Twitter is one of the top social media platforms, along with Facebook, that people use to communicate; so why not take advantage of this environment to target potential clients with your content? Much like Facebook, Twitter offers a variety of marketing tools to help you get your brand and your message in front of the right people. Here’s a comprehensive guide to creating your first Twitter ad.
Sign in to your Twitter ad account. Here you’ll find your dashboard, where you can see the status of an ad, analytics, impressions, and money spent. Click “Create a Campaign” in the top right-hand corner of your dashboard to start building your ad.
Choose a Marketing Objective
First, identify your objective. As part of your general marketing strategy, you should discuss the goals that you’d like to accomplish through social media campaigns. Do you want followers to visit your website? Do you want to raise brand awareness? Do you want visitors to purchase a product?
Twitter offers five main objectives to choose from:
- Awareness – Get your Twitter ad in front of as many people as possible.
- Followers – Gain more Twitter followers.
- Promoted video views – Videos are one of the most popular types of posts on social media. Promote your video to reach more people.
- Website clicks or conversions – You want visitors to take action on your website, such as purchasing a product or making a donation.
- Tweet engagements – Maximize the general engagement surrounding your ad.
For our example, we’ll choose to raise awareness for Sevaa Group using our blog post about the sessions we’re looking forward to at DrupalCon Nashville.
Determine Your Budget
Next, name your campaign and set a budget. Your budget may vary based on your marketing objective. For the awareness objective, you pay for the number of impressions your ad receives. You can set a daily budget or a total budget.
The daily budget means your ad will only cost as much as you allow per day. Your ad will stop running once it hits the daily budget max and restart the next day. This is a required field for every ad campaign. On the other hand, a total budget is the amount you’re willing to dedicate to your campaign. Your campaign will never exceed this amount.
Determine how long you want your ad to run for. You can choose to run your ad continuously, until your budget runs out, or you can set a date range. According to Hootsuite, the best time to post on Twitter is Monday through Friday.
You’ll later be asked to set your bid. A bid is how much you want to spend per impression, click, or whatever parameter corresponds with your marketing objective. An automatic bid with the maximum reach allows Twitter to take care of your ad optimization.
Choose an Ad or Create Your Own
Next, choose your ad, also known as a “creative.” In the drop-down menu, you can choose from a variety of creatives including tweets, media, or cards. Cards are essentially created strictly for the purpose of advertising and may link to a landing page on your website, as opposed to a tweet that may link to a specific blog post. For this example, we’ll choose our tweet about the DrupalCon sessions that will link back to Sevaa Group’s blog post.
When creating a card, I recommend scoping out companies that are similar to your own in order to get inspiration. A great way to do this is to create a Twitter list. Go to your profile, click on “lists,” and create a new one. Set the list to private so that only you have access to it, and add similar companies to the list. This will allow you to gather inspiration on one stream.
Choose your Audience
Within your marketing strategy, you should also have a general audience nailed down. With Twitter Campaign Creator, you can narrow that group down to target a specific audience that will find your content relevant.
For example, since the tweet that we’re promoting involves DrupalCon, I targeted people who were interested in open source technology and computer programming as well as keywords including “drupal.”
Twitter also allows you to target follower look-alikes. With this feature, I can target people with interests similar to a particular account’s followers; in this case, DrupalCon and DrupalCon Nashville.
Launch & Analyze Your Ad
Once all of the criteria are to your liking, you’re ready to launch your Twitter campaign! Once you review and submit, your campaign should be listed in your Ads Manager dashboard along with past campaigns.
Your dashboard will show you the status of your ad, when it’s scheduled to run, your budget and how much you spend along the way, how many impressions your ad has, and more. Use this information to adjust your digital marketing strategy and tailor your content for the future.
Engaging with your audience is a great way to promote your brand and offer personalized customer service; what better way to accomplish that than through social media? Twitter is a great place to expand your marketing strategy. Considering the fact that Twitter is meant for concise, creative “tweets,” advertising on this platform should be a no-brainer. Add eye-catching visuals, hone your message, create quality content and you’re ready to showcase your business through Twitter campaigns!
For more on marketing strategy and social media campaigns, contact us! We’re always happy to help your business succeed in whatever way we can.
