Maintaining a strong presence on social media platforms is absolutely crucial in today's increasingly digital landscape.
Social media marketing allows you to connect more directly with your customer base, on platforms that they're already using. Northsail understands the importance of establishing a connection with customers. We should, it's part of our core values.
In fact, we're so committed to meeting and exceeding our customers' expectations that anytime we don't think we can go above and beyond for them - we simply won't accept the project.
We're committed to finishing every single project we start on-time, on-spec, and on-budget, which is why we offer a 6-month guarantee to all of our customers.
But if you're having trouble connecting with your target market or reaching campaign objectives, maybe it's time that you started looking at social media platforms as a way to help your brand branch out and connect more directly with your target audience.
As you probably learned while reading about running successful promotions on Pinterest and Instagram, there's a lot that social media marketing has to offer.
So, how do we translate those tactics to other social media platforms, like Twitter? Let's talk about it.
If you aren't familiar with all of the different social media platforms available these days, you'll probably still have heard of Twitter at some point during your own time online.
Unlike other forms of social media marketing, people tend to absorb content and information differently on Twitter than other platforms.
Branding is an absolute must when it comes to using Twitter in your marketing strategies.
This means that you need to take time and establish a strong brand identity, as well as build brand affinity with your potential customers.
Of course, the major benefit of social media marketing in general, or running twitter contests or promotions, is that they encourage establishing a connection with your customer base.
It also helps give your brand the appearance of transparency. Social media platforms force you to give direct, public access to your team to anyone that follows you on those platforms.
This means for good or bad, your customers have the opportunity to bring your conversations to a public forum.
How you choose to respond or address things, again both good or bad, will have a major impact on how future potential customers see your brand - especially if they research your digital presence, before giving you their business.
Twitter offers the unique ability to help you promote your brand directly to your target market segment, through the use of 'promoted tweets'.
Because Twitter has segmented databases, it makes the process of getting your marketing materials much faster and more efficient than using some other social media platforms.
Plus, one major benefit for marketing planners is that twitter contests and promotions can be arranged ahead of time and pre-scheduled for release onto the platform.
This allows you to plan entire campaigns ahead of time, and then arrange posts for very specific release times, in order to maximize the potential return on your campaigns.
There's no such thing as a perfect platform, so there's definitely a few downsides to running twitter promotions or contests.
Twitter ads function well, except for when it comes to calculating your ROI. For instance, if someone clicks on one of your ads by accident, it will still count towards your paid clicks for the ad, even though there's virtually no chance of a conversion from that visitor.
This leads us to the next issue with Twitter marketing - costs. Twitter ads are more expensive than comparable advertising campaigns on many other platforms, partially because of the sheer volume of targeted users you can reach.
The old expression 'you have to spend money to make money' could be applied here, but if your marketing budget is already quite thin, you may want to consider another social media platform before you start a Twitter campaign that could push your ads campaign over-budget.
Understanding who you're trying to target, as well as what your ideal target audience looks like is incredibly important before beginning any Twitter contest or promotion campaigns.
What age demographics are you typically serving? Are your customers most often men, women, or a healthy mix of both? What industries do your customers tend to work within? Are there common interests that apply to a substantial portion of your potential customer base?
All of these things need to be taken into account when you're designing your marketing materials for your Twitter promotions, and narrowed down as much as possible before you start running Twitter Ads.
Trust us, if you don't target your Twitter ads campaigns accurately to your follower base, you definitely won't be happy with their results.
Twitter users love to get behind brands that stand out amongst the crowd. Unique, expressive brands that connect with customers on an emotional level get a lot more attention on Twitter than brands offering much of the 'same old, same old'.
Don't just go with campaigns that feel comfortable and familiar. In fact, whenever you can, try to shake things up and break out of the mold your competitors might still be trapped within.
If you can stand out as a trend-setting within your industry, odds are your Twitter contests and promotions could get you a lot of attention.
All it takes is one viral Tweet and your brand could explode with popularity. But crafting a Tweet like that requires some outside-the-box thinking.
Just like social media marketing on any other platform, successful Twitter promotions require you to have already established some kind of consistent presence on the platform.
This means having more than a couple of cursory posts on your account before launching into a Twitter contest. We're talking about weeks, if not months, of regularly making pointed or valuable posts to increase the number of potential followers on your account, as well as your brand’s credibility.
