3 Ways That Micro Targeting on Twitter Helps You Maximize Results On Social

This amazing infographic highlights the importance of social media in a potential customer’s purchasing process. While this isn’t really new information, the representation underlines the role that social media needs to be playing in your brand’s overall marketing strategy. As of the first quarter of 2015, Twitter alone averaged at 236 million monthly active users, so  it’s clear that a brand’s potential reach on social media is massive.

But sometimes you don’t need to be reaching everyone at once – sometimes tailoring your campaigns to better target a specific subset of your audience can not only bring down your spend, but also engage better as the viewer connects to relevant content.

Here are a couple of ways to micro-target on Twitter –

1. Geography

One of the ways to micro-target is geographically. Take the example of an automobile company with hundreds of dealerships across the country, but whose marketing is taken care of by a single team or agency at the company’s headquarters. When the campaign is for the launch of a new model or to announce a brand ambassador – the bigger the audience, the better. In that case, you can target your entire follower base, the entire country, or based on the relevance – the entire Twittersphere, reaching as many people as possible.

However, what about when the brand decides to offer a deal to a specific state or region only? Without getting into the economics of this too much, sometimes it makes sense for the company for dealerships in the mid-west region to offer a discount of 15% on older models, while dealerships on the East Coast offered the chance to win a prize instead. In this case, distinct micro campaigns for each region highlighting the specific offers would make sure that the brand was not being charged frivolously.

If the brand had simply tweeted the offers to their entire audience and promoted without targeting, potential customers all over the country will end up completely confused, or be wasting your money by clicking on offers that are not relevant to them.  

Check out how Zender Ford used geo-targeting to ensure only the most relevant audience was seeing their message here.

2. Device

Another clever way to micro-target your campaign is by targeting specific devices based on your business objective. We stumbled upon this when we were looking at the content strategies of QSR brands, where we found that Starbucks was promoting downloads of their app only on iPhones. By specifying the device, they were mitigating the cost of their campaign by targeting the device that their app was most relevant to. This way they were not wasting money on laptops or other personal computers that were incompatible with their app.

Similarly, if you are promoting an eBook or white paper, chances are that people will be more willing to download these on their laptops, and a brand can save money by choosing not to target phones. At the very least, by A/B testing micro-campaigns on different devices, a brand can clearly understand which device is the most conducive to the campaign or content type, and target accordingly. 

3. Tailored Audiences

Apart from targeting to a specific location or device, you can also upload a custom list of Twitter handles in the form of a Tailored Audience. According to Twitter, a Tailored Audience “allows you to define groups of existing and prospective customers based on users’ web browsing behavior, email addresses, Twitter ID and other CRM data.“

Think of this as hyper targeting – instead of a general audience, you can handpick those Twitter users that have shown interest in your product (users who have visited your website), products of your competitors (users who have interacted with your competitors on Twitter), products similar or related to your product (or any product whose audience is similar to your target audience).

When we tested Tailored Audiences ourselves, we created a list of Twitter users that had interacted with the Twitter accounts of publications in the marketing space – like Adweek, Digiday, AdAge etc, to focus only on those Twitter users that were already in the advertising, and more specifically, digital advertising space – our core target market, and saw an increase in quality engagement.

Find this under the Tools tab at the top of your Twitter Ads dashboard, and select Audience Manager. You can create different types of Tailored Audience lists.

 

One of the most interesting is the ability to retarget your website visitors on Twitter. By placing a cookie on your website, Twitter creates a list of people who have visited your website, and when those people use Twitter next, your ad will show up reminding them of your (awesome) product. 

Small Tweaks – Big Impact

We know that there are hundreds of blogs out there with thousands of tips on how to optimize your campaigns and how to better your content and campaign strategy. But at the end of the day, we always encourage digital marketers to experiment, A/B test and see what works best for your brand. After all, no one knows your brand like you do. And no one knows your target audience like you do. Well, actually your competitors probably do know your audience because they’re targeting the same audience too. So you should really be looking at your competitor’s strategy to find out more about your own target audience.

If you’re interested in getting a behind the scenes look at the content and campaign strategies of your competitors, or you need help analyzing and auditing your own social media efforts, hit the button below and get started!

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