AR Marketer’s Guide 3: Intro to Snapchat Lenses

Many companies have already used Snapchat lenses for promotional purposes. Those that are a result of direct cooperation with Snapchat are obviously the most successful ones, but every brand can use it to its advantage.

The most important factors that can make AR lens a valuable marketing tool are:

  • an idea tailored for the audience,
  • incorporating AR lens into a wider campaign, for example mixing AR lens with offline advertising which makes offline activities more measurable,
  • boosting lens’ reach with the use of influencers and creative distribution, like putting a snapcode on a packaging,
  • the fact that it presents an opportunity to gather lots of user-generated content, which is highly valuable and allows your promotion to go viral,

 

In our Read section, you’ll find many case studies of Snapchat lens activations. Here we want to show you two of them which are great examples of using AR in marketing the right way: Westworld & Tic Tac.

Snapchat Lenses results

There is no responsible marketing without analyzing the results. Snapchat provides rather basic, but sufficient statistics of every published lens: Views (the number of times a lens has been viewed), Plays (the number of times a lens has been activated in the camera in Snapchat ) & Shares (the number of times a lens has been shared on Snapchat).
You can find exemplary lens’ results in many of the case studies published by Snapchat on forbusiness.snapchat.com (they’re also included in our Read section). In the case of lenses created in the cooperation with Snapchat, other insights, like time spent inside a lens, are also available.

Why choose Snapchat for the AR project?

The most obvious reason to choose Snapchat Lens instead of Spark AR (Facebook and Instagram platform) for marketing reasons is a different audience. Where Snapchat is popular, lenses can be effectively used, plus Snapchat is mostly used by Millenials Gen Z users, while Facebook audience is getting older. There are also some differences in functionalities between Lens Studio and Spark AR Studio, for sure, but it’s a topic for a different article or the talk with an AR developer about a particular idea for an effect.

Snapcodes, faster reviews or lenses working on pets are some of Snapchat’s main advantages over Instagram and Facebook AR, but there are as many shortcomings as wins for Snapchat there. If you’d like our help with choosing the right platform for your next AR activation, don’t hesitate to ask Lenslist Team.

Snapchat Lenses in a Capsule

  • they were the first AR effects used in social media
  • they introduced millions of people to Augmented Reality
  • they will work on your dog or cat
  • Snapchat has a young audience which loves AR
  • Snapcodes are great and recognizable