Imagine a billboard for your business.  A nicely designed logo and brand message.

Your customers are standing in front of this billboard, taking a photo like they would at the entrance sign at a famous landmark.

Now imagine you could take this sign or billboard and turn it into a digital overlay people could put onto their pictures when they’re nearby your business.  Pictures they share with friends in their network, transporting your brand message to thousands.

You don’t have to imagine it.  This is essentially what Snapchat geofilters for business do.

Branding the Selfie Story

Snapchat is the most immediate of social media platforms.  People document what they’re doing at the moment.  They create image based stories – usually with their “selfie” in the image – about the events of the day.

Far from a magnum opus, these stories are informal and temporary.  They’re an image based way of telling a circle of friends what you’re up to now.  Tomorrow will bring a new story.

Snapchat is now a form of everyday communication for teens and millennials.  I recently listened to a friend’s 13-year old son plead with his mom to allow him to create his Snapchat account.  Mom, this is how kids communicate with each other nowadays!

In 24 hours, the content created on Snapchat vanishes – which motivates people to focus their attention on snaps while they’re live.

And we all know what the name of the game is today with advertising.  Winning attention.

When you slip your brand into that personalized story, you can make a strong, immediate impact.

How Snapchat Geofilters Work

A Snapchat geo-filter is an overlay users can find on the app when they are within a certain proximity of your business.  When they snap their image, they enhance it with the overlay.  This overlay should add a fun, quirky element to the snap so people want to use it.  But it also works somewhat like an old school billboard because it’s branded content for your business.

You set up the “geofence” around your business where the filter will be available, then set the dates/times it will appear.  You can create a filter for just a few hours for a specific event, or for up to a year for something ongoing.  The time and area you run the filter in determines what you pay to run it.

McDonald’s and Starbucks are two big brands that started running geofilters around their locations.  Users create snaps like these.

It’s really that simple.  Design the filter and from there, let your customers do the advertising for you.

Case Study:  The Orange Party

Every year, Madwire host The Orange Party to celebrate our business anniversary.  This year, we created a Snapchat Geofilter for attendees to use on their snaps:

Here are the results:

• 208 unique users shared it 265 times (swipes) with their followers
• From that, 11,300 followers saw it (impressions)
• 78% of Snapchat users at our party, used the filter (user rate)
• Cost was only $18.37

For less than $20, our branding got over 11k in impressions.  A no-brainer.

We’ve also created a filter for our business location that we will run for a year.  Anyone who snaps while in our area can use this filter.

We can run this filter all year for less than a billboard would cost for one month.

Conclusions

If you are experienced with traditional marketing, you may find that Snapchat takes getting used to.

Snapchat turns conventional marketing on its head.  Instead of carefully scripted, studio quality images of your business, the immediate, imperfect, personal feel of the everyday dominates.  Content is spontaneous and controlled by what users want to see and share.

When you create your geofilter, you’ll submit it for approval from Snapchat.  Aside from technical aspects, even your branded filter will be subject to guidelines that focus on the user experience.  Your filter must be relevant to your location, and your business name will appear so users know it’s sponsored content.

Most of all, your filter needs to be something people will want to share with their Snapchat friends.  Keep in mind how people use Snapchat as they tell their day’s story.  They’re more likely to share a fun, cool, unique overlay than something that’s just a blatant advertisement for your business.

This is not a sales channel, it’s brand marketing.  Get visitors snapping while they visit you and you’ll get your branding in front of more people than a billboard on the busiest interstate highway – for a fraction of the cost.

*Results are based on past client performance. Individual account performance may vary. Results are not guaranteed.