As the Astroworld tour makes its way around North America, it’s the perfect time to show you how Snapchat lenses can add value throughout multiple stages of your music and event marketing campaigns. From your next album release, to increasing the excitement of your fans while you perform live, Snapchat lenses are designed to drive brand engagement, and promote album and ticket sales.
We created two Snapchat lenses to show how Travis Scott could hype the Astroworld tour across his favourite social media channels (look for him on Snapchat as T). The first is a world lens, featuring the golden 'Travis' head from the Astroworld album cover—complete with yellow smoke billowing from his mouth. Snapchatters can tap and drag Travis’s head around their physical space, and create totally unique Stories to share with their friends. This lens could be shared organically using digital or printed Snapcodes and integrated into an online competition for exclusive access to pre-sale VIP concert tickets.
We then created a face lens that allows users to blow yellow smoke out of their mouths. Users can create enhanced Snap Story content while they are at his concert or at an Astroworld party of their own, and remember: any content created on Snapchat can be easily downloaded into the camera roll and shared across social channels, including TikTok, Instagram or Facebook!
The Astroworld album’s signature golden head was perfect to turn into a lens experience. However, just about any concept art can be transformed into a highly engaging Face or World lens, and coming up with the creative is just as much fun as using it! Tap here on mobile to try the Astroworld lens, and here to try the Astroworld Live face lens.
At their core, Snapchat lenses create memorable, interactive moments for users to share with their friends. Integrating a lens into your album launch marketing strategy means users have access to shareable visual content that has the potential to go viral especially amongst users 18-24 & 25-34 year olds, two of Snapchats biggest demographics. More than 70 million people access their AR Lenses every day, using the tools for an average of three minutes per session, making Shapchat lenses one of the most engaging ways to get your audience excited about your new album release, concert tour and merch.
After the Travis Scott face and world lenses were published in Snapchat’s powerful Community Lens Library, the lenses had over 100K views in two weeks! This was with organic sharing only, and a pretty powerful stat given that there was no other promotion of this lens experience.
If you don’t want to rely on peer-to-peer sharing alone, one of the most effective ways to get word out about your lens is to integrate it into a Snap Ad. With a Reach x Frequency campaign, you are able to buy ads in advance – and the main benefits include predictable ad delivery as well as greater control over frequency. These ads show up between stories, and Snapchatters can swipe up on the ad to unlock your custom Face or World lens.
With Snap Ads, you can target Snapchatters based on their interests and behaviours, via geofenced locations, or simply by selecting Travis Scott’s followers on this platform. You can also create custom audiences and lookalikes to find more people similar to your existing fans that might be interested in the your album or tour.
There are multiple features Snapchat has introduced to their Face and World lenses that can help amplify an artist’s album launch. A ‘Watch Now’ button integrated into a lens as a CTA could open a teaser clip of Travis Scott’s single SICKO MODE music video, for example.
You can also turn your lens into a shoppable ad. Nicki Minaj’s team created an Snapchat AR lens which was allowed them to purchase her Queen necklace in-app. SeatGeek, a mobile first ticketing company, used Snapchat to sell football tickets without users having to leave the app. This could help increase ticket sales if you were to geofence the ads for specific stops on the tour you want to promote more actively.
With traditional album sales down and streaming not always an effective revenue source, artists are looking for creative ways to increase their profits in other channels. Making money on merchandise and concert sales are becoming more important and lucrative ways to make money.
Snapchat lenses help customers stay engaged within the community before and after the buy. Combining a lens experience with the Shoppable AR Lens feature (we talk about it here) allows you to add a “Buy Now”, “Watch”, or “Install” button to the lens. These calls to action make your ROI easily measurable as users could be redirected to to the KKW eCommerce site or to an app download.
You’ve used lenses to hype your album release and new music video drop, and have just sold out your tour! Now, you can bring the mobile experience full circle with a custom face lens your fans can use while they are at your concert. Snapchatters love taking and sharing videos of their experiences (this is, of course, the reason why Snapchat was created)—so help them share proof they were at your once-in-a-lifetime music event with a second lens only accessible to concert goers! This can be done by printing the Snapcode on merch available exclusively at the show, by sharing it on digital tickets, or by using a geofenced drop within the Snapchat carousel.
These are just a handful of ways you can integrate Snapchat lenses at multiple stages of your social media marketing campaign. Offering your fans tools to create enhanced Story content with your brand messaging will help both spread the word and allow them create memorable experiences to share with their friends.
Want to learn more about Snapchat lenses? Head over here to see more branded AR lens campaigns!
