increase engagement:

Use Polls To Improve Ad Engagement

People like polls because it offers them a chance to be heard. Polls are a great way to attract attention to a specific topic.

It could be anything from discussing a new product or features offered on an upcoming one. The point of a poll is to involve people in your feed. You can even ask them on polls about what kind of content they like in the future.

Tips For Creating Engaging Polls

While ads may not be clicked all the time, polls are found to be powerful in getting engagement. But you can't simply create a poll and expect it to work. You must ensure that it has interesting topics people are willing to engage in.

• Research topics of interest for your audience. Google Analytics can help you outline topics.

• There are several tools within Snapchat to create your poll.

• Alternatively, you can also use tools like PollsGo to improve your polls.

Here's a screenshot of a Snapchat poll:

Verify Ads Link To Your Landing Page

You need to check that your ads link to your landing page.

The ad must have the same logo if your landing page has your brand's logo. The ads should match if you use a similar color scheme, font style, and text size. It can establish brand identity and ensure a professional outlook.

Funneling Traffic To Your Website

The main function of ads is not just to let people know what you're selling. It should also redirect them to money pages on your website. The first thing to do here is to check if the ad correctly links to the right landing page on your website.

• Ensure the ad has the right landing page. Irrelevant pages can cause users to click away.

• You can manage several aspects of your Snapchat ads with Ads Manager.

• If you want to track links from your ad, you can use a link shortener like Bit.ly.

Here's a screenshot of Bit.ly:

Ensure Your Copy Is Creative

People want to read ads that are interesting, informative, and helpful. People like Snapchat will enjoy reading your message if your ads are unique and different.

That's why you need to use creative copy that will appeal to your readers. In addition, you need to write informally so your audience will understand your message.

Improving Creative Copy

To do marketing through Snapchat, you must ensure that your ad copy is creative. That means messages in your ad copy are attractive to your target audience. This will be very important since Snapchat users are very selective about what they interact with.

• Draft is a tool that is made for your writing team. It has powerful version control and collaborative features.

• You can also include a creative video with Animoto. It includes branded videos and flexible sizes.

• Adobe Creative Cloud can deal with all your visual content needs.

Here's a screenshot of the Draft:

Verify Ad Viability Through Split Testing

One aspect of ads that needs more attention is the testing phase. Brands need to improve their testing methods to incorporate more real-life variables.

This can help keep ad performance as close to reality as possible. Split testing is a great way to improve testing results. A/B testing ensures you can test all aspects of your ads with a real audience.

Strategies To A/B Test Ads

A general rule of thumb when it comes to testing is to cover as much as you can. But realistically, there are only a limited number of scenarios that you can include. You also have to make allowances for the lack of time. Some tools can help, which can save you time and money.

• If you don't have the budget for tools, don't worry. You can test it using Snapchat's Campaign Lab module.

• Create variations on different parts of your campaign. This includes images, CTA, and headlines.

• You can also circulate your different ad versions to your employees to gauge feedback.

Here's a screenshot of Snapchat's campaign lab:

Integrate AR Into Your Shoppable Posts

Companies have been experimenting with AR as people look for new avenues to interact with social media. Augmented reality has been a standout development regarding technology for Snapchat. As a brand, you can unlock new ways of interacting with your users with AR. It can help them interact with products almost in their reality.

Improving AR For Snapchat

Snapchat has a powerful AR experience that is simple to access for your users. All they need to do is click the scan icon, and the AR model will be visible on their phone. It is a novel and powerful way for people to interact with the app and others.

• Snapchat's shoppable posts now include AR as part of it. This can encourage more clicks on ads.

• People can use it to find the dimensions of a particular product or how it will fit their home.

• Brands like American Eagle and Gucci are making great use of AR to improve user experience.

Here's what Gucci's AR filter looks like:

Posting The Same Snap Time And Again

Sometimes brands lose track of the content they post. And when this happens, it can repeat snaps on the feed. Repetitive content can most often push people away from your brand.

It means you're not spending enough effort to audit content on your Snapchat feed. In the long run, this can be disastrous for your brand.

The Solution

• Taking a look at your Snapchat history can prevent this from happening. Although, this can be difficult if you have thousands of snaps posted.

• Ensure that you have a content tracking system to prevent this. Your content team could maintain a repository that the entire team could use to reference content.

• You can handle duplicates on your Snapchat with Duplicate Photo Cleaner. This tool can save time and money for your business.

Here's a screenshot of Duplicate Photo Cleaner:

Using Too Much Text

As the heart of the platform, Snapchat is a visual platform. There is nothing wrong with using text, but larger paragraphs might not have the intended effect.

