Snapchat posts a new guide on how to create successful Snapchat ad campaigns, covering all the basic elements, and adds some extra notes on what exactly works best in the app.

And the Snap team comes with some meaty stats to make its case:

"Snapchat has 375 million active daily users with $4.4 trillion in global spending power. What's more, 75% of Gen Z and millennials say it's the number one platform for sharing real-life experiences."

Some pretty big claims, underlining the potential of the app for maximizing brand awareness and promotion-but how can you tap into that, and create resonant, effective Snap marketing pushes?

You can find all of Snap's best practices here, but we'll outline some of the key takeaways in this post:

First and foremost, Snap provides a list of best practices, which are generally the same digital marketing principles applied across:

Choose the right ad format for your goals
Put the most critical product information front and center in your ad creative
Make your ad feel native to Snapchat
Encourage utility with relevant messaging
Design for audio on
Connect your ads
Test ad creative and try new ad formats. Use goal-based bidding to bid towards your desired action. Broaden your targeting. Understand your audience reach to optimize. I suppose the only two main ones are 'design for sound on', which hasn't always been the case on Snap, and 'broaden your targeting'.

As TikTok leads and others begin to adopt sound on consumption, this introduces entirely new possibilities for your ad creative and adds a whole new element that can now be reliably inserted into campaigns.

Now with the latest update by Apple called iOS 14 which had curtailed some apps' ability to collect data, most now appeal to advertisers to expand their targeting parameters, hence allowing their ad delivery systems to show relevant content to the most valuable prospects.

That adds more dependence on those systems to connect your promotions to the right audience, but mounting research, in several apps, now shows that expanded audience parameters can help to drive better outcomes.

Snapchat also advises marketers to 'embrace the format' and the uniqueness of Snapchat, by focusing on joy, and keeping your promotions under 10 seconds in length.

When it comes to things not to do, according to Snapchat, marketers need to have realistic expectations on the time needed to develop their campaigns and be able to clearly see solid results.

"We'd all love to flip a switch and have ad engagement soar. But, real results? Those take time. Of course, launching a campaign and seeing positive returns in the first few days or weeks is possible. Typically though, those results are reserved for the well initiated - businesses that have their targeting and creative locked in."

Snap says your first Snapchat campaign is mostly all about data accumulation and pivots and each push takes about five days to give any meaningful strategic insight.

Snapchat also urges businesses to connect with audiences personally, not to push messaging, and for brands to regularly analyze their performance data to know what's working or not.
The majority are fairly general, but there are some useful Snap-specific data points here, which might be of value in your planning, and could help get you on the right path with your campaigns.

If you're looking to optimize your Snap ads or simply want to start a new campaign within the app, these may be worth looking at.