Effective Twitter marketing can drive significant increases in revenue. With hundred millions of users, the platform is the world’s second largest and advanced targeting options give marketers access to numerous audience segments. The key is in defining clear goals, choosing the right ad formats, crafting engaging content and then measuring the results to achieve a viable ROI at the lowest cost.
In an era of social media advertising dominated by paid campaigns, Twitter represents a prime avenue for brands to raise awareness. Twitter’s fast-paced nature means that brands must take particular care when it comes to what type of ads they decide to run. With an emphasis on visual content, Twitter advertising is ideal for catching the eyes of new followers and buyers alike.
In fact, Twitter ads represent a totally different beast versus the likes of Facebook or Instagram. Engagement rates for Twitter campaigns grew by 151% last year, with the platform attributing much of its success to the popularity of its video ads.
In this guide, we’ll break down how to get started with Twitter advertising, what makes an awesome ad and how you can score a higher ROI for your campaigns.
Determine your goals
You would be amazed at the number of marketers that adopt a haphazard approach to running their Twitter profiles. Decide early on what the key goal(s) behind your Twitter activity is going to be. Answering the question, “Why am I tweeting?” will enable you to build optimized campaigns. The answer will also point to the kind of people to target, the ads that you pick, the content that you will craft and the metrics that you will use to gauge your success.
The following examples are common goals:
- Generate leads.
- Drive more general awareness for your brand.
- Use your profile act as an addition to your content marketing efforts, working to increase the reach of your blog posts, videos and guides.
- Promote special offers to new potential customers.
Your choice of goals will tie in directly with how you run your campaigns, so it’s vital that you’re clear on them. Using SMART criteria to guide the goal-selection process will mean that you don’t end up being too general. In the early stages the idea is to find a middle-ground between broad and specific goals that are able to feed into specific choices about ad types.
Target like your budget (or your raise) depends on it.
Twitter is a far smaller platform than Facebook, but there are still enough people on it to be choosy about who your ads appear for. So while targeting the followers of a couple key influencers is a great start, add keyword targeting and some other criteria to increase the odds that your final audience will be interested in your ad.
My best-performing Twitter campaign for the survey ads targeted one location, 11 Twitter handles, 1 interest and two keywords. That was still more than enough of an audience to generate over four hundred completed surveys.
Of course, if you’re running a massive campaign and need, say 4,000 conversions, you’ll have to be less choosy about your targeting. Or you’ll have to create multiple ads that appeal to different audiences. Or you’ll have to make a juicier offer in your ad. Or you’ll have to do all three things at once…
I actually didn’t take Twitter’s targeting features far enough. You can, for instance, upload a file of email contacts, Twitter IDs or Mobile Ad IDs to Twitter to create a custom audience.
If you don’t have a big enough email list to make that feature work (usually it takes about 500-1,000 emails to make a reliable lookalike audience), then just use Twitter handles. A few searches through Twitter account bios on Followerwonk can easily generate a large enough list that you can upload to Twitter for more targeted ads.
You can also target by:
- Gender.
- Device. Twitter is heavily mobile… does your landing page work well for mobile users?
- Language.
- Country. Consider using a tool like Tweepsmap.com to identify the countries your existing customers or your target customers come from.
- 21 different “Behaviors” like travel, household, and business.
- Interests (23 categories with 350 subtopics). You can choose up to two main category interests, or up to ten total subtopics.
- Keywords. Don’t forget to use quotes if you want exact matches for your keywords. For example: “social media marketer”.
- Followers of specific Twitter accounts. For example: @RandFish, @AdStage, etc.
- Emails lists, Twitter Ids and Mobile Ad IDs (mentioned above).
- TV markets or by TV programming times. More on this in a second…
Use Tailored Audience Campaigns
The Tailored Audience Campaign functionality in the Twitter Ads platform is an untapped goldmine and the secret to great ROI. It basically allows brands to define their own groups of existing and potential customers, and connect with them on Twitter with relevant ad messages. In short, you are in 100% control of the list of people/companies you are targeting. As a result, no money is wasted as you only advertise to the precise people you wish to reach, right the way down to the individual.
How do you create the perfect Tailored Audience list for your Twitter Ad campaign? Easy! Twitter marketing platforms with the right segmentation and targeting tools should give you a vast number of filtering options such as: user location, keywords in the user bio, influence rating, competitors followers, language, entity type (i.e business or person), gender, number of followers/following and many more. More importantly, a good Twitter marketing platform should also allow you to create Tailored Audience lists based on content-based filtering. For example; Twitter users mentioning a particular event your company will be at or users mentioning one of your competitors. Here’s the best part. Once you’ve done your content-based filtering you can refine your search with demographic-based filtering.
