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Zachary Wenger is a 20 year old entrepreneur and Future Shark who owns one of the largest Snapchat niched pages in the world, @NoChillSnaps with over 3,000,000 views daily. In addition, he is the founder of Viral Burst, a Snapchat Marketing Agency that holds over 30,000,000 views daily.
Snapchat: NoChillSnaps
Instagram @Planted
Linkedin: Zachary Wenger
Agency: Viral Burst
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Where are you from and where do you reside now?
I was born in Alexandria Virginia, which is 10 minutes away from Washington DC (to keep it simple,) and still currently live there now.
What are some of your hobbies:
I am very boring. I love my job, so I consider that one of my hobbies. Other than that, basketball, and learning about nutrition in my free time.
What is your favorite quote?
“The best salesman, is one that doesn’t have to sell”.
This is a quote coming from me based off my experiences in business. Let results speak for themself and people will be sold before having to say anything. Most of the deals done from my agency Viral Burst, were directed through word of mouth.
Who are some past clients and results through them?
I have worked with Supreme Patty along with his manager Millz, on growing his Snapchat page and helped add 600,000 unique viewers to the page.
Worked with the 8-figure custom jersey company, Jersey Champs and brought them over $25,000 in 24 hours on a 2.5% ROI.
Worked with the trendy app Voice Changer that has you speak into your phone mic, and gives you the ability to sound like Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian, and tons of other celebrities. Had the app at a $.50 CPI through my page NoChillSnaps, and at times had it as low as $.35.
How does a normal Snapchat marketing campaign look?
Brought over 6,600 people to the Magiquiz site all at once – an engaging quiz website for millennials.
I would first need to see what type of content we are working with, what niche it would fall under, and pricing. While I personally own 3,000,000 views myself, I hold available 30,000,000 for larger campaigns.
How does that work? In the past, I had issues scaling with companies. If a 3,000,000 view campaign performed well and the company wanted more unique viewers, how would I execute that? I have built in a system to where I have access to posting ads on some of the other top niched pages on the platform. Talked with each page owner directly, and have teamed up for when campaigns are large or are looking for a specific niche.
How did you come up with this idea?
I have been growing the followings of pages since I was 14 years old. At 14, I was growing Twitter pages across different niches and had a net following of over 4,000,000 followers. At the time, I wasn’t monetizing through the pages at all, and just used this as a hobby. Over time, I started to get emails from companies wanting to pay me hundreds of dollars just to post about their product/service.
At 14, that was surreal for me, to know that brands would actually pay me good money to post ads on my pages that I built up from nothing. Results were good and I started to make over $100/day for at age 14, wasn’t too shabby. Only a few of my closest friends from middle-high school knew I had this crazy following, because I was very shy and didn’t want others to know about all that I did.
As I got older, I felt more comfortable with it all, and branched out to other platforms. I started to take this all very seriously, and discovered Snapchat. I replicated what I did with my Twitter pages, and just used those same methods on a different platform, Snapchat, which has worked out quite nicely to this point.
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Next, I asked Zack to go in-depth on tactical marketing fundamentals and strategies that you can implement right away.
What are 3 Secrets to go Viral and Create a Large following on Snapchat?
- While Snapchat lacks the “retweet,” feature, it does have the share option. If you hold your finger down on any post, a share icon will appear which can be sent to any of your Snapchat contacts.
- Posting a ton throughout the day gives you a better shot at virility. This may seem like an easy one, yet many don’t implement this. I see pages posting 3 times a day, struggling to grow. One may argue quality over quantity, why not work hard and achieve both?
- Lastly, engagement is huge. Make your followers feel important, if your followers leave a message that you think is entertaining or relatable, take a screenshot of their message and post it on your story. Retaining your audience is just as important as growing it.
What makes your company special?
I will always be honest with brands/influencers. I have been doing this long enough to know if something won’t convert on Snapchat, which I will say immediately.
A lot of companies will ignore that and just want to make a quick buck. Which in the long run will just leave a bad taste in the advertisers mouth, and will just have bad things to say about you and the platform in the future.
I instead ask to see if they have any other types of content, and if not, I would suggest another platform to them that would perform better.
How do you creatively advertise?
Snapchat makes advertising creatively super simple. I believe out of all the major platforms, Snapchat is the most creative of them all. I have done numerous music sponsored posts that included a lens. If you’re not familiar with Snapchat lenses, it’s a way to make unique/entertaining live filters. For example, there’s a lens that can change your hair color to whatever color you’d like, one that can change the frequency of your voice for videos, and the most famous of them all, the dog filter.
Here is how you can use that feature to your advantage.. I did a promotion for the rap artist Famous Dex’s new song at the time, and the lens was called “Dancing Dex.” Users would swipe up and with their actual camera, and wherever you are, you could record a funny video with having the illusion of Famous Dex dancing right next to you with his new song in the background… and that BLEW UP! In a 2 hour post, 525,000 people viewed the lens, over 40,000 people scanned the lens, and 25,000 people shared the lens to their friends.
What did that promotion accomplish? It added awareness to Famous Dex, promoted his new song, while looking organic and easy to interact with.
What are 5 pillars I need to know in order to market effectively on Snapchat?
- Creative content is ESSENTIAL… it’s the most important part of marketing effectively. If users don’t relate, engage, or show interest because lack of creativity, it will perform poorly.
- Snapchat is centered around Gen-Z, products targeted towards adults won’t do as well on Snapchat.
- Lenses are always the answer. If you can incorporate them in your ad, you will be on top.
- Learn the audience before promoting – Snapchat gives large pages that posts clean content an analytics page of their audience with the demographic, age, interests, location, etc.
- Starting a Snapchat page for your business. Ask your followers about new designs/ideas, running giveaways, etc.
What was your biggest failure? What did you learn from it?
Hired a big media company to handle the content for NoChillSnaps, so I can spend my time doing the backends of the business. A week goes by, and I lost over 40,000 of my viewers.
The takeaway message from this would be hiring isn’t always the answer. Ever since then, I have delegated myself to handle content for the page, which is what I enjoy doing and the page went right back to its speedy growth. Value-add questions
What’s something new you’ve learned in the past month?
LinkedIn is a platform I never found value in until recently. If optimized correctly, it can lead to tons of inbound sales as well outbound.
What holds most entrepreneurs back and how can they get through it?
I can only speak for me, and fear is what held me back. Dreading phone calls with multi-millionaires, not attending events with other entrepreneurs.
As cliche as it sounds, the best way to beat this fear is to just go out and do it. Our brains can be our worst enemy at times, and deter us from experiencing some exciting things and connecting with wonderful people.
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Zack is a rising millennial leader and future shark. He has spent over half a decade honing his craft to become an expert marketer who specializes in Snapchat.
He has all the tools and has grown a social-media empire that can generate more than 30,000,000 views per activation. Any company and/or brand will be making a good decision to work with him and implement the 5 Pillars and 3 Secrets to having viral success on Snapchat.
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