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How To Use Snapchat Geofilters For Your Hospitality Business

Digital

24th November 2016

ruggero

Snapchat has been around for a while now; feared by many business owners as yet another social media channel to get to grips with. The thing is, Snapchat is the fastest growing social media platform with over 150 million daily active users worldwide who share over 9,000 ‘snaps’ every second. It’s no longer ‘just for the kids’ either; each time new stats are released the age demographic of users is rising. So why aren’t you getting involved?

Firstly, don’t panic! You don’t have to worry about posting daily, snaps, stories, memories or any of that – the simplest way for your business to take advantage of Snapchat is with Geofilters.

As Snapchat defines them –

“On-Demand Geofilters are location-based overlays that users can apply to their Snaps.”

When scrolling through the list of available filters you want to apply to your picture, these customised PNGs will appear if you are inside the geographic area that the advertiser has selected and paid for.

Over 1 billion Geofilters are viewed daily and they work perfectly for hospitality businesses to increase and spread awareness of your event or venue by allowing us to place branded content right in front of users eyes for very little money. So let’s see how to make one!  

Before you get started.

The most important thing to note is that you will need to indicate whether you’re submitting a ‘community’ or an ‘on-demand’ Geofilter.

 – With ‘community’, Snapchat encourages artists and designers to create and submit a free community Geofilter for their city, university, a local landmark or another public location. No brand logos are allowed.

 – An ‘on-demand’ Geofilter is one that promotes a business or event and will need to meet the business guidelines.

Here we are considering ‘on-demand’.

Get creative.

For the success of your filter it is crucial to have a good design and a clever idea behind it. The chances of people using a boring or ugly filter are very little! That’s why you want to make sure your brand is associated with awesome content that has been properly created.

There are some templates within Snapchat for you to create your own but these aren’t that great so the best practice would be to use a designer (like us!).

Upload.

Once you are happy with your creative, upload it on the platform and give it a name that will help you recognise it when you need to look at its results. For example, you can call it “Event X – London – 23 Oct”.

Next select the dates and times you wish your filter to be available. You can have your on-demand filters live for a minimum of 1 hour to a maximum of 30 days. If your event is running over several days, a best practice is to create one filter per day; this will avoid you having to pay for night hours when no one will be using it.

Finally you need to choose where you would like your filter to appear. Simply draw a fence in the map and make sure the area is at least 20,000 square feet, but not bigger than 5 million square feet.

How much will it cost?

After running some tests across various locations in UK, we found that there are 2 different prices. In fact, if you schedule your filter in an urban area, you pay $0.025 per 1000 square feet, per hour. While if you would like to run your filter in a less bigger city or in the countryside, you pay around $0.004 per 1000 square feet, per hour.

So for example, if you are targeting the area where a big concert is happening outside of the main city, this will give you loads of views for very little money!

Submit your filter.

It will take few hours for the filter to be approved. Please note that there are few limits that might affect your schedule:

  Snapchat won’t allow more than 7 geofilters at any time in any particular location. You won’t know if this limit has been reached when placing your order; you’ll only be told after if your submission is rejected.

 – It’s also important to note that Snapchat also won’t allow on-demand geofilters to appear in the same place where Live Stories or Sponsored Geofilters may be running. 

Measure Results

Only after the filters have stopped running will you be able to see the performance of them. Currently Snapchat only displays total views and total uses however it is worth mentioning that the views include not only from people that saw your creative because they used they were in the area, but also friends and family watching snaps that used the filter.

We’re very excited to now have an Account Manager at Snapchat and, as a result, have exclusive access to more data for your campaigns. We have been testing Geofilters for a while with our clients D&D London and Pho (whose efforts have even been recognised in the Peach Report). To learn more about how we can help your hospitality business with Geofilters please get in touch.

Key Take Aways:

  1. Geofilters are a very effective way to build brand awareness among younger generations, not only because there is still little competition, but also because people love sharing filters!
  2. This tool works perfectly when you want to target people attending a specific event like concerts, sporting events etc. because you can reach thousands of viewers concentrated in a small area.
  3. When designing your creative, think about what you would really love to show to your friends. Only create high quality filters to have the best chance of success.

Happy snapping!

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