Sharing text-heavy narratives or content might not have the same traction as a good image or video. This is why you should opt to communicate with your audiences through a more visual medium.

The Solution

• The key is to opt for images that convey the message. You might need to create a video if it is a complex message.

• If the message is too complicated, include an image with a link to the landing page. This can get people clicking and visiting your website too.

• There might be times when text is unavoidable. If that happens, give the people enough time to read. Don't expect them to read through a paragraph in about 3 seconds.

Here's an example of a brand using images to convey most of the message on Snapchat:

Sharing Too Many Snaps At A Time

Like sharing a huge paragraph of text, too many images can also be counter-productive. As a brand, you need to be concise and articulate about the message you're sending your audience. This means you must use as few images as possible to convey the meaning. This also extends to video - not many people have the time to sit through a 15-minute clip.

The Solution

• Snapchat Stories are great for engagement. But ensure that you keep them limited to about ten snaps or fewer.

• When you have longer videos that need to be circulated, don't do it on Snapchat. Instead, give your audiences a small preview on your snap feed and link them to your website.

• Don't snap too many times in a day. Share snaps that coincide with the peak engagement times of your audience.

Notice the links at the bottom of each Snapchat story. They lead to the website of the brands:

Deleting Bad/Negative Comments

As a brand posting on social media feeds, there are times when comments are not favorable to you. Many brands opt to delete them rather than having to deal with them.

While this might apply to certain explicit messages, it's not a great idea to do this. It can affect how people see your brand. Censoring speech on your feed can be problematic for you in the long run.

The Solution

• If a person has a genuine concern and is angry about it in the comment section, respond to it. Many great conversations around brands are built on this foundation.

• Make it a point to deal with audience comments professionally without being hurtful. The onus is on your brand rather than the individual.

• Proper responses can also improve the brand appeal and get people on your side. This is particularly true when a harsh comment from the user is unjustified.

Here's a screenshot of individuals commenting on Snapchat stories:

Sending Snaps Too Often

While being in the public eye is good, too much of your brand can be distracting. Snapping too many times in a day is also distracting for your audience.

It can put people off, and they might even unfollow your brand if you continue to do this. Don't force your team to post if you don't have many things to post about. It might cause more harm than good.

The Solution

• The key to any social media platform is to keep posts impactful. Posting fewer times during the day is the best way to go.

• Understand what your audience expects from you. Using Snapchat Analytics to determine peak engagement times helps.

• Even when you do post many snaps, ensure that you're talking about different subjects. It can increase diversity and encourage different people to follow you.

Here's a screenshot of Snapchat Analytics:

Not Taking Enough Time To Edit The Snap

Using Snapchat as a business changes a lot of things. It can make a huge difference to your impact as a brand.

For example, if you are a person, a few hurried snaps might not have much effect on your feed. But when you're a business, hundreds of thousands of people will see anything that doesn't align with your typical post quality.

The Solution

• Ensure that you have a team checking and auditing your snaps before they're published.

• Having a checklist for your posts can also help. Establish every little thing about a post that captures the branded look. This includes filters, dimensions, and video length.

• And it doesn't stop with just images - take the time to create captions. Creative captions can sell any idea that you have.

Here's a useful checklist for designing quality posts on Snapchat:

Using The Wrong Tone For Posts

Something that isn't that tangible for business but still critical is the tone of the tone. The wrong tone for posts can result in negative sentiment for your brand.

This can be disastrous for established companies, and you should ensure it doesn't happen to your business.

The Solution

• Have a team that is composed of different types of individuals. This will give you a broad view of the subject you're writing about.

• Check and analyze what companies did wrong in the past. Educate your team about this so it doesn't happen again.

• Don't resort to relying on sensitive topics for your marketing material. Mental health, important people passing on, and making fun based on gender are examples of how things can go wrong.

Snapchat rolled out creative tools for the LGBTQ pride month recently:

Not Being Creative Enough With Content

While being creative always is challenging, brands must find new avenues to express themselves constantly. You must be creative with your content to get the most reach on your brand socials.

Unfortunately, this is something that many brands get wrong. And when they do, it results in issues for their branding efforts and people having negative sentiments.

The Solution

• Something to remember is the end goal of the post. Your goal should be to get a compelling message across. If you aim at selling a product, there are chances you might fail.

• The key to being creative is to find all the ways your brand can express its message. You should do this in a way that it aligns with your audience and brand values.

• Take inspiration from social media brands in other niches to improve their reach. It can be adopted to your niche as well.

