Instagram and Snapchat in the geostickers “battle”

Instagram and SnapChat features go hand-in-hand,with Instagram taking a lot of inspiration from SnapChat and its successful tools.

In March, Instagram has launched geostickers ( a kind of like stickers that represent your location and only work in Instagram’s ephemeral Stories feature), a feature that already had a lot of success on SnapChat.

On SnapChat, geofilters are creative overlays that capture where you are or what you’re up to in a Snap! Create your own, and surprise Snapchatters in the locations you choose. On a business side, Geofilters offer a chance to be seen and sent by Snapchatters at your store, event, or other location. A business can drive awareness and engagement, in one swipe. At the moment, On-Demand Geofilters are available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Saudi Arabia, UAE, France, the United Kingdom, and most of the USA.

To see the available filters in your area, simply take a picture or record a video and then swipe across the screen. There are two types of On-Demand filters are offered: Personal and Business. In their guidelines, Snapchat explains:

• A Personal Geofilter is one that doesn’t include any branding, business marks/names, or logos, and doesn’t promote a business or a brand. You might submit a Personal Snapchat Geofilter to celebrate a birthday or graduation, for example.
• A Business Geofilter is one that promotes a business or a brand.  If you’re creating a Business filter, you must have the necessary rights and permissions to include any business names, marks, logos, or trademarks and you must also supply a business name while purchasing the filter.

More about it you can read here.

And here.

Creating smart, beautiful and interesting geofilters for SnapChat became a business on its own, as companies such as Geofilter Studio, Canva or Pepper Filters prove it.

But how do geofilters work in Instagram? According to TechCrunch, the one thing Instagram’s geostickers and filters do that Snap’s don’t is show the Instagram location page for that place with a tap, though Stories posts won’t show up there, so there’s no privacy issue with that.”All of Instagram’s cloning efforts seem to be paying off. Instagram Stories already has 150 million daily users, more than Snap’s original version of the feature. Instagram Stories is stealing Snapchat usage, which led Snapchat’s user growth to plummet 82 percent in the two quarters after Facebook’s copycat spun up. Now worries about Snap’s growth are sinking into its share price, which slumped 12 percent yesterday and 11 percent today after its 40 percent IPO pop,” wrote TechCrunch in March.

When you click on a geofilter from someone’s Location Story, that geofilter will direct you to Instagram’s Places page, which contains a collection of other users’ posts tagged with the same location. From there, you can watch a long reel of Stories from strangers who have visited and tagged the place you are in.

“If Instagram decides to monetize Location Stories, it will likely look and function similarly to the hashtag feature in Stories Instagram is currently rolling out. Brands will be able to purchase tagged geofilters, featuring their brand name, logo, and location. When Instagrammers click on the filter, they will either be redirected to the Places pages or to the brand’s Instagram page. From either of those pages, Instagrammers can view the business location, get directions, and get familiarized with the brand through the UGC content people posted in Places and the content posted on the brand’s page,” wrote advertisemint.com.

The best media mix for your brand in 2017

The media market is changing under our eyes, each year bringing something new. It’s more than obvious that, even if you are representing a smaller brand, it’s not enough to rely on a website or social media page alone if you want to be competitive in the marketplace. Moreover, the media channels that used to work very good for you two or three years ago may very well not be the best ones to use anymore.

According to Initiative and their report Media Fact Book 2016, in Romania the TV continued to be in 2015 the rising engine of the media market, having a push of volumes of 7 percent compared to 2014 and reaching the EUR 212 million margin. Other channels that grew were the online (a boost of 12 percent and reaching EUR 57 million) and the radio (a 5 percent boost, until EUR 19 million). The OOH remained stable at EUR 28 million.  Moreover, Initiative estimated that the media market would reach in 2016 EUR 351 million this year, following a 6 percent growth. The evolution on each channel is similar to the one in 2015 – the TV market will grow with 6 percent, the online with 12, the radio with 5, while the OOH will remain the same and the print would continue to drop still with 10 percent. In this context, the approaching of the digital next to the TV in the consumers’ preferences are, the amplitude that the mobile took, the influence of the multi-screening or the forever bigger importance of the content’s quality has over the rise of the media budgets.

source: Linkedin

With a well-chosen media mix, you can build the kind of name recognition and buzz for your company that isn’t possible with single-pronged approach. A mixture of owned, paid and earned media will help ensure your marketing efforts are reaching your target audience.

Consumers want brands that are useful and accessible, and most of all, entertaining. Marketers will continue to pull out all the stops to counter declining ad receptivity. In 2017, we’ll see more branded content and less regular advertising. Get ready for more native content, short and long form video, branded filters, and emoji and PR stunts. But it won’t end here. The specialists forsee that the marketers will forge ahead with new technologies such as 360 video, augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence (chatbots performing customer service and sales functions), making the landscape ripe for new creativity. Marketers will also closely monitor effectiveness as studies start to show which formats consumers find annoying and intrusive, particularly on mobile.

These advancements create new challenges for marketers. Far from a controlled consumer view of a brand (TV, outdoor, instore), marketers will face multiplatform, multi-device, in and out of walled gardens, all differently experienced by every consumer. Geotargeting will be seen as a commercial opportunity and Snapchat itself is using geofilters to let people know where to find a Snapbot vending booth. Brands will move quickly into customized/personalized creative content, delivered in a targeted way via programmatic buying. We will see more sequential content as marketers consider using retargeting for a more strategic and persuasive catenation of consumer messages.

In a media landscape of ongoing dramatic change, advertisers will more aggressively adopt multiple media alternatives to reach and connect with their audiences throughout 2017. Synergies will become more important than any single channel and the collective weight of all channels put together. Marketers will be focused on understanding the role each media plays within a broader plan and how they rub off to produce synergistic effects. The concept of synergies has been around for some time but what has changed is the planning aspect and the application of a discipline to the selection of channels to maximize its impact. Cross media studies conducted by Kantar Millward Brown show that globally 25% of media effectiveness has been attributed to synergies, and nearly 40% in APAC. These numbers are not only growing but increasingly we are seeing non-TV synergies emerging as advertisers and agencies start to get their heads around this. The two broad parameters needed to leverage synergies are – creative synchronization and media duplication and phasing.

source: Digital Land

„A “big idea” is important for creative synchronization to occur, but it’s also about adapting the message to the medium and following a common theme across a campaign. For example, it’s unlikely that a 30 second TV ad will work as well on YouTube or Facebook because these media have different characteristics. But they offer opportunities for forming different kinds of relationships that meet consumer needs at different times and occasions. Optimising media duplication and phasing can go a long way in driving synergies but as a first step, marketers will need to ensure that every medium has a role to play within the broader media mix. Roles will be in terms of driving ‘reach and or frequency’ or various aspects of how people think, feel and make decisions about the brand,” said Straford Rodrigues, Media & Digital Director, APAC at Kantar Millward Brown.

Therefore, every brand needs to create its media plan accordingly to its target, expectations and business plan. The strategy is more important than ever: setting clear objectives, finding the right opportunities, integrating your message and your true content, exploring, creating, producing and measuring.

Apart from the media planning itself, don’t forget the fact that the content is the KING and it needs to be as powerful, sincere and creative as possible.