Steal This $10 Twitter Ad Campaign Strategy

Since you are here to steal my Twitter Ad Campaign Strategy, I know 2 things about you already:

1. You are interested in testing out ads on Twitter
2. You are a low down thief  🙂

Hey…I'd be all over this post too.  So, I'm not judging.

$10 is nothing. Even if you just got a few leads, it's probably  worth $10 to you.

I'll show you how to set up your Twitter profile in a way to get more interaction on your Tweets, and how to set up a small dollar campaign to test the waters.

This is kind of a long post, so stick with me…

An amazingly high number of people use Twitter on a monthly basis, 316 million to be exact.

Another 500 million Tweets are sent on a daily basis.

With the traffic on Twitter, it can be hard for anyone to get noticed.

To go from just getting noticed to making a true connection is even more difficult.

To best explain the situation, consider a huge football stadium. Let’s say this football stadium is Twitter. To focus in on just one fan in attendance is difficult.

Imagine, though, if you had the help of a jumbotron.

This allows everyone in the stadium to focus on one person.

By following the steps listed below you can effectively build a Twitter Ad Campaign Strategy to promote your business with a little $10 campaign.

Get Your Profile Perfect

Your Twitter profile is a mini-resume — emphasis on mini. List your expertise, experiences, then accomplishments (unless you can start with a great accolade). Use the least words to convey the most information.

Round it out: the best Twitter profiles combine work and play, jobs and passions — that’s what makes us interesting.

Have a professional profile picture. Don't just throw up any image here.  You need to really make sure you have one of your better images here. If you don't have one, you can easily take one with your mobile phone.  I did a whole post about it here.

Show confidence, not arrogance. No one is invisible on social media. In fact, the small space and fast pace of twitter means that everything has a potentially greater impact. Apply the same sense of etiquette to your profile as to tweets. Yes: do list honors, but don’t brag “TOP 100!”

Make it playful and positive. Download our free Authority Twitter Cover Templates here.  It's a fun design, that will help you stand out and add some personality to your profile

Use keywords. Keywords are helpful in a profile, especially since you have so little room with which to introduce yourself to the Twittersphere. So turn your profile into a discovery tool by adding a hashtag, like “Job Search coach / #LinkedIn Expert.” 

There is a great article with more suggestions on perfecting your profile here.

Identify Your Twitter Advertising Goals

It’s important to decide ahead of time what your goal is for Twitter when it comes to advertising. You goals can either be to gain website clicks or conversations, tweet engagements, leads on twitter or app installs. Those are a few of your options, but aren’t by any means the only options you have.

Twitter ads are actually perfect for defining your goals.

When you build your ad on Twitter, you will be asked for your ad objective.

So, be ready to answer this question.

The following points will hopefully help you as you set your objective:

• Are you attempting to drive up a new event?
• Are you wanting to target people within your industry?
• Are you trying to move people away from your competitors?
• Would using an embedded video help?
• Are you after engagement?
• How many new followers do you need to get for your ad to be a success?

 

Test Your Content

You understand the importance of testing content before putting a ton of money into it. Thankfully, Twitter gives you an easy way to do just that.

This of course is one of the many advantages Twitter has when it comes to advertising.

Learn what works by keeping track of the shares and clicks you get on your current tweets.

This tells you what tweets have the highest engagement.

Is it a video that is leading to the most clicks, or something else?

Go through your past posts and see what tweets got the best engagement, or had the most shares.

This tells you what is working and what isn't. Incidentally, you need to be posting regularly.

This is important so you have a broad range of data to study.

Define Your Target Audience

Define your target audience before building up your Twitter ad campaign. It does no good to reach the general masses if these people aren’t your target audience.

The idea is to reach the right people through your Twitter ad campaigns.

Some ways to categorize your audience are on the following factors:

• Location.
• Gender.
• Interests.
• Languages.

Another important thing to consider when defining your target audience is where their loyalties lie.

For example, it is great to get a new follower on Twitter. But, if you can get a person who is currently following your biggest rival to follow you, that’s even better.

Create Your Ad

You have defined your goal and identified your target audience. Now’s the time to get your campaign started.

First, go to Twitter ads platform. This is where you will enter your payment information.

The process to create your ad after this is fairly easy.

It mainly consists of your filling out various fields on a form. You will then pick a name for your campaign, name your funding source and enter the start and end dates you desire.

