Snapchat Affiliate Marketing: A Practical Guide (To Make $$$)

I remember a few years ago, Snapchat was all the craze. All my friends were into it, everyone was maintaining their streaks, and we loved passing the time by trying out those filters.

Since then, I feel like the app has become way less popular. Other platforms like TikTok have become the new thing, but the platform still has a ton of potential for making money.

There are a few different ways to earn here, but affiliate marketing is particularly well-suited for it, provided you know how to make it work.

I am here to give you the A to Z for successful affiliate marketing campaigns on Snapchat, with an example, so that you can figure out how feasible it is for you.

But jumping right into it, let me give you a little context about the platform.

How Snapchat Works

I wouldn’t be surprised if you aren’t super familiar with Snapchat, as it is a far cry from being the most popular app of its kind. Here are the broad strokes of how this ecosystem works so you can get a feel for it.

1. The Audience

Unlike giants like Facebook, that have billions of worldwide users, Snapchat only has a few hundred million.

While it is still growing in popularity, the growth has definitely slowed down since it began, and it also pales in comparison to its competition’s growth, like TikTok.

There are roughly a little over 100 million active users in the US as of 2023, and India actually has the biggest audience share at around 182 million users.

Other than geography, you need to understand that an overwhelming majority of the audience here belongs to two age groups:

• Millennials (born 1980-1994): People who grew up with globalization and the rise of the internet. They love to invest in experiences like travel and tend to stick with mainstream trends.
• Gen Z (born 1995-2010): Folks who grew up in the digital age, experiencing multiple realities at once. They are radically inclusive, very conscious of the environment, and seekers of truth.

2. Level of Engagement

There might be fewer people who visit regularly, but the app itself is made to be engaging. I remember when my friends got into it, the user experience was nothing short of addictive!

You have a very personalized space here. In fact, privacy and close-knitted groups are the hallmarks of this platform.

It has features like disappearing messages and media, files that can only be viewed a limited number of times, and personal messages. The concept of daily streaks that gamify regular use also drives engagement.

Beyond that, the app’s content is extremely short-form (less than 30 seconds), and they have their own version of TikTok scrolling on their Spotlight page.

3. Marketing Potential

The audience might be young, and growth may be dwindling, but there’s more to it than that. In terms of overall digital marketing, Snapchat may very well be underutilized at the moment.

As you can see in the graph, it is easily the least popular platform for digital marketing efforts worldwide. While this means that people are not willing to invest much into it, it also means less competition for you.

In fact, Snapchat has one of the cheapest average CPM of all such platforms at less than three dollars. Compare that to Facebook’s $12 CPM, and you start to see the potential.

CPM stands for Cost Per Thousand (M= milli = Latin for 1000), and it is the price paid by an advertiser to get their ads seen by one thousand people.

Is Snapchat Good for Affiliate Marketing? 

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online since you just need to focus on making sales to do it. You can sell other people’s products and services and let them manage everything from the orders to the returns.

As we have seen, there is minimal competition on Snapchat for advertisers, but is it a good option for affiliate marketing?

In a nutshell, Yes. Snapchat is a great platform for affiliate marketing for various reasons. Here are just a few of them:

• It allows the unrestricted posting of affiliate links without any penalties, unlike other platforms where you can get banned for doing so.
• The user base is highly engaged and uses the app regularly.
• It is definitely underutilized and has low competition.

We will review the pros and cons at the end once again.

Just know for now that while Snapchat has a lot of potential for affiliate marketing, there is a lot you have to keep in mind to do it successfully. Let’s take a closer look at the details.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing On Snapchat

Now that you’ve enjoyed the starter course on how Snapchat works and its potential, I hope you are ready for the main dish: The step-by-step guide on how to do affiliate marketing on Snapchat successfully.

After that, you can look forward to some awesome tips and tricks and, finally, an actual example of a successful affiliate marketing campaign that I came across in my research.

So let’s look at these crucial steps that you need to consider seriously before starting such a project:

1. Choose The Right Program

First things first, to start off on the right foot, you need to choose the right affiliate program to join. That’s precisely why I gave you an overview of the platform before we started.

When choosing the correct program for you, you need to consider a few things about yourself and your own needs and capabilities. You need to consider the goals of your campaign and the decisions related to it.