Changing the color of certain words in your Snapchat story makes the post creative:

Storyheap

Pricing

About

Storyheap is your platform to manage your Snapchat and Instagram in one place. It focuses on delivering high-quality Story experiences for users. It has several features that help you stay ahead of your competition. They have many modules that can help you get your brand to the top of the heap.

Features

• Integration: It can connect with most platforms that are popular with users. This includes Stripe, MailChimp, Google Analytics, and Trello.

• Collaboration: You get several tools that help you synchronize work between a large team. This is especially important when you need teams of people working worldwide.

• Autopilot: This feature allows you to automatically synchronize all your accounts with the same story when you upload it. This is a great way to handle multiple accounts.

Fastory

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About

Fastory is all about creating compelling user experiences on social media platforms. Marketers can use a powerful platform to ensure they get the most out of any social campaign. Fastory includes tools that have several automation tools and analytics. It can provide a turnkey experience for Snapchat social media handling.

Features

• Automation: Fastory comes with several bots at your disposal. These can help you get more accurate results quickly. They also scale better when you have many clients.

• Campaign Management: The app is built to scale to a large number of clients and platforms. It can do this effectively using an improved dashboard that is both intuitive and easy to use.

• Detailed Analytics: it offers actionable business intelligence through its analytics package. It is comprehensive and can help your business.

Snapchat Geofilters

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While this isn't a third-party tool, it is critical to Snapchat and its results. As a brand, your objective is to ensure that your snaps are unique. Buying your Geofilter allows you to customize filters and lenses for your brand. This can even be extended to different events for your users. To get more engagement and reach, brands sometimes release free Snapchat Geofilters to their customers.

Features

• Comes Built-in: The Snapchat Geofilters app comes with your business account. All you need to do is log in and set the desired filters and lenses.

• Interactive: Depending on the filters you choose, they are interactive to the users. You can set it up for some pretty nice effects on the camera.

• Customizable: You can add several graphics or effects to it to make them unique. It completely changes the look and feels of the media.

Supermetrics

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Supermetrics is the best app for in-depth data regarding your Snapchat marketing analytics. It can offer a huge number of data points and visualization. It can connect with Excel and Google Sheets to import data. You can also use it to extract data in any format you want. It also plugs into various cloud data storage options like Amazon S3 and Azure Storage.

Features

• Complex Analytics: This is perhaps one of the most recent detailed analytics solutions. It works well with Snapchat. Marketers can get access to all critical data points they need.

• Comparison: You can compare different data points with your competitors to understand how they're doing. It also gives you insights into how to improve your campaign.

• Huge Integrations: Get many integrations across many different applications like data storage, retrieval, and visualization.

Snaplytics

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Another social media analytics package, Snaplytics, aims to deliver powerful results as quickly as possible. It also has access to critical features like publishing, account management, and scheduling. These make it one of the better platforms for companies, starting with social media. Because it is simple, it can also be scaled to enterprise levels.

Features

• Multiple Account Management: While the focus is on delivering accurate metrics, the platform also offers tools to help collaboration. With multi-account management, you can synchronize work over multiple accounts.

• Automation: The app allows you automation of several key areas, including publishing and posting content.

• All-Inclusive: This app is great for companies just starting because it has everything they need. This makes it a much more cost-effective alternative solution.

GhostCodes

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About

While this might be a free app, don't underestimate its functionality. You can use this to find new and worthwhile Snapchat accounts to follow. The entire purpose of the app is discovery, and it excels at it. The app can also save snapcodes so you can follow many people in one go. The interface is really simple, and it's easy to get things done with the app.

Features

• Intro Videos: You can create a 30-second intro video to ensure that your requests are accepted. It increases the chances of getting you in touch with other GhostCodes users.

• Intro Videos: You can create a 30-second intro video to ensure that your requests are accepted. It increases the chances of getting you in touch with other GhostCodes users.

• Quick Growth: With GhostCodes, you can quickly grow your follower counts. Not just that, but you can also build real connections with people.

Mish Guru

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About

Mish Guru falls into the category of a storytelling suite for business. It can work with both Instagram and Snapchat. It comes highly rated by the community and has powerful features that make it worth your marketing dollar. You can use this to curate content for your platform. This is especially useful for working with user-generated content extensively.

Features

• Extensive Dashboard: With Mish Guru, you can get all the information you need from its dashboard. Some people might find it a little daunting considering the amount of information there.

• Synchronize Across Platforms: You can keep your feeds across Instagram and Snapchat synchronized. This keeps your posting schedule consistent.

• Data Import/Export: It can also help you easily import data to and from the platform. You can connect it to other analytics platforms.