The next step will have you set your objective.

This is of course why defining your objective is so important and was mentioned above.

The objectives you set will fall into one of four different ad formats offered by Twitter.

These include the following:

Promoted Accounts: This ad invites those in your target audience to follow your brand. This grows the right kind of followers and builds your overall brand.

Promoted Trends: A promoted trend ad allows you to put your story at the top of the feed list on Twitter for 24 hours. In other words, your story will pop up as a trending topic.

Promoted Tweets: A promoted tweet ad is a message that appears directly in the timeline of users you are targeting during a preset time. The vast majority of ad campaigns fall under the Promoted Tweet category. This is usually the cheapest type of advertising. So, it’s often used by companies new to Twitter ads.

Native Video: This type of ad is fairly new. It works by autoplaying when someone scrolls over it. It also appears in timelines.

The next step in building your ad is to choose your targeting options. This will allow you to see the estimated audience size for you advertisement. This gives you the option of opening up your scope to reach more Twitter users.

For our purposes, I used the “Follower” option.  I wanted to target people that followed well known people in the online marketing space.

If you are targeting local businesses, you'd want to focus on ones that they would follow.

They may not have a lot of followers…but they are VERY targeted.

The final step in building your ad is to use your best content.

Remember earlier, where we were talking about how you can know if something was successful?

Thanks to your research, you now know your Tweet promoting your blog post, “The 5 Ways To Get More Leads From Facebook” is your most popular tweet.

Now its time to create the ad itself.

There are a few things you want to consider when building it.

1. Use An Image –  Tweets with images get more interaction than any other type.

2. Don't Include The Price – You'll get significantly more interaction without a price in the Tweet.  Remember, this is a social environment, so keep your promoted Tweets educational and entertaining to your audience.

3. Keep Your Character Count at 120-129  – Tests show that too few characters, really hurt engagement.  However, as you go passed 130, it starts to drop as well.

 

Well, you have identified what to use for your promoted tweet. Don’t worry if it’s the exact message that you have already shared.

Remember, the audience viewing your promoted tweet will be seeing it for the first time.

Place Your Bid/ Set Up Your Budget

Here comes the part of the process that usually scares people off using Twitter ads. This is just because they don’t understand the process.

Twitter ads are a cheaper way to advertise.

So, don’t worry about breaking the bank.

The cost of a Twitter ad varies. It can run anywhere from 50 cents to $10 or more per engagement.

Remember, engagements are link clicks, follows or video views. Promoted Trends are pricey, though.

The best way to set your budget is to come up with a daily maximum output. This means Twitter will pull your ad when your preset number is reached.

No need for you to end the ad yourself or keep up with it. Twitter does all that for you.

Next you move on to the bid part.

You bid on how much you are willing to pay for a retweet, website visit or other action.

Others will place bids as well. The most you will ever pay though is one cent more than the highest bid.

Twitter provides you with the information you need to place an educated bid.

Once the ad is live, you can track the results within minutes.

You can also follow up on what was the most effective sponsored ad by using the advanced analytics reports. This allows you to launch many test ads on a small scale to see what works best before pushing it on a big scale.

Keep Up With Your Ad Performance

Anytime you post a Twitter ad, you should be keeping up with its performance, from beginning to end. Check in on a daily basis when you first launch the ad.

The following are some things to look for:

• What did you spend?
• What are your impressions?
• How many link clicks?
• What is your cost-per-click?
• What is your click rate?
• How many conversions?

Make sure you are on target with these elements. After watching it a few days, you will know whether you should let the ad alone or pull it.

If the ad costs more than you planned and isn’t giving you enough benefit, you might want to remove it.

If the problem is low conversions, it’s a good idea to change the content emphasize in your call to action. If your impressions or click rate is low, you might want to rethink your target audience.

Give The People Some Variety

Everyone hates seeing the same commercial over and over. This is the same on Twitter.

So, don’t make your audience hate you by subjecting them to the same ad over and over again.

Rotate your ads to keep things fresh.

It is typically a good idea to run a Twitter ad for three to five days and then change it .

This will lead to better ad performance overall, because you are always providing new, fresh copy.

The above information tells you all you need to know to get started with Twitter ads.

Begin small and then build up.

There is nothing to be afraid of!

After all, with Twitter ads, the risk/reward ratio is advantageous to you as a consultant.