As the holiday season closes in, and brands look to maximise opportunities to make up what they can after an incredibly tough year, this week, Snapchat has provided some new pointers on how brands can get the most out of their Snap promotions, with ten tips of note for your campaigns.

You can read Snapchat's full overview here, but here's a quick overview of Snap's top tips.

1. Select the appropriate ad format for your objective Snapchat ads have five available objectives: Within these, Snapchat says that these ad products are best aligned with specific goals:

Driving sales and sign-ups online - Dynamic Ads, Single Image or Video Ads, Story Ads, and Collection Ads.
Boosting app installs and engagement - App Install attachments, Lens AR Experiences.
Building brand awareness - Story Ads, Lens AR Experience, Extended Play Commercial.
Retargeting existing customers - Story Ads
There are different ways you can apply each, so they aren't strictly limited to those categories, but Snap claims that these are the best match campaign types for each objective.
2. Position your product front and center in your ad creative
Snapchat reports that brands should seek to position a 'hero' message, and to incorporate appropriate offers or specials to build consideration.

For eCommerce, Snap recommends that brands should put the focus product/s "front and center', while local businesses should look to specifically highlight the services and/or products they specialize in.

"For example, a local restaurant can showcase popular dishes or specials in their ad creative to entice customers to visit." 

3. Make your ads feel native to Snapchat
Snapchat also adds that brands should align their creativity with the native platform experience, in order to have a more integrated user experience.

For this, Snapchat recommends your ad duration should be 5 to 6 non-intrusive seconds. Advertisements which include user-generated content (UGC) and/or 'Snapchat inspired features' tend to see a better response than more polished, generic brand promotions according to Snap.

4. Drive urgency with relevant messaging
Expanding on the above point, Snapchat also observes that simplicity is key in your ad creative.

"Your messaging should be easy to understand, displayed from the beginning of your ad, be localized for your audience, and provide an offer message (if available) within the first 2 seconds of the ad."

That's not a lot of time, though at 5-6 seconds duration, you don't have much to work with. The more direct and aligned to your brand purpose, the better.

5. Design for sound on
Interestingly, given that different other platforms advise brands to include captions for sound-off viewing, Snapchat says that 64% of Snapchat Ads are viewed with sound on, so you should look to include audio elements
An effective way to incorporate audio in your ad creative is by using a customer testimonial of your product or brand within the ad creative. A verbal testimonial brings your products to life and enables Snapchatters to relate better to your brand, thereby helping them see how your business can add value."

That is a straightforward, yet possibly useful suggestion, that can further help improve your messaging for your Snap ad.

6. Link your ads properly
Snapchat also recommends the brands to make sure that they are using the correct links for the campaign goals, such as:
Drive online sales-Web View attachments, allowing Snapchatters to swipe up to access a web page Drive app installs-App Install attachments allow the Snapchatters to swipe up and download your app Drive app engagement/app visits- Deep links help businesses drive customers to the specific areas of their apps
You can find more information about your Snap ad linking options here.

7. Test ad creative and try new ad formats
Snapchat also recommends testing your ad creative to maximize performance.

But when testing ad creative, consider running your test for 2-4 weeks to gather enough impressions on your ad(s). After getting up and running your ads on Snapchat, we recommend testing a variety of ad formats to find out the winning combination for your brand.

Of course, the more you test, the better, but not everyone has the capacity and/or scope to test on a wide scale. But if you can, running initial tests for a defined period will help to drive better results.

8. Use goal-based bidding to bid towards your desired action
The goal-based bidding of Snapchat requires brands to make use of it in such a manner so that the optimization of their ads will align with specific actions, like the installing of your app or purchase made.

"By specifying your cost-per-action in the 'Delivery' section of Ads Manager, impressions will be delivered to efficiently achieve that outcome."

Goal-based bidding essentially rewards more responsive creative - if people are engaging with your content, the system will drive more engagement, which will increase performance.
9. Widen your targeting
Snapchat reports that brands can further maximize their campaigns by widening their targeting once they've been running an ad for a while, and have a better understanding of audience response.

You can also expand your reach further by expanding geo, gender, age ranges, and languages from within existing ad sets and campaigns."

That comes with an inherent level of risk as well, but the more campaigns you run, the longer you run them, and the more you can learn about response rates to your audience. You can indeed expand into these more specific segments.

10. Understand your audience reach to optimize
This leads us into the final point of discussion-by using Snap's Audience Insights, you could better know your audience's response and then help in the optimization of your campaigns.

You can then proceed to create custom audience subsets and saved audiences to test and expand. It takes time and analysis to get down to the right audience focus, but the more you invest in this, the better your ad performance will be.

Some of these tips are very helpful, although a lot of them are testing-based, i.e. exploratory ad spend to optimize performance, which really is the only true way to gain a better understanding of how to maximize your ad efforts.

The problem is that this might not be particularly helpful for this holiday season, as it only gives you a week or so between now and Christmas. Still, these notes are a good jumping-off point for your Snap campaigns, and this will better give you a feel for what the platform has in store for your promotions.