By Rebecca Smith, Marketing Coordinator at Heinz Marketing
Twitter gives marketers access to billions of real-time insights and moments. You want to know what’s trending right now in the social sphere? Twitter is the first place you check. You want to get quick insight into worldly news? Twitter is the first place you check. You want to skim through your favorite B2B articles?…I think you catch my drift.
Twitter is a hub for the most relevant and timely information, especially for marketing and sales. And, because it’s so popular, it changes the way that most of us now look at advertising. It’s not just a business-to-consumer audience anymore, and it hasn’t been for a while. Twitter ads offer you a chance to share a word-of-mouth message to a specific audience you want to target in any industry. And, as long as they are strategized the right way, they can be really powerful for your market.
Here are some helpful tips I’ve learned to optimize Twitter ads for B2B.
The objective really matters
To make your ads worthwhile, you need to decide what the overall objective of your ads are. Are you looking for leads? Are you looking to increase sales? Are you searching for visibility? The answers to these questions will help you optimize for the right results. And, since B2B can be so specific depending on your industry, you want to optimize for your target as much as possible.
You’ll want to create a campaign with the right conversion tracking that matches your objective. This helps Twitter recognize what you’re trying to accomplish with your ad.
You’ll also want to set up a website tag that matches your campaign objective. This website tag is key to tracking and optimizing. It’s such a crucial part of the Twitter ad implementation because it triggers an algorithm within Twitter that will help get your ads shown to more readers without actually paying more money.
HINT: Don’t forget to create a tailored audience for remarketing when you’re setting up a tracking code. This is super helpful! If your audience is large enough, this newly created segment can be excluded from future retargeting efforts as these folks will have already converted. It helps keep your targeting fresh.
Now that you’ve generated your conversion tracker, place it in the HTML of your desired landing page and watch the magic happen.
Creativity is key…but not too much.
We hear over and over again that the only way to get visibility and interest to your Tweets and ads is to make them as creative as possible. While I do think creativity is key, I also think it has its limits.
Develop creative copy. One liners that will draw on pain points or daily struggles are always strong. Make the copy witty and interesting, but also make it really informative. You don’t want to waste money on an ad that doesn’t actually tell your prospect anything about what you are offering them. What a waste, right?
Bigcommerce (Shh…I know this is more B2C but it still applies in B2B!) found that Tweets with less than 100 characters get 18% more engagement. Keep it short, sweet, and to the point. The higher the engagement, the better the ROI.
Along with the copy comes the image choice. Pick a few images that have minimal copy, if any copy at all. Too much copy will stray your reader away from your call-to-action in the ad. It can cause confusion and your prospect will likely abandon the ad in the end. Keep it simple.
Also, give your prospect options. Create a couple different versions of the copy and find 2-3 images that are enticing. Bigcommerce also said that brands see the most ROI from Twitters ads with 3-6 promoted Tweets.
Keywords, followers, interests, behaviors…oh my!
Which category do you choose to optimize when targeting to get your ads facing the right audience? It’s tricky. Some say keywords are the way to go. Others say interests are. I say it’s a mix. Followers and interests are the two targeting categories that I think will bring the most results and create the most conversions.
Keywords are pretty self-explanatory. You’re targeting searches or users who tweet with the keywords you enter. While this is really simple, make sure to use really targeted words so you can eliminate the fluff. For example, if you’re trying to invite people to register for a webinar on better content marketing, avoid the light keywords such as: B2B, marketing, content, etc. Yes, those words are in the topic of the webinar itself, but it also encompasses a much larger range of content and Tweets as well.
Followers are a little bit more exciting to me, but they can also be dangerous as some people have hundreds of thousands of followers and I’d bet a ton of money they aren’t all quality leads… Targeting via followers allows you to reach users with similar interests to other followers of any of the handles you include. It’s important to keep these followers really targeted to your topic so you can stay on the right track to show your audience to the right people.
Using interests and behaviors isn’t the worst thing you could do in your Twitter ad targeting, but I think it leaves too big of a margin for error. It’s too vague. Keep your ads targeted to the right audience and you’ll get that much closer to optimizing your ads to reach your ultimate goal.
I’m ready to optimize!
You have your objective, campaign, tracking code, copy, creative and targeting. I think you’re ready. I only briefly touched on what I think are the most important and strategic pieces of setting up your ads.
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