9 secrets to a winning Snapchat marketing strategy for BFCM
Building authentic connections with your audience generates sales—and Snapchat can help you do it.
Established brands like Tecovas have grown their BFCM revenue by 138.8% with personalized messaging, so it isn’t hard to imagine what kind of growth you might see if you connect with your audience on a more intimate level.
The Snapchat platform has over 400 million daily active users, and about 62% of them are between the ages of 18 and 35.
Reaching that audience is especially vital considering Klaviyo’s 2024 consumer spending report found that millennials and Gen Z are the most likely age groups to favor online holiday shopping, and Americans spent $9.8 billion online shopping on Black Friday in 2023.
What makes Snapchat near-perfect for this kind of reach is the nature of the platform. Snapchat has always been about highly visual, bite-sized content people can interact with in multiple ways. At one point, nearly everyone was taking photos and making videos with a puppy filter.
Nowadays, Snapchat’s AR features, including Lenses, are part of what helps the platform drive 5x more active attention than other social media platforms.
Your brand stands to profit from that—especially during Black Friday Cyber Monday.
With Snapchat, sponsored lenses and AR filters are just the tip of the iceberg. Brands with overarching Snapchat marketing campaigns also run Snap Ads, create custom geofilters, and invite their audience to become brand ambassadors to strengthen bonds and earn trust with customers.
You can do it, too. Here’s how.
1. Get to know your audience on a deeper level
The key to a successful BFCM season is not just offering great deals but also delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. That’s as true on Snapchat as it is on your owned channels like email and SMS.
When developing your BFCM Snapchat strategy, focus on understanding your audience on a deeper level. Who are they? What do they want? What do they like?
You can use Snapchat to gain these insights. Here are a few features that can help:
In Snapchat’s own words, “Audience Insights help you learn more about your target audience on Snapchat so you can create relevant content and surface targetable segments to grow reach.” This feature provides detailed analytics on your followers’ age, gender, location, interests, buying habits, device they use, and more.
While very simple and straightforward, Snapchat polls can—and will—help you understand your audience and appeal to their desires. You just have to ask the right questions. For example: “What type of BFCM deal are you most excited about—exclusive discounts or bundle offers?”
Snapchat marketing pro tip: Use the data you gather to tailor your Snapchat ads and organic marketing toward what your followers and customers actually want to see from your brand. For example, if you discover a large segment of your audience is interested in sustainable fashion, that’s a sign to highlight more eco-friendly products in your BFCM Snapchat marketing.
2. Film and post short how-to videos
Depending on what you’re selling, your Snapchat audience may benefit from educational content like how-to videos. Whether they’re GRWM videos or mini guides on how to style your holiday look, quick, engaging how-to videos are perfectly suited to Snapchat.
Brands like Graza do this flawlessly. The olive oil brand doesn’t use any paid channels. Instead, they invest in 3 key organic channels to keep their highly engaged audience happy:
- Hyper-segmented email marketing
- A gifting program for influencers
- An organic social strategy that blends professional photography, UGC, and how-to content
They even turn blunders into wins. Recently, Graza customers noticed they couldn’t open their olive oil squeeze bottles. So the brand filmed this how-to video in response. (This video is from Instagram, but this type of video content would work great on Snapchat, too.)
In the video caption, Graza even offers their customers an apology in the form of a discount on their next order: “PSA ‼️ Have you or a loved one been affected by Graza bottles that were too hard to open? You may be entitled to $4.66 off your next order with code ‘TOOTIGHT’ at graza.co (link in bio) as we didn’t realize that our machine was on the wrong setting for two weeks.”
Snapchat marketing pro tip: To make it as easy as possible for your audience to buy what you’re selling, include swipe-up CTAs that lead your audience to a product page, where the only thing that’s left to do is add to the cart and buy.
You can also use swipe-up CTAs to cross-sell other items, offer bundles, or recommend similar products. For example, if you’re selling gaming chairs like Secret Lab, you could offer 10% off to those who buy a lumbar pillow and an armrest.
3. Use AR to make shopping interactive
If there’s one thing that keeps retention and engagement high on social media, it’s AR. (Remember that statistic we shared at the top about Snapchat’s AR helping it drive 5x more active attention than other social media platforms?)
Snapchat’s AR Lenses, in particular, allow you to create fun, interactive experiences that encourage your audience to interact with your products before even buying them.
Say you’re running an online store that sells furniture—you might create a custom lens or an AR filter that lets your audience place the sofa in their living room.
Selling eyewear? Create a filter your audience can use to try on the new sunglasses before buying.
Or let’s say you’re selling supplements like Vital Proteins. Why not create an interactive, tap-to-play custom lens so your customers can play a game while they shop—even something simple, like catching the vitamin gummies?
Snapchat marketing pro tip: Spice things up by granting special offers, discounts, or gifts to those who film and share their game using a custom hashtag.
4. Build trust by sharing genuine customer reviews
Of course, especially during a peak sales season like BFCM, great ads and product positioning can only take you so far.
Alexander Melone, co-founder of CodeCrew, puts it this way: “As trustworthy as your brand might be, it isn’t as trustworthy as someone who doesn’t have a clear agenda to promote your product.”
Who doesn’t have a clear agenda to promote your product? Your customers. In fact, Bazaarvoice found that product reviews are the most likely type of user-generated content (UGC) to make shoppers buy when they see it on a product page.
Plus, the younger the audience, the more reviews they want—and considering how young the Snapchat audience is, this strategy practically writes itself. Create stories, snaps, or Snap Ads featuring your best customer reviews, and turn them into visually appealing, easily digestible content for your Snapchat audience.
