Why Snapchat is a Must for Your User Acquisition Strategy

Every failed developer has an app. What failed developers don’t have, are customers.

That quote was from the excellent business book “Traction” and the main lesson there was to think about marketing as soon as you begin working on your app. When it comes to user acquisition there are a lot of thing that an app developer can do including social media, Search Ads and so on, but what you guys are not doing enough of is: Snapchat! Afterall it’s the only place where we’ve seen CPI as low as $0.20.

A lot of people think that Snapchat is dead since Instagram copied their features. However as Gary Vaynerchuk mentioned in his latest keynote with Clickfunnels :

HOLY F**K, Snapchat’s ad product is so under priced because all these people think it’s dead … there’s no other platform on Earth, not Youtube and Facebook combined, that can get someone under 30 to watch a 3 minute video continuously even remotely close to Snapchat.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

So what makes Snapchat so great?

Young audience

It’s never happened that something has gone viral because it was really popular among 40 year olds. Instead it is the under 30 demographic (young people and teenagers) that have a large say in what ends up trending in the world nowadays and if you want to reach this demographic, you have to go where they live…on Snapchat.

Engaged Audience

Unlike Facebook and Instagram, there’s no feed to scroll through at the speed of light on Snapchat. On Snapchat the content occupies the entire screen and demands your attention because it will disappear in 24 hours. Yes, almost the entire world is on Facebook and Instagram, but the ones who are on Snapchat are actually paying attention to what is in front of them. 

You can finally link out

For the longest time it was impossible to link out from Snapchat and drive your audience to a landing page or an app page, however that has all changed. Now everyone can attach links to their snaps, putting Snapchat on a level playing field with the big boys like Facebook and Instagram. Now you could partner up with Snapchat influencers and have them send their audience to your app.

Under priced

Facebook and Instagram are maturing as advertising platforms, they are literally running out of places to place ads and naturally the cost of advertising there, is rising steadily. Snapchat on the other hand is massively under priced right now. As Gary Vaynerchuk put it:

…it’s only $2.80 CPM to get in front of everybody who is under 30 in the world…and holy sh*t the swipe up conversions are so f****ing incredible.

Unlike Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat is a relatively pure environment, it has not been bombarded by endless adsSome of the campaigns that we’ve run in Fanbytes for our mobile apps clients we’ve seen results like $0.20 or $0.50 cost-per-install. There is no other platform where you could see those kinds of results at the moment.

So why haven’t more firms taken to Snapchat for their advertising campaigns?

Too young of an audience?

For the longest time Snapchat was popular among teenagers only and that can be a very limited audience, even though that is quickly changing now. Around 1/3rd of adult Snapchatters are parents and 50% of new Snap users in the US are 25+.

Adjustment Period

Well to be fair Facebook and Instagram took years before people started seeing them as viable advertising channels so naturally there is an adjustment period and that could be the case for Snapchat as well.

“Odd and Restrictive” Platform

- Unlike Facebook and Instagram, there no profile pages on Snapchat.

- No hashtags.

- Why create a snap only for it to disappear??

- You have to condense your message in 10 second clips and so on and so forth.

However it is precisely these restrictive features that seduce its users to its platform and set it apart from every other social media platform out there.

Of course I do not want to give off the impression that Snapchat is the end-all-be-all of app advertising at the moment and your app will explode if you start advertising on Snapchat. There are of course challenges but at a time when most firms allow these“challenges” to scare them off, YOU can take advantage of that and start telling your story in an environment that commands a lot of attention for an extremely low price.

Many thanks to Miri, the Head of Partnerships at Fanbytes, for this guest post. Fanbytes helps mobile app firms drive ROI on Snapchat. If you’d like to learn about the unique ways they use Snapchat to increase downloads head over to https://fanbytes.co.uk/