Think Twitter Ads are a Waste of Your Advertising Budget? Think Again.

You either love it or you hate it. Everyone has an opinion about Twitter. Just look at the stock price alone, it’s obvious advertisers aren’t bullish on the platform’s ability to perform. Despite mirroring features from its competitor Facebook Ads, advertisers still question Twitter’s ability to deliver value.

However, any smart marketer knows no two mediums are the same and performance is unique to that channel. Take search for example: Google and Bing have completely different audiences, algorithms, and costs and therefore must be tackled differently from a strategic standpoint.

In this blog post, we’ll uncover how to leverage Twitter-specific features to get the most mileage from your advertising budget.

Keyword Targeting

Google is top dog when it comes to digital advertising. Your marketing team is most likely already using keyword targeting for their AdWords campaigns. Much like AdWords, Twitter offers phrase and broad match keyword targeting to deliver contextual ads to your segmented audience.

Twitter gives advertisers even more flexibility with their keyword targeting options. You can get creative with your campaigns and include keywords that reach audiences actively tweeting a specific topic. For example, if you’re selling tents, you can target tweeters that use the phrase keyword “burning man.”

[Source: Flickr ]

“Event” Targeting for B2B

We all know about Twitter’s event targeting because most events covered on the platform attract a large volume of people and encourage real-time activity like the Super Bowl, the Oscars, or the Olympics. B2B marketers should take this same strategy and leverage Twitter’s keyword targeting to engage users attending a conference or event using the event’s hashtag as a keyword.

For example:

AdStage CEO, Sahil Jain, speaks at a variety of digital advertising conferences about the AdTech space. On June 20th he’ll be speaking at MarketingLand’s #SocialPro Conference. To engage with our audience and continue the conversation beyond the event, we include a specific hashtag in the presentation and ask people to use this hashtag. We want to connect with highly engaged advertisers and marketers, so we not only target users tweeting about #SocialPro, but also people who attended his talk and provide relevant content with clear CTAs.

Remember, the volume for this type of campaign will be somewhat low because the targeting parameters are so specific, but these leads will be higher quality. What’s more, those who are using Twitter at the conference are in a business mindset, so your ads won’t seem out of context or intrusive.

Here’s an example of a Twitter user talking about #SocialPro. She fits into our target audience and because of this it would be beneficial to engage with her via our Promoted Tweets:

Attracting Competitor Followers

When Twitter Ads first launched, I desperately wanted Twitter to include Handle targeting in their feature set, so I could target my competitor's’ followers. (I even wrote a blog post about why Twitter Ads sucked.) But, that was 4 years ago, and Twitter has since refined their advertising suite.

The people who follow your competitors are raising their hands and saying they are interested in similar services or products to the ones you offer. So wouldn’t it be cool to send your message to your competitors’ followers? Reaching these users will help syndicate your brand awareness, even if they’re not following you.

For example, you can access massive audiences by following Marketo or HubSpot’s Twitter followers.

Now, we wish Facebook would allow for this type of competitive targeting for Facebook Page likes, but this is my first blog post mentioning this feature request...so I’ll check back in 4 years.

Scaling in Japan

Fun fact: In Japan, Twitter’s usage exceeds Facebook’s; with 35M monthly active users on Twitter compared to Facebook’s 25M. Global brands with large advertising budgets are usually more willing to test new markets and as such, already seeing Twitter’s ROI in Japan. For businesses weary about running Twitter campaigns, breaking into Japan’s market offers a way to drive traffic from a new audience at measurable scale. Japan is, after all, a mature and sophisticated market, so selling goods and services to this audience should be profitable.

[ Source ]

Now What?

Twitter is its own unique social media platform, so don’t expect the same campaign performance results as Facebook or Google. Twitter only has 310M monthly active users compared to 1.65B monthly active users on Facebook. Based on volume alone, Twitter should not be considered a standalone traffic source. We recommend diversifying your campaign budgets for maximum cross-channel reach and cater to each platform’s targeting advantages.

If you’re running campaigns on multiple ad networks you likely understand the headache with making your daily account audits. Automate those tedious performance optimizations like bid adjustments, budget pacing, or pause low performing across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, AdWords, or Bing campaigns.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial of AdStage Automate today.