But all of that is somewhat within your control, or within your reach at least. What isn’t in your control is the ecosystem in which you operate. Choosing the right verticals that are compatible is crucial to success.

So consider the following things when choosing an affiliate program to integrate with Snapchat:

• The audience is young and has very short attention spans. Dating, Eco-friendly consumer products, fashion, and nutrition or health-related verticals are some of the most compatible ones.
• When selecting an eCommerce business to promote, try to niche down as much as possible. It’s easier to sell goth merchandise to metalheads than a generic T-shirt that says, “Music is my Life.”
• Consider your own capabilities and ideas to create great content and target ads properly for any specific company. Can you make it work on the platform, knowing what you know about it?

The biggest thing I advise you to consider is whether or not you can make a program profitable using your own marketing strategy.

Obviously, it’s much better and easier to choose the right program if you are already a content creator and have a considerable following.

If not, Snapchat gives you a great deal on running ads, but then the ads have to be super effective. It also has to be profitable, so the commission structure needs to leave you with some reasonable wiggle room.

The main point is this: You shouldn’t be spending more on ads than you can earn back from the sale.

If you earn a twenty-dollar commission per sale, spend more than fifteen to eighteen dollars on promotions to make that sale.

So, calculate a budget, do a trial run, and then join a program that feels right. You don’t have to limit yourself to the safest verticals either, as long as you are creative and smart with your promotions.

2. Set Up Your Account & Establish Your Reach

Once you’ve chosen a vertical and looked at some programs, it’s time to start setting things up that actually get the ball rolling.

This is the stuff that gets you started, the things that you do in the beginning to really start feeling the progress. Things like:

• Making your public profile and setting up a business account for ad campaigns.
• Writing your bio and filling out your profile.
• Adding on all of your contacts and the people you know as your followers, thereby starting to grow your reach on the platform and establishing your presence.

You might wish to run ads and have other strategies for promotion, but trust me, when it comes to promotion, you need all the help you can get.

If you have any followers on any other platform or medium, redirecting them to your new account before you start posting would be an ultra-high IQ move.

3. Create Awesome Content

Finally, it’s time to step down to the ring and really get your hands dirty. As an affiliate marketer, your content is not only your bread and butter, it’s the thing you have the most control over.

You could say that it’s the twenty percent of the work that gives eighty percent of your results.

And now that you’ve laid down the groundwork, you can start to tackle this with the attention that it deserves. First things first, you need a lot of inspiration.

No need to reinvent the wheel; first, you need to understand what works. Here is what I suggest:

• Check out the most popular accounts and see their best content, especially within your niche. You should also check out the Discover and Spotlight pages for this research part.
• Understand the different types of content: Snaps (images + videos), Collections (grouped posts), Stories, and everything in between.
• Make use of the excellent filters and augmented reality lenses on Snapchat that give you so many options for making outstanding content.
• Know that short videos and trends are the most effective for advertising here. The folks at Snapchat advise you to keep it lesser than six seconds. THAT’S REALLY SHORT!
• Beyond that, just make a content plan, start creating, and start posting accordingly, just like any other platform.

4. Optimize Your CTAs

That means your Call To Action(s). This is how you seal the deal. It’s how you communicate to your viewers what you need from them.

“Go buy this product” or “Click now” would be good examples, but you can do way better than that. You might have to as well; there are a ton of things fighting for the user’s attention, and you will have to earn it.

The best-selling strategy isn’t about you or the product at all, though. The best salesmen know to focus on the customer and just ask them questions. If you have what they need, they’ll buy it from you.

So, the best advice I can give you? Clearly signify who this product or service is for in a cool, fun, and interesting way that your target audience could appreciate.

You should also treat your profile as a mini-sales funnel built into the platform. What do you want the traffic to do once they are interested enough in your ads to check out your profile?

There’s a lot you can do with this, so make the most out of every word you can customize on the page.

5. Run Advertisements

Now I’ve already touched upon the potential that running ads has on this app. In case you missed it: It’s very affordable, and there is minimal competition.

Combine that with the fact that you can add affiliate links without pre-landing pages or any in-betweens like that, and you’ve got one of the most effective ways to run ads for affiliate marketing on social media.

In fact, it’s so crucial, it deserves a section of its own. Let’s go over it step-by-step.

How Do Snapchat Ads Work?

To start with Snapchat ads, you must know the following steps.

