Snapchat For Franchises – A 2018 Update

If you’re an avid follower of FranchiseHelp and the articles we post about lead generation, then you may remember a couple years ago when I wrote this article entitled Snapchat Advertising: The Future Has Arrived (Again

A brief excerpt of the pros and cons from that original post:

Pros

• [Snapchat]allows you to reach potential franchisees in a manner that you haven’t been able to previously.
  
• Photos and videos may allow people to perceive franchise ownership more concretely than text.
  
• Succeeding as an early adopter means that costs are low and ROI is high

Cons

• A new advertising platform means very high risk.
  
• Educating users about franchise ownership doesn’t mesh well with the other content on [Snapchat]
  
• [Snapchat]is focusing on branding and e-commerce, rather than direct response "
  

In two years, Snapchat has matured quite a bit as a company. The user growth curve now isn’t meteoric, and now it’s traded as a public company with the ticker SNAP. 

That being said, Snapchat has become a major player in the online advertising world (not Google/Facebook big but still big) sporting over 180 million active users as of the end of this year.

If your franchise was interested in advertising on Snapchat, you would have three options for your business. Let’s look at each of them from least likely to most likely to be used today:

Lenses

With a lense, you can create a visual experience for Snapchat users where they are actually in your brand! In the example above, you can see Serena Williams being doused with Orange Gatorade. Imagine that happening 100 million times! Lenses are generally reserved for big, big brands as they are expensive to create and are not action oriented.

Filters

Along the line of the interactive lenses, Snapchat also has a static (yet often geographically oriented) ad product called “filters.” With a filter, users can add an additional effect to their photos (or videos). Companies, fairly easily, can add a filter to the library and then pay for it to be offered in various locations. Filters are much more accessible from a cost perspective, but there is still a tenuous relationship with regard to action.

Snap Ads

Finally, and most likely to be attractive to franchises, are standard (up to ten second) video ads. In ten seconds, you can really tell a story about your franchise. Obviously producing good video can be expensive, but if you have the inventory, this is a great way to get it out there. They even come with an action button at the bottom of the screen. (See “Install Now”)

In the end, Snapchat is still probably not the correct place for franchises to spend their development dollars on the web. (I could see a good argument for the consumer side…) It’s still a platform focused on branding, not action. Plus, the user base is almost certainly not the right age for entrepreneurship via franchising.

That being said, Snapchat is driving a significant amount of the innovation occurring in the digital advertising space. So keeping an eye on their progress and products is paramount to really knowing what’s on the horizon.

Eli Robinson is the COO of Metric Collective, the parent company of FranchiseHelp. He is not married to Miranda Kerr.