The potential of Twitter ads often gets overlooked due to a number of factors.
Firstly, marketers do their best to achieve the traffic on Twitter organically. Secondly, Twitter’s ads are too expensive for many advertisers. And third, the number of platforms is growing, and it often ends up being a choice between Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter for marketers. These days, a growing number are choosing the first two.
Yet Twitter ads have a number of benefits that you can’t get anywhere else.
For example, they don’t differ much, in terms of presentation, from the organic results users see, as opposed to ads on Google or Facebook. More importantly, however, you can upload your own list of people on Twitter, so that the audience of your choice sees your ads.
In this post, I’ll outline how this and other features of Twitter ads can help you get more exposure, traffic, and leads.
1. Advertise to audiences with proven interest in your product
The success of a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign depends on the targeting. No matter how good your product and your ads are, you can’t show them to the wrong audience and expect positive results. Twitter has 317 million users – wouldn’t it be great if you could find the ones that are interested in your product and show your ads specifically to them?
Well, you can, although it requires some thinking outside of the box and a social media monitoring tool.
Step 1
After you’ve started your Twitter Ad Campaign, click +Add Tailored Audience to upload your list of people.
You’ll see this:
Step 2
You need to find people that’ll be interested in your products – you can do this by finding keywords people use which imply that interest.
How do you work out what these keywords are? Start by brainstorming as many keywords you think your target audience would use when searching for your products ior services.
If you want to do this more precisely, you can use a professional tool like Rank Tracker.
Step 3
Once you’ve chosen keywords that best indicate that the user is interested in your product, you need to find all people who have mentioned those keywords – you can do this by using a social media monitoring tool like Awario, Mention or Brand24.
For example, you can find everyone who was looking for a new collaboration tool by searching for tweets that include word combinations like “Trello alternative”, “JIRA alternative”, etc.
Step 4
After you’ve started going through the Twitter campaign set-up process and selected the audience profile, click ‘+Add Followers’
You’ll then see this:
Step 5
To further refine your audience, you can use a social media monitoring tool to find the authors with the biggest number of followers that have tweeted about your keywords, and the authors that have tweeted the most about your keywords – indicating that they’re truly interested in them.
Step 6
Import these people into Twitter ads and your perfectly selected audience will be presented with your content.
For a more detailed guide on how to make this work, read this case study – it explains how one business got 991% more traffic from Twitter ads and made their Google Analytics social traffic report look like this:
2. Complete uncompleted sales
If you have an online store, it’s possible to track every user that goes through the purchase process but doesn’t complete the sale. Having moved so far along the buying path, you know that these people are interested in your product, so it makes sense to retarget them, so that they see your ads on Twitter and remember/re-evaluate their decision.
Step 1
Create a new campaign and click on ‘+Add tailored audiences’.
You’ll see this text:
Step 2
Create a list that only includes the emails of users who went through the shopping process on your website but didn’t complete the sale.
Step 3
Upload the list of these emails into Twitter. Right away your potential shoppers will see your Twitter Ads and will hopefully turn into the happy buyers.
3. Improve newsletter open rates
Even during the social media boom, email marketing is still alive and well. Yet, newsletter open-rates are generally small, or at least not high as one would like them to be.
Using Twitter Ads, you can retarget the subscribers who aren’t opening your emails, which can improve your performance.
Step 1
Using a mailing platform (for example, GetResponse, Aweber, MailChimp), identify which subscribers aren’t opening your newsletters. Choose the ones that haven’t opened your emails for a while, and create a list of their emails.
Step 2
As in the previous case, create a new campaign and click on ‘+Add tailored audiences’.
You’ll see this text:
Simply upload the list of emails you’ve created at the Step 1.
4. Offer a download or a deal
Your promoted tweets should include a clear call to action – mostly, these are “Follow” or “Retweet”, and they’re generally among the best performing prompts.
However, if you want to go a bit further, offer a download or a deal (preferably on a deadline). These tend to be the most effective calls to action for promoted tweets.
A download doesn’t necessarily have to be a free version of your product or a discount. It can be a free app, a song, a white paper, an e-book, a game. Some even suggest a Word document of phrases that might make your users feel happy.
5. Test. Then test again
No matter how big or small your budget, testing is absolutely essential.
Pick 3-4 tweets for each campaign, with variations in what you think might affect your engagement and conversion. These could be wording differences, images, alternate offers. Dedicate some of your advertising budget to testing and use this money to see which option works best.
But before that, you also need to decide which metric is most important for you (e.g., retweet, click, follow) and decide which option should stay and get promoted further based on that metric. If you’re getting a lot of engagement on your promoted Tweets, but what you actually want is conversion, check the form (is it too long?), the clarity of the call to action, and rethink the content of your Tweet.
It’s better to start testing with the tweets that did well organically, or at least include both – the previously organic ones and the ones made specifically for promotion – in the game. The more you test, the better results you’ll see in the end.
Conclusion
Effective Twitter marketing can be very rewarding. The keys to success are:
- Be very aware of the kind of audience you want to target and learn a lot about this audience and their interests/behaviors
- Establish clear goals for each Twitter Ads campaign: is it increasing exposure? Traffic? Leads?
- Find out which ad formats, content, and promotions work best – done predominantly through testing
- Measure your results – it’s always important to know if your tactics (even the best ones) are working and why
- Implement some creative ways for improving Twitter Ads – like the ones described above – rather than just spending more money on them
The available options for Twitter ads are also updated often, so keep an eye and don’t miss any new opportunities to experiment.
[Source:- socialmediatoday]