1. Click on the link below and customize your own ads. You can also get help from the experts for more clarity.

Snapchat ads- https://forbusiness.snapchat.com/

When you click on the link, you land on this page where you see the option of Create an ad; click on that to go ahead. 

2. If you don’t already have an account, you’ll need to fill out some information on the next page after selecting Create an ad, followed by another page asking for additional information.

3. If you already have an account, you’ll be prompted to create a public profile. 

This involves supplying information about your company, such as its name, contact information, and payment method.

4. When you are done with these steps, you are left with the most crucial part, which begins by choosing your ideal objective, like if you need it to Increase website traffic, increase app installs, or enhance views. 

Choose the objective that corresponds to the goals; it sets the foundation of your campaign.

5. The next step would be selecting your budget and audience. It is essential to understand your target options to reach your target audience.

I don’t mean just audience and budget but also by target time; you have to schedule your ads at your ideal time. Consider the best time your ad can have the highest reach. 

6. Now, make sure your content is well-optimized for your selected audience one last time, and review it through their eyes.

7. Examine all the settings and options to ensure they align with your campaign goals. 

When you’re finished, click the “Launch Campaign” or equivalent option to run your ads.

You are now good to go with Snapchat ads!

Some Tips & Tricks

As an affiliate marketer, you need to understand the platform as much as possible. So, to save you some time and energy, here are some tips that might prove useful:

1. Have a good content mix that lets you try out various types of styles. This will improve your chances and keep things interesting for your followers.
2. Test out your ads yourself to catch mistakes. A common one to avoid is asking users to swipe up instead of adding a button link, which might accidentally cause them to skip.
3. Use drawings and blends to make things extra interesting and fun. If you enjoy making the content and it entertains the users, it’ll be way more effective than a formulaic post.
4. Optimize your content for instant impressions. Most people will only look at it for a second or two before swiping. Make your brand stand out clearly from the start.
5. Remember that your account name and brand will be displayed at the top, so keep a little space there to avoid blocking anything out.

Those were some useful tips to avoid some common pitfalls. Now let me tell you about a real-life example I found of a successful Snapchat affiliate marketing campaign that made decent money.

Case Study: Canada Debt Relief Snapchat Affiliate Marketing

Now, this is a pretty popular example that you can find as easily as I did, but if you don’t care to leave this page, let me give you the broad strokes of it.

So this was done by the person who runs Snapvertising, which is a course on… exactly what it sounds like. Safe to say this guy knows what he is doing.

More important than that, he ran and managed a campaign himself, promoting Debt relief services in Canada, not the kind of vertical you expect to thrive on this platform.

Yet, he made a monthly income of $24,000 with a $6,000 investment!

He did this by directly addressing his target audience and optimizing his campaign properly. The CTA simply read as: “Did you know? Canadians born before 1997 could get debt relief.”

Pretty impressive, if you ask me.

Should You Do Affiliate Marketing on Snapchat? – The Conclusion 

At the end of the day, does this mean that Snapchat is the ace in the hole you have been waiting for to jump-start your income and make you super rich?

Yes, and No.

If you can make use of the younger audience and cater to their unique tastes, then you probably shouldn’t sleep on this one.

But if you have a program that simply cannot be condensed into a three-second video, or maybe you want to sell pain relief ointment to old people, you might have better luck as a door-to-door salesman.

Ultimately, things are always changing, and who knows what’s around the corner for this underdog of the digital marketing space?

For those of you who skimmed through the article only to read the headings and the bulleted points, let me end with some quick pros and cons, to sum up all that info:

The Pros

• Running ads efficiently can give you a real bang for your buck here.
• No need to hide your links or build a landing page; Snapchat doesn’t restrict the posting of affiliate links at the moment.
• The app gives you a bunch of tools to make some really cool content.
• People here are young and prone to impulse purchases, with considerable spending power.
• They are also highly engaged and use the app regularly.

The Cons

• Long-form content just isn’t a thing here. If you can’t do it in less than ten seconds, it’s going to be a problem.
• Not as popular as it once was and far from being one of the most popular social media platforms.
• Disappearing messages and a lack of groups or broadcast channels make free affiliate marketing a little difficult. It doesn’t help you much, that’s for sure.
• The younger and smaller audience might set a ceiling on your revenue, limiting your growth.

FAQs [Frequently Asked Questions]