Not sure how to get reviews in the first place? There are several ways to incentivize your audience to leave reviews, which you can then incorporate into your Snapchat marketing:
- List your online store on review sites.
- Simplify the review process on your ecommerce site.
- Establish a post-purchase email automation that requests reviews.
Snapchat marketing pro tip: If you’re not getting enough reviews with interesting visuals, take a leaf out of Compass Coffee’s book: with Klaviyo, they set up a conditional split in their review request flow. If a review has a photo, the reviewer gets a 15% discount on their next order. If it doesn’t, they simply get a thank-you email and a reminder to leave a photo next time.
The strategy contributed to 3.7x more reviews with images in the brand’s first quarter with Klaviyo Reviews.
Speaking of UGC…
5. Let your audience speak for you with other types of UGC
UGC is more than just reviews. It includes any original content customers share with your brand—anything people are saying or showing about your brand, online, to their own followers and networks.
Essentially, it’s today’s version of word-of-mouth marketing—and this kind of social proof can make all the difference in the success of your BFCM weekend.
Your audience is your audience for a reason. They share the same interest: your brand. Even if they’ve never made a jump from subscriber to buyer, if they see that someone like them has bought a few of your products and is wholeheartedly recommending them, they’re more likely to do so, too.
Take a cue from Fashion Nova. They’re a billion-dollar brand, but they’re just as focused on UGC and influencer marketing as they were early on.
From A-list celebrities and musicians to social media models, Fashion Nova has attracted a wide range of brand ambassadors and generated a massive social following for the brand, positioning Fashion Nova as one of the leading names in fast fashion.
Snapchat marketing pro tip: It’s useful all year round, but UGC can be especially helpful during high-traffic periods like BFCM when everyone is trying to decide what to buy. Encourage customers to post their haul to Snapchat using custom AR lenses, branded hashtags, or geofilters (more on this next).
6. Use geofilters to localize your promotions
Personalization is crucial in marketing, and localization is a powerful form of it. Tailoring your promotions to specific locations makes your audience feel seen and valued. This kind of content resonates more deeply with audiences because it reflects their environment and experiences, which can boost engagement and sales.
Since you’ve already identified your audience early on, you can use Snapchat’s geofilters to localize your Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions in 3 steps:
Make sure they’re visually appealing and clearly communicate your brand’s story.
Define the boundaries for where your geofilter will be available—around your brick-and-mortar store? Where your highest-value customers live?
To maximize usage, let your audience know about the geofilter through other channels like email, SMS, or other social media channels.
7. Incorporate Snapchat into your broader BFCM marketing strategy
To truly maximize Black Friday sales, you need to guide your audience through the sales funnel by integrating Snapchat into a broader, omnichannel BFCM marketing strategy that incorporates email, SMS, paid, and organic marketing efforts.
Here are a few ways to make sure your social media strategy complements the rest of your omnichannel BFCM marketing strategy:
There are a few ways to do this. You can collect customer information with features like Snapchat’s native lead forms, or you can use lookalike builders across social media platforms to connect your social followings to your owned marketing lists.
Let’s say you’re partnering with an influencer on a top-of-funnel BFCM Snapchat marketing campaign, and you’ve built out a special landing page at a vanity URL where the influencer is sending their audience. You can launch a specific pop-up for that page only, as well as a unique welcome series that includes a 20-second video of the influencer endorsing your company.
Leads get more expensive the closer you get to BFCM, so remember: it’s worth spending more on paid ads earlier.
8. Assess and optimize your Snapchat marketing
You can find most of what you need to know to assess and optimize your Snapchat marketing by swiping up on your snap or a story and checking out the Insights section.
There, you’ll see metrics like:
- Reach: total number of people who’ve seen your snaps
- Unique story views: number of times someone opened your story and watched it for at least a second
- Story view time: breakdown of how many minutes your audience spent watching your content
- Completion rate: percentage of people who watched your entire story
- Screenshots: number of times someone screenshot your snap or story
Understanding how your content performs can help you generate more sales come BFCM.
If your story has a low completion rate, for example, you might need to make the video more engaging or try a new photo that better showcases your product. On the other hand, if your story’s getting a lot of screenshots, that’s a good sign that your audience finds it valuable because it means they want to come back to it after it vanishes in 24 hours.
If you decide to take the paid ad route to boost the visibility of your campaign, you should also monitor:
- Paid impressions: number of times someone tapped on or saw your ad on the Discover page for at least a second
- Swipe-up rate: percentage of ad impressions who swiped up
- Paid reach: number of unique people who saw your paid ad
- Paid eCPM: cost per 1,000 impressions
By keeping an eye on these metrics, you can identify potential issues or bottlenecks in your Snapchat marketing strategy—and adjust them in time for Black Friday. A low swipe-up rate, for example, might be an indication that you need to work on your CTA.
9. A/B test to see what works and doesn’t
According to Rob Hand, lead product marketing manager at Klaviyo, “you need to test and iterate in real time to see what actually works and gets people excited.” He’s talking about A/B testing in SMS marketing—but the same principle applies across marketing channels.
Similar to how marketing automation platforms let you A/B test emails and SMS messages, Snapchat allows you to A/B test your snaps, stories, or ads to help you find the best-performing ones.
In Snapchat, you can conduct:
- Creative split tests
- Audience split tests
- Placement split tests
- Goal split tests
As Snapchat puts it, “A/B testing shows you what type of ads are resonating with your target audience, and why—giving you the ability to unlock maximum return on investment for your budget so you can grow your business.”
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