The essential steps to building successful Twitter marketing campaigns

With Halloween, Black Friday and Christmas upon us, brands are sure to fire up their marketing campaigns. Whether in-store, experiential or digital, marketing teams all over the world are gearing up for their biggest time of the year. Twitter, will no doubt be on everyone’s agenda too, so here’s a short guide to building successful Twitter marketing campaigns.

Create Twitter Campaigns With Smart Audience Segmentation

If your Twitter marketing campaigns aren’t targeted to the right user, it’s not only a waste of time but also a waste of resources. To get the best out of your Twitter campaigns, your first step should be to further segment your audience and create hyper-targeted campaigns which will give you the best possible ROI.

Using Audiense’s Audience Manager, you’ll be able to find your ideal audience based on a wide range of segmentation variables such as: Twitter profile information (gender, location, language, time since last Tweet etc), account performance (Tweets per day, number of followers etc), relationship to your own and other Twitter accounts, content users have or haven’t Tweeted, and personality types. For example, if a sports brand wants to promote a newly launched line of trainers that are endorsed by a famous basketball player, they could use the Audience Manager to find Twitter users who send a minimum of two or more Tweets per day, who have ‘basketball’ in their bio, have a high propensity to click on Twitter Ads, and who are also following the celebrity endorsing the product, among other filters (like country, language etc). This will allow for precision targeting and the best possible ROI.

Use Data From Personality Insights

Audiense’s Personality Insights, powered by IBM Watson is a great way to understand your customers’ psyche to know how they will react to your various campaigns. Will person A retweet your Tweet like person B or are they more likely to redeem a coupon?

To give an example, we examined the Twitter followers of Burger King and McDonalds, and after cross comparing the personality types, we found that McDonalds’ audience is more likely to respond to Tweets. Burger King’s audience tends to be more receptive to unsolicited targeted advertising from the brand and finally, Burger King’s audience have a stronger affinity to the brand than McDonalds’ audience. From this analysis, McDonalds could if they wanted to, launch a competitor campaign specifically targeting those Burger King’s followers that are more receptive to unsolicited advertising.

Use DM Campaigns Effectively

There are a number of ways that marketers can use DM campaigns in a subtle and effective manner.

Nov 2017 - UPDATE: Direct Message campaigns are no longer available. The new way to send automated direct messages is through Twitter Chatbot.

Audiense's DM Campaigns tool can be used to target a specific segment of your users with personalised DMs. The tool will help not only help you send multiple personalised DMs in one go, but also see the metrics behind the DMs (i.e how many have clicked on it etc). Twitter DM campaigns are used in a number of ways. Here are some of the ways our own customers use them:

• Sports clubs /organisations - letting fans in particular regions know about upcoming events in their city.
• Music labels - sending DM’s to their artists’ most loyal fans (announcing new songs, sending special invitations etc)
• Technology companies - inviting key people to private VIP events.

Pro tip: Make sure your DM content is highly relevant and you keep your DMs short, sweet and to the point.

Finally, Don’t Forget To Follow Up

Your Twitter marketing campaigns will undoubtedly have different phases. Once you’ve launched the campaign and gained the interest of your audience it’s time to ensure that you’re nurturing those contacts . Create follow up campaigns to target those who were highly engaged with your initial marketing communication so that you can turn them into customers and brand advocates. As for those who didn’t engage with your campaign, dive deep to see why that was. For example, if you find that the personalities of those who didn’t engage with your campaign are unlikely to respond to Tweets but more likely to redeem to coupons, you can follow up with a coupon redemption campaign for that audience.

Determine The Value Of Your Twitter Campaign To See Earned Media Value

One of the most relevant metric to monitor for marketing managers is ROI. With SocialBro’s Twitter Ads dashboard, you’ll be able to set your own KPI figures based on the objective of your campaign, for example, engagement, impressions or downloads. This will allow you to not only map out the value of your paid media instantly, but also measure and track the ‘earned media’ that your campaign has generated in terms of retweets, favourites and mentions.

How will you use these steps for your Twitter marketing campaigns? Tell us in the comments below.