MomentFeed Uses Location Data to Boost ROI on Snapchat Campaigns

MomentFeed is announcing the addition of Snapchat geofilters to its social marketing platform this morning, as the digital marketing firm inches closer to becoming a one stop shop for multi-national brands looking to fully capitalize on social advertising formats.

Geofilters, for the uninitiated, are special overlays or location-based stickers that can only be accessed by Snapchat users in certain locations. Although geofilters have been around since July 2014, brands have only recently been able to create and sponsor geofilters of their own. They were introduced as an ad product this past June. Since then, major brand advertisers like McDonalds, GE, Nike, and the Minions movie have all experimented with using geofilters to reach Snapchat’s powerful — and youthful — audience.

Multi-location brands that work with MomentFeed will now be able to geofence the exact locations where their geofilters should appear without having to manually input each polygon on a map for Snapchat. MomentFeed says this process should increase accuracy, with “cleansed and verified” data for each shop or restaurant, and that businesses will no longer have to worry about their branded geofilters showing up when users are in the wrong location.

“Done right, Snapchat can present your brand in a way no other network does,” says Eoghan Geoghegan, vice president of business development at MomentFeed. “[It can be] authentic, relevant and fun. While especially impactful with millennials, these are all positive factors in increasing a brand’s level of consideration amongst any target audience.”

Snapchat joins the roster of other paid media, search, and social media platforms supported by MomentFeed. The company has been helping multi-location businesses cleanse data inaccuracies so they can better manage the content being posted at their store locations on Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, Twitter, and Google+ for years. However, this push into Snapchat is new for MomentFeed and the company sees it as a large market opportunity.

“Part of our process is that we verify all address, phone number and latitude/longitude data. In a mobile-led world and especially on a mobile only platform like Snapchat, these three data-points—with opening hours coming a close fourth—are the most important to make sure you have right,” Geoghegan says.

Multi-national brands, like the ones MomentFeed works with, make up the core of Snapchat’s advertiser base. Fifty-seven percent of brands purchasing ads on the platform fall into the activewear, CPG, and consumer electronics categories. The estimated cost per day for branded geofilters and lenses is $100,000 to $700,000, according to the business intelligence firm L2 Inc.

The challenge that many of these brands have been facing — and the pain point MomentFeed is trying to eliminate — has to do with verifying, managing, and constantly updating the locations where their geofilters should appear. Retailers usually only want their geofilters to appear when customers are inside their stores. But if retailers can’t provide Snapchat with accurate GPS coordinates for all of their locations, or if the location data they provide is out of date, then the entire campaign can be thrown off.

“On Snapchat, campaigns can be targeted by location and if you’re a multi-location brand, that’s the best way to drive traffic and increase engagement at your POS,” Geoghegan says. “Snapchat doesn’t know where all your locations are, you need to tell them and by leveraging your location dataset in MomentFeed, brands can rest assured whether it’s a store, market or national, the foundation on which their campaign is built is solid.”

MomentFeed has already been leveraging location data for years, so making the transition and using the data for Snapchat campaigns shouldn’t be a huge leap. Still, Geoghegan sees MomentFeed’s new capabilities as a major improvement in the way multi-national brands can take advantage of Snapchat to reach millennial audiences, and he says geofilters in particular have become an effective strategy for brands looking to drive immediate sales.

“The nature of Snapchat is that you can choose to be a total goofball and it won’t be crystalized in your online persona forever. This form of peer-to-peer, authentic and unpolished content grabs a user’s attention quicker and captivates beginning to end,” he says. “Hitching your brand to a user’s ability to tell that story to their friends or even better, giving them a tool to amplify their fun and impact in their social community will only further endear you to them, and given the viral nature of social media, at the same time—raise your level of awareness and consideration amongst a customer’s followers too.”

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.