How To Run An Influencer Campaign On Snapchat

40% of Australian consumers are more likely to buy a product if they see an influencer posting about it. Influencer marketing is a vital strategy for your business as consumers are more likely to buy a product that’s advertised by someone they know, like, and trust.

And if you don’t want your brand to miss out, you need to learn this strategy to get your brand in front of more ideal customers.

One of the best social media tools to use for influencer marketing is Snapchat. With its personal touch, Snapchat is a great way to market with quick, snappy, and personalized messaging, especially to younger demographics.

Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about how to run an influencer campaign on Snapchat.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

You might be wondering how influencer marketing is different from traditional marketing. While influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing, it focuses on endorsements and product mentions from influencers.

In traditional social media marketing, your brand would focus on producing valuable content on the right platforms, interacting with customers, and showcasing your products.

With influencer marketing, the influencer would recommend or mention your product in one of their posts or videos.

Why Influencer Marketing Works

Influencer marketing works because the influencer has already gained the trust of his or her audience. This way, your brand doesn’t have to work to gain the trust of a new audience and can instead focus on creating the best product possible.

And since people trust the influencer’s recommendations, they’re more likely to try out your product. Since an influencer’s reputation is on the line when promoting products, they usually won’t promote a product unless they like it and approve of it.

This is great for your product because it builds trust and authenticity in your brand as well.

Why Is Snapchat Such a Good Option?

You’ve likely seen influencer marketing campaigns on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, but Snapchat marketing is a great choice for three primary reasons.

First of all, the fact that Snapchat “Snaps” disappear after 24 hours means that users are always eager to see their favourite influencers’ Snaps.

And because Snapchat gives fans an intimate look into their favourite influencers’ and celebrities’ daily lives, fans build trust with the influencer because they see them in an “unfiltered,” behind-the-scenes way.

The second reason is visibility. Since the Snapchat app takes over the entirety of your screen without you having to click any buttons, users can get a clear view of your product in action.

Finally, Snapchat is a great option to expand your brand reach, especially to a younger demographic. 238 million people use Snapchat every day, and advertisers need as little as two seconds to connect with a Gen Z audience.

Snapchat “Takeovers”

While you can hire an influencer to mention, show, or endorse your product on their Snapchat account, the typical form of a Snapchat influencer campaign is in the form of a Snapchat “takeover.”

This is when a brand allows an influencer to take control of their Snapchat account for a day, a couple of hours, or whatever the influencer and brand agreed on. During the takeover, the influencer will create Snaps on your account.

The purpose of a Snapchat takeover is to help a brand reach audiences it might not have been able to reach on its own.

What happens in this process is that the influencer tells their audiences to follow them on your brand’s Snapchat account. This strategy has the potential to get a lot of traffic to your account.

For example, although a lot of the new people looking at your account might be the influencer’s audience, they might like your brand so much that they stick around.

Even though this is a fairly new marketing tactic, it has recently yielded great results for huge companies like McDonald’s and Disney.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

The first step in a Snapchat takeover is to define your goals. It’s best to do this before you think about which influencer to hire, as your goals will help you determine who the best choice would be.

The first question you need to ask yourself is what you are trying to get out of this campaign. Are you trying to get more people to follow your social media accounts? Or do you want customers to try your new product?

Some of the main marketing objectives you can consider include:

How you will target ideal customers
How you will create a positive brand perception
Whether you’re trying to generate leads
Whether you’re trying to convert followers into customers

If you’re stuck, you can try looking up some successful marketing campaigns to see what these brands measured. Don’t worry if your goals don’t look exactly like other brands’, particularly if you are in a different niche.

Every company has different goals, and your goals will also change as your company grows.

Step 2: Choose Your Influencer

The next thing you need to do is choose an influencer. While this part may seem easy since there are so many influencers to choose from, it’s one of the most important parts of your campaign.

In fact, many people hire an influencer agency to help them hire an influencer because your campaign hinges on this point.

If you choose the wrong influencer, then not only could your campaign be unsuccessful, but you could damage your brand’s reputation.

You need to check several things before hiring an influencer, such as seeing who their audience is and making sure they are honest in their product reviews and recommendations.

Target Market

Another important aspect of choosing an influencer is to make sure that their audience fits with your target market.

For example, let’s say you own a skincare company. All your ingredients are natural, organic, and are made of key Australian ingredients. When you decide to hire an influencer, you need to make sure their following aligns with your brand.

