Twitter recently announced Keyword Targeting for their Promoted Tweets ad product.
Performance marketers rejoiced,
Now we can generate leads and sales from social networks using native, keyword-targeted ads!
Maybe…
As Forbes pointed out in a recent article, the jury is out as to whether keyword-targeted advertising in social media will deliver search-engine level of performance. There are good reasons to doubt it will. The biggest difference? on Twitter, you are often interrupting conversations with your content, not responding to personal inquiries for help.
While you can definitely sell stuff on Twitter, it’s clear that most of Twitter’s marketing value (impressions) lies in top-of-funnel branding, prospecting and lead nurturing activities, where Twitter’s real-time content-sharing and interest-based relationship-building competencies shine.
Can Twitter Be Used To Generate Leads At Scale?
Absolutely!
Twitter’s real-time content marketing advantages can be leveraged to capture warm leads, build email lists and shorten sales cycles. This is because Twitter is uniquely awesome at getting the right content in front of the right person at the right time – in real-time.
Now, with keyword targeted Promoted Tweets available to everyone, Twitter has made getting your content to people who need it a whole lot easier – because now you can automate your outreach marketing (the most frequent request from our users). Yes!
This post describes a simple process you can use to generate leads and to shorten your sales cycle using Twitter’s new keyword-targeted Promoted Tweets.
Here’s a deck we put together that explains the method in detail, along with a few lessons we learned along the way:
The cool thing about using intent-targeted Promoted Tweets is that it gets your best content in front of your prospects when THEY need it.
It’s like having a dedicated direct marketing team monitoring Twitter for leads, 24/7.
Even better: you don’t have to sit in front of the screen all day to monitor and respond!
Of course, you have to pay Twitter for the privilege of automating your content marketing. But for many marketers, it’s well worth the price.
The Strategy: Target Buyer Needs With Helpful Content
The strategy we recommend is to promote your most helpful content – FAQs, videos, blog posts, infographics, spec sheets, whatever – to carefully-targeted prospects during specific moments of need they discuss on Twitter.
If you don’t yet have high-quality, buyer-issue-focused content online, then go out and get some right now.
Presenting your most helpful content to prospects near their ‘moment of need’ can shorten your sales process in three important ways:
- You will knock-down more sales obstacles, faster.
- You will build your brand as a helpful provider of solutions and content – not a cold-calling machine.
- You will respond to your buyer’s needs in real-time, in a non-threatening manner. Being timely can make a huge impact on engagement, CTR and lead conversion rates.
Tactically, you will be placing solution-focused Promoted Tweets in front of buyers discussing issues. Your Promoted Tweets will contain links to helpful content on your website.
To target your potential buyers, you will use conversational keywords that indicate purchase intent. These keywords are what they actually say on Twitter during their moments of need.
OK, enough of the strategy – here is the process, starting with campaign planning.
Campaign Planning
Preparing for a sales-focused Promoted Tweets campaign is straightforward and consists of four steps:
- Compile a list of the questions and issues that your prospective customers and active leads commonly face.
- Gather links to helpful content you have already produced that address your prospects’ key issues.
- Create a landing page for each issue in 1.
- Post at least one tweet from your account with a link to each landing page in 3.
The first step is to compile a short-list of the most important questions and issues that commonly stand between an uninformed prospect and a sale. The best way to find these issues is to ask your sales force or your direct marketing team, if you have one. If you target multiple types of buyers or personas, then you will need a list of issues for each persona.
The second step is to gather together (or create) links to blog posts, videos and other forms of high-quality digital content that addresses each key buyer issue. It is best if the content is yours, but it’s not required: plenty of people will click on your bio and follow you if you share helpful content. The important thing is that the content you share addresses the issue and is helpful.
Next, you will create at least one landing page for each issue or group of similar issues. Place your content behind or on these landing pages and generate a unique web tracking code for each. Each landing page should provide a way to capture lead information like a social login, an email signup form or a full-blown lead capture form.
Finally, you will prepare one or more Promoted Tweets for each issue. This is because on Twitter, your tweet is your native ad. In your posts, be natural, use a 1-to-1 conversation tone and keep it brief (like you normally do on Twitter).
