Seriously Digital Entertainment's mobile game Best Fiends had a huge pre-established fan base across all social media channels except for Snapchat. BLKBX was tasked with creating a unique Snapchat experience to engage with fans in a fresh way.
While their regular social channels focused on the heroes of the game, this campaign took the approach of giving the villains of the game, the slugs, a place to live in the digital world. Utilizing vinyl toys of the slugs combined with handmade props and sets, BLKBX created stories around what the hapless and goofy slugs do in their free time when they're not battling the fiends.
The overall strategy had 4 pillars:
DIY Visuals
Everything in the snap stories were created by hand. Snapchat users want to know there's another human on the other side of story. The DIY approach helped to give the Snapchat Stories a sense of authenticity that Snapchat users are looking for.
It's Good To Be Bad
BLKBX turned the evil slugs into Snapchat stars. The slugs participated in all kinds of activities ranging from their own version of The Grammy Awards to a day trip around Hollywood to creating slug ornaments for their Christmas tree. Every week was completely different, but the one thing that stayed the same was keeping the slugs in a starring role.
Snapcode Promotion
For every new Snapchat Story, a Snapcode was created and posted on all of the Best Fiends social channels. Snapcodes are personalized codes that allow users to scan them with their Snapchat app to follow your brand's channel. This made it easy for fans of the Best Fiends social pages to join in on the fun.
Game Integration
Within the mobile game, fans could choose to follow the Best Fiends Snapchat account to get an in-game reward. This helped the channel to grow immensely throughout the year by giving those playing the game an easy way to follow the account.
BLKBX used two metrics to measure success: the number of people who viewed the first Snap in a Snapchat Story and the percentage of people who watched the entire Snapchat story which BLKBX calls the "retention rate."
The campaign started slow but quickly exploded. The Best Fiends Snapchat went from getting less than 300 views on the first Snap ever posted to over 138,000 views on the top performing first Snap of the year. Through optimization, the retention rate raised from around 60% to over 90% on Snapchat stories in the 4th quarter of the year. Fans weren't just casually checking out the Snapchat Stories. They were coming back every week to see what trouble the mischievous slugs would get into next.
