Hungry for more marketing channels to add to your strategy?
We can definitely be friends.
Marketers are living their best life right now with the number of platforms available. We can tap into so many audiences to find our customer avatars making an omnichannel presence easier than ever before.
Savannah Sanchez, the founder of Social Savannah, has become an expert at helping her ecommerce clients market on Snapchat spending $50k-$2M per month on social ads. “Snapchat has robust prospecting and retargeting abilities so ecommerce brands should be taking full advantage of the ease of campaign set up.”
Not to mention the platform has 280 million daily active users and is up 22% YoY.
Count us in.
We’re bringing you Savannah’s expert take on Snapchat marketing so you can decide if it’s the right platform for you and start piecing together how you’ll approach your content. As Savannah consistently sees, “Most ecommerce businesses I work with are always willing to test a new channel to diversify their marketing and reach new audiences.”
We love how adventurous you are but like the safety precautions they read you before you jump out of an airplane, first, we have to tell you what to avoid.
The #1 Mistake Ecommerce Businesses Make When Marketing on Snapchat
“There are two common mistakes I see when eCommerce business owners start with Snapchat Ads. The first is refined, narrow targeting in prospecting campaigns.”
We like to think that we know more than computers. What an adorable thought. We had it all the time over at DigitalMarketer before realizing we had to trust the algorithms to do a bit of the work for us. These little robots (most of the time) know more than us and trusting them to do their work is a necessity on Snapchat—and honestly—all of the other ad-based social platforms.
Savannah’s figured it out, “I’ve learned to entrust the machine learning technology to help us refine audiences after a few weeks of testing. The interest and demographic targeting that performs well on another ad platform may be entirely different for that same brand on Snapchat!”
Here’s Savannah’s advice for understanding which audiences will perform best for your business on Snapchat, “Start with a broad prospecting campaign, with general targeting based on their market research. After a few weeks of testing, I’d be able to determine best-performing groups by reviewing the data in Snapchat’s reporting and then scale budgets toward them for more efficient ad spend.”
The second mistake Savannah sees ecommerce businesses make when marketing on Snapchat is “a lack of creative testing.” There are some marketers who would tell you that you should be publishing new ads every single day. With the amount of content consumption rising every day (do we really even need the stat or can we all just take a look at our screen time?), ad fatigue is getting more and more real. Savannah finds, “brands experience ad creative fatigue which would lead their campaigns to perform poorly.”
To avoid ad fatigue, Savannah “provides new creatives weekly to have a continual rotation of fresh ads to avoid fatigue altogether.”
With those potholes avoided, let’s get into the good stuff.
3 Ways to Get Started on Snapchat (To Grow Your Ecommerce Revenue)
We’ve gone over the safety precautions of this Snapchat adventure and now we know what to do if things start to go wrong. Repeat after us, “I will let the algorithm do its thing to help me refine my audience and I’ll create weekly new ad creatives.”
The next step is to get into the logistics of running Snapchat ads. We had Savannah give us her top 3 strategies.
#1: Create a library of your top 5 best performing mobile 9×16 vertical format creatives (like Facebook/Instagram stories)
Snapchat, for now, is a vertical platform. When people go on the app, they hold their phone upright as if they were taking a portrait-style photo. An ad that feels native to the platform is going to follow the same 9×16 format.
As Savannah points out, you don’t need to create original content for your Snapchat. In fact, already published content is better. This content has proven that it gets the attention of your customer avatar and it can convert. Is there better content to put your money behind?! (The answer is a strong nope!)
If you don’t have usable content from other vertical platforms, Savannah recommends to “create original content, but follow the Snapchat Creative Golden Rules when designing for Snapchat Ads. Keep your ads short and sweet, always include a clear CTA, and make sure the viewer knows exactly what you want them to do in the first second of the ad.”
Time to hit record.
#2: Start with a very simplified campaign structure
Simplicity is underrated. When you start building campaigns on Snapchat, or any other ad platform, you always want to start simple. This is for your sanity as much as it is for logistics. You need a foundation to base your future campaigns on and with too many campaigns running at once it can be hard to nail down what’s really working and what isn’t. Savannah suggests creating “one prospecting and one retargeting campaign. That’s plenty to learn from, no matter the budget.”
Here’s how Savannah structures the ad groups for her clients. “Keep at least 3 ad creatives in each ad group and allow them to exit the learning phase before making any major changes or optimizations.”
This can be one of the hardest parts of marketing (and in life). Patience. As much as you want to believe that you know more than the super wise device you’re reading this on…that’s not always the case. (We speak from experience here)
Make sure to give your ads enough time to get the data you need. That’s when you can start to build a more complex campaign structure and pull ads that aren’t performing as necessary.
#3: Ensure your landing pages are mobile-optimized
Snapchat doesn’t exist on desktop. The only way to access the app is through mobile, which means your audience is clicking through your CTAs on their phone 100% of the time. You always want your landing pages optimized for mobile but it becomes extremely important when it comes to Snapchat.
As Savannah explains, “Snapchat is a great way to reach and intrigue your potential customers but, if they swipe up on your ad and arrive in a non-user-friendly environment, you’ll likely experience high bounce rates and low ROAS.”
Can you blame them?
The last time we swiped up on an interesting ad that we saw on Snapchat that didn’t open to a user-friendly mobile website…we immediately bailed. As consumers (who are also marketers), even we don’t have the patience to try to get a website to work that isn’t optimized for mobile.
Consumers don’t need to figure out how to navigate your website. They need you to make it as easy as possible for them to do so.
You’ve made it this far into your Snapchat Marketing 101 class, which means you no longer have an excuse to procrastinate. These are your first steps towards creating a Snapchat presence from a proven expert who gets a ROAS for her clients.
Here’s how Savannah knows when she’s finding success on Snapchat.
The Most Important Metric to Track Snapchat Ads ROI
Marketing strategies are cool and all, but if you can’t show an ROI then they’re more of a hobby and less of a strategic plan to get more customers. That’s why we knew we needed Savannah’s insight on what success on the platform looked like.
Obviously success is linked to more conversions, but what can we look for inside our ad account to tell us we’re on the right track?
“In short, ROAS is the best metric to track in order to understand if your campaign is successful or not. On an ad creative level, it’s always important to check that you don’t overspend on a creative that isn’t doing well in a specific ad group. If you find that one creative is overspending but under-delivering on a revenue level, I recommend turning it off to allow other creatives to spend more efficiently.” says Savannah.
Here’s what you’ll need to remember from reading this short guide to Snapchat marketing:
Trust the algorithm to find your audience, don’t create narrow and refined targeting on your first campaignCreate new ad campaigns consistentlyUse 9×16 videos that have performed well on other channels or create your own by following the Snapchat Creative Golden RuleStart with simplified campaignsAlways optimize your landing pages for mobileFocus on the ROAS of each ad
Our guide might be over, but the adventure has just begun.
Use Savannah’s expertise learned from spending $50k-$2M per month on ads to start your first Snapchat campaign—and if you run into any questions, you can always reach out to Savannah here.
The post How to Use Snapchat to Grow Your Ecommerce Revenue appeared first on DigitalMarketer.
To discover more visit: digitalmarketer.com