For promoted tweets, we like to combine a short buyer question with a simple CTA, for example:
Trouble With Malware? Learn 3 ways to eliminate it from your life: http://ntag.it/5vbcxr
Now that you have your marketing assets in place, you are ready to launch your first intent-targeted Promoted Tweets Campaign.
Campaign Execution
Setting up a campaign on Twitter is easy.
You will want to create one Promoted Tweets Campaign per buyer issue addressed. This way, you can see how well you are addressing specific pain points and how good each type of issue is at delivering sales-qualified leads.
Setting up a keyword-targeted Promoted Tweets campaign to address a specific issue in your buyer’s journey is easy to do – if you know what keywords to use. More about that in a second.
You’ll enter your keywords into the campaign panel below. You can choose from Broad Match, Phrase Match or Negative Keyword match for each keyword entered. There is a practical user interface limit of about 300 keywords, although the system can actually handle more.
So… how do you identify the right conversational keywords for an issue-focused campaign?
Selecting the Right Keywords: Not The Same As Search
To come up with the right keywords for your campaign, the first thing you should do is take a few minutes to listen to what your prospective buyers actually say on Twitter.
Use Twitter Advanced Search or a specialized tool like NeedTagger to filter Twitter for people discussing the issues on your list. Take note of the verb phrases (intent markers), topics and hashtags that are commonly mentioned.
For example, this guy has an issue with malware and might need some anti-virus software:
Verb (intent) markers include: “ruins your day” and “fml”.
Topics include “malware” and “browsers”.
As you can see from the example above, the words people use to express intent on Twitter (conversational keywords) are often different than the keywords they might enter into Google to find a solution (search keywords).
To illustrate just how different, what sort of solutions do you think Clinton might find on Google if he entered the keyword, “ruins your day malware fml”?
Just for giggles, we tried it – here’s what we got:
Where’s Norton AntiVirus when you need them?
Selecting the right conversational keywords to target is a potential stumbling block for anyone who wants to augment their Google AdWords PPC campaigns with keyword-targeted social media campaigns. Especially if they are performance-marketing oriented, which means they want to target purchase intent (mostly).
To help bridge this gap, we’ve been working on an automated way to identify the right conversational keywords to target, for NeedTagger customers.
Currently in private beta, NeedTagger can now automatically generate a list of the top-performing conversational keywords for your intent-filtered stream. (ask us about the beta if you’re interested).
Here’s how that works:
An alternative way to generate conversational keywords is to use a keyword combination tool (Google AdWords has a free one) and combine verb phrases and topics together, as follows:
Measuring Results
Twitter provides a great set of analytics that help you understand how effective your ad campaigns are and in how people are engaging with your Promoted Tweets.
Twitter does not, however, provide a way for you to A/B test your landing pages and messages against a target audience prior to launching a paid campaign. Using a tool like NeedTagger is a great way to test your messaging in real-time with real prospects to see how well they work – before you start paying to promote them.
In our Insights tab, NeedTagger also provides the actual number of needs we find each day for your intent-filtered stream of conversations. We cannot guarantee 100% alignment with what Twitter targets for your keywords (we use different algorithms), but Insights can give you a pretty good indication of how much opportunity there is inside of Twitter for your campaign, before you start paying.
We also generate daily email alerts that will keep you on top of your market.
Optimizing Your Campaign
Twitter offers several cool features and media types that can help you maximize results. We won’t go into depth on them here.
One does deserve a mention for lead generators, however:
Twitter has been testing a new Lead Generation Card that simplifies content sharing and lead capture from prospects who like your helpful content. The way it works is really simple (see screenshot below).
Lead Gen Cards are great for building email lists!
Just understand that this is all you will get – an email address. To mine those leads, you will need a decent marketing automation platform.
In summary, Twitter’s new keyword-targeted Promoted Tweets product is a powerful new tool in a performance marketer’s kit. But you’ll need high quality helpful content and know how to identify the right conversational keywords to make it work for you.
To learn about more ways to leverage social media for lead generation, check out this excellent presentation prepared by Marketo:
Have you tried Twitter’s new keyword-targeted Promoted Tweets?
Tell us about your experience, by leaving a comment below.