In this case, you might hire an influencer who posts about natural skincare, and makeup as well as a healthy lifestyle. This way, it’s more likely that your brand will resonate with the influencer’s audience.

Step 3: Create an Outline

Once you’ve hired an influencer, the next step in your influencer marketing strategy is to create an outline. This is where you develop a calendar that includes what kind of content the influencer will post, as well as go over any important notes before you start.

One thing that may be counterintuitive is that it’s often a good idea to let the influencer have as much of a say in the ideas as you. Of course, while you know your brand best, your influencer knows what content works best for their audience.

This is why you shouldn’t try to be too controlling of the campaign. Even if you’re tempted to micromanage because you want your product to be presented in a certain way, you need to have trust that your influencer will do their job well. This is yet another reason why choosing the right influencer is so important.

Outline and Troubleshoot in Advance

You also want to create the outline and calendar with your influencer well in advance so you can avoid mistakes and make any preparations if needed.

You also want to make sure to schedule how the influencer will promote the takeover on social media so you can spread the word in advance.

Finally, make sure you go over any points of confusion or contention so that there are no disagreements later on.

Step 4: Start Your Influencer Campaign

Now you’re finally ready to start your campaign. Here is where you give the influencer access to your Snapchat account and let them create your Snapchat Story.

A Snapchat Story is a collection of Snaps that were captured in the last 24 hours. They appear in the order the snaps were taken. Stories can include static Snaps as well as videos.

While the influencer is busy running your campaign, you shouldn’t just sit back and watch. You need to be paying attention to the campaign the entire time to make sure everything is going as it should.

This is another reason why preparation is so important. Rather than emailing your influencer in a panic because he didn’t showcase your product behind a green backdrop like you asked, you need to take care of these issues before they arise.

The Ideal Campaign

The ideal Snapchat takeover shows the influencer promoting your brand/product while living their everyday life. The influencer should promote your brand in an appealing way while being relevant to their Snapchat audience.

Also, don’t forget to include calls to action in your campaign. Your influencer could put a text overlay on top of your Snap to encourage users to visit your site, for example.

Another good example of a call to action would be for your influencer to ask people to sign up to your email list.

Step 5: Document

As the campaign is going, you want to take screenshots of each Snap. Since Snaps disappear after 24 hours, you will no longer have a record of them after that time is up.

So instead of leaving your recollection of the campaign to memory, be sure to keep track of each Snap in the campaign. You can take screenshots of video Snaps as well so that you have a reminder.

Engagement and Analytics

Another important step for documenting your campaign is to record engagement as it happens. While Instagram and Facebook record engagement in terms of likes, Snapchat records engagement in terms of screenshots.

This means that every time a user takes a screenshot of your content, Snapchat will record this as engagement. Make sure to keep track of these numbers as you’ll want to know which Snaps users were taking screenshots of the most.

During and after your campaign, you also want to make use of Snapchat’s analytics tools. These include viewer demographics (such as age, gender, location, and interests) and completion rates, which measure how many users watch your entire Snap Story from start to finish.

Step 6: Evaluate

Finally, when your campaign is over, you have a little bit more work to do. First of all, you want to get all your data in one place and back it up for extra security.

So if you were writing data, observations, and engagement numbers down on a notebook, you’ll want to transfer these to a document like an Excel sheet. This way, you can have all your data in one place.

Consider analyzing your data and making some simple charts such as a pie chart to help you visualize your campaign’s results.

KPIs

Finally, make sure to evaluate your KPIs. KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator, and these refer to measures of performance that are quantifiable. In social media marketing, you’ll use KPIs to see if your social media strategy is effective.

Examples of KPIs for your Snapchat campaign include engagement, conversions, and Snap Story completion rate.

Remember that your KPIs can change as your business evolves and your company goals change. Still, you always want to measure KPIs and consider adding them to your graphs. This helps you see your campaign’s success at a glance.

Ready to Start Your Snapchat Influencer Campaign?

Influencer marketing is becoming a more and more popular way of promoting brands, often on par with traditional marketing in its results.

Whether you hire an influencer to endorse your product on their own account or you hire them to do a full-fledged Snapchat takeover, these steps will give you a good framework to get started.

At the end of the day, to get the best results out of your Snapchat influencer campaign, you need to choose the right influencer.

This is where an influencer marketing agency like Wear Cape can help. Our passionate social media experts use the best technologies to help you find the best influencer for your brand.