For example, imagine an national cider brand wanting to target specific attendees of a large rock festival with Twitter Ad campaigns. The company could simply target all the people who have mentioned the rock festival on Twitter in the last 6 months. But that’s not their target audience, so without taking into account the demographics of that audience, the cider brand could be wasting a lot of money on creative ads to the wrong audience. Let’s face it, cider is great but everyone is not a cider drinker. Instead, they could use both content-based filtering (i.e the users who have mentioned the festival in the last 6 months) as well as demographic-filtering (gender, keywords in the user bio, location etc) to create a whole range of lists for different subsegments of their target audience.
So if they want to target male festival attendees based in the UK with an interest in football that have mentioned the word ‘cider’ in the last 12 months on Twitter they could. Or if they wanted to target male festival attendees based in the UK that have mentioned a competing cider brand on Twitter in the last 12 months, that could do that too. The secret to great ROI from Target Audience based Twitter Ads campaigns really lies in the segmentation and targeting.
Use Advanced Targeting Features
The real power of social media advertising on big platforms like Twitter and Facebook comes from the mix of huge audiences and incredibly specific targeting features.
Finding your “sweet spot” as an advertiser, where you are able to achieve and maintain a positive ROI in the long-term, will involve a combination of using the right ad formats and targeting the right audience segments. The Twitter campaign manager includes the following targeting options:
- Keyword matching: After you have uploaded a set of keywords, Twitter will search for tweets containing them and show your ads to the users responsible for writing them. Interestingly, Twitter can exclude those users that have used your keyword disparagingly.
- Followers: This feature allows you to target the followers of influencers, companies and initiatives.
- Email lists: Suppose that you recently promoted a product to your email list. How could you reach out to those that didn’t buy? One way could be to upload their emails to Twitter, who will match their accounts and target them directly.
- TV targeting: A feature with which you can target people who watch certain TV shows.
- Remarketing: Similar to Facebook’s remarketing function, Twitter’s “website visitors” option allows you to target users who have previously visited your site. You can even connect with people based on specific pages that they have viewed. Selling an enterprise-level product? All you need to do is target those users that have read related blog posts.
- Event targeting: Although a relatively recent addition, event targeting allows you to reach people involved with current events.
- Exclude features: I don’t see many people talking about the exclusion option, which is a great shame because it has a lot of potential. One of the best ways of optimizing an audience is to selectively limit poorly-performing sections. You can also use this feature to avoid targeting your own followers.
Optimize Your Objective-based Campaigns
The Twitter Ads platform helps you optimize campaigns by allowing you to select a primary advertising objective, such as followers, leads generated, or Tweet engagements, and pay only for actions that help you work toward that objective. This will ensure you only pay for what matters to you.
Use the classic words and tricks of advertising copy.
Here are the words copywriters have been swearing by for decades:
- You.
Adding “you” to a call to action or a headline can increase click-through rate by 30% or more.
- Free.
Everybody loves free.
- Communicate urgency via words like “now” or “today”.
The Twittersphere lives in the moment. Your ad should, too.
- Ask a question.
People unconsciously and automatically respond to questions. It’s what made the “Got Milk?” campaign great. Just be careful which questions you ask. If the consumer’s automatic answer to your ad’s question is “No”, your question – and your ad – just shut down the conversation.
- Use percent off rather than dollar amounts.
I’ve seen this recommendation for email copy, landing pages… and now for Twitter ads. It makes sense. “20% off your first order” is more compelling than “$10 off your first order of $50 or more.”
Experiment With Your Bid Price
When setting up your campaign, you will need to enter what you’re willing to bid for each completed objective (such as a new follower, an app download or a click). The higher the bid, the more likely it will be that your Promoted Post is seen whenever someone who fits your campaign’s criteria is due to see an ad. Twitter will suggest a bid price to get you the best results, but you may find that you want to deviate from this suggestion depending on the importance of the campaign.
Target Devices That Suit Your Landing Page
Is your website not optimized for mobile? You could be wasting money on clicks that don’t convert. Only target desktop users until you have a mobile version of your site ready to take advantage of Twitter’s mobile audience. Alternatively, if you’re promoting something that is best consumed on mobile or is aimed at people on the move, then removing the desktop option may increase the rate at which people follow your calls to action.
Always be Testing
It’s important, right from the start, to link your ad spend to specific business goals. You should be making use of conversion tracking from the get-go. It’s an incredibly simple tool that only requires a few lines of code installed on your website. You can then attach specific outcomes – purchases, downloads, sign-ups etc – to campaigns geared to conversions.
The same principle applies to split-testing. It’s incredibly easy to run similar ads with minor alterations and see if there is any change in engagement levels. Campaigns can also be targeted at different audiences, events and behaviours.
Any of the following metrics may be useful for gauging a campaign’s success:
- Increase in number of followers.
- Follower engagement.
- Overall reach (this is good for testing different types of content).
- Click-throughs to posts.
- On-site email sign ups.
- Product purchases.
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