This is a piece of advice that many business owners don't want to hear, because they're only worried about running a successful Twitter contest or promotion in the short-term. Yet, a few dozen potential followers isn't going to be enough additional people to justify a Twitter advertising campaign.
Without spending the time to establish credibility and build a reliable presence on the platform, why would anyone choose your business over a competitor with a massive list of people following them on their social networks, and months of archived Tweets under their belts?
The answer is they likely wouldn't.
Unfortunately, unless your business is offering something revolutionary or incredibly high-value, without an established presence, your brand simply won't be considered reliable compared to veteran Twitter marketers within your industry.
That's okay, though. You can combat this by simply taking your time to make regular brand-related posts in the weeks or months leading up to your campaign. Run an email campaign that promotes your account and links to the Google/Apple stores where the Twitter app installs using your customer email list.
It takes more effort, no question. However, you should be spending that time preparing your campaign details to create the most successful campaign release possible. Reaching your campaign goal will more than justify the extra set-up time.
There's nothing wrong with spending some time prior to launching your own Twitter contests or promotions looking around on Twitter to see what your competition is already doing.
You may not be able to see exactly how effective each of their own campaigns were. Yet, by keeping an eye on the levels of user engagement across each of their promotional posts, you'll be able to get a rough idea of what campaigns are working, and which ideas they've tried that fell flat.
Learn from their mistakes and their successes.
If you can see a popular competitor trying something that got virtually no engagement from their audience, why would you try it? When you see Twitter promotions that clearly functioned effectively within your industry, find a way to adapt some of those same techniques into your own campaigns.
You and your competitors share the same target audience. This may seem like an obvious statement, but just because you think you offer superior products or services, doesn't mean customers will feel the same way.
There's no point in wasting your time and money trying to replicate something that failed the first time. Be unique and groundbreaking. Your brand will thrive for it.
Twitter Promote Mode is a subscription service that you can consider adding to your Twitter Ads Manager, that allows you to automatically promote your tweets without having to design a Twitter Advertising Campaign yourself.
Using Twitter Promote Mode can help you reach a much bigger audience of users and allow for a more cost-effective campaign, if you're unsure how to achieve solid results through managing your own Twitter Ads.
It's a bit of a catch 22 Twitter Promote Mode, because you're relying on Twitter's built-in algorithms to help you reach the most effective audience of people, but will it reach your actual target audience if you're not in control of your full audience parameters? That's the risk you take when you use Twitter Promote Mode.
Campaign success seems to be on a case-by-case basis, but Twitter Promote Mode might be worth a shot if you're not sure what types of content to include in your ads, or if you want to try something new to keep your marketing content fresh.
Just remember: you're not fully in control of your Ads with Twitter Promote Mode, so while it may be quick and easy, it may not end up being the most effective method for getting your content to people.
You may not realize just how effective a single tweet can be, especially when you design a popular hashtag around your pieces of content.
When a tweet goes viral, it can reach an incredible broad audience of people. So finding engaging, entertaining, or exciting contest hashtags to use in your Twitter promotions is a great way to start getting more attention from your audience outright.
Make sure to include any contest hashtags that you want to promote for followers to use in the contest announcement. You can even make use of the hashtags part of the contest guidelines or competition rules.
You can even ask your followers to come up with their own unique hashtags for your online contest. This user-generated content is a great way to reach the biggest audience possible when you're running a Twitter promotion, because it immediately creates user engagement and excitement about participating.
All of your work will go to waste if you don't take the time to track the results you're getting through Twitter Ads, and then sit down and adapt your future campaigns to become more effective.
It's extremely rare for a brand's first campaign to knock it out of the park. That's okay, and a very natural, expected result.
Even if you've done all of your research, and followed our other tips to give you an advantage when you're starting out, that doesn't mean you're going to be perfectly on-point with your marketing materials from Day 1.
Identify your mistakes, or where you can improve your campaigns, and then build that knowledge into your next campaign.
If a campaign just isn't performing for you, don't just keep dumping money into it in the hopes that it will suddenly turn around. That's a great way to waste your campaign budget on a terrible ROI.
Sometimes, you would be better off stopping an Ad campaign for a few days and retooling, than simply crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.
When you find a style of Twitter promotion that works well for you, stick with it, but don't rest on your laurels.
Every campaign can be improved. Don't be satisfied with mediocre results. Your customers won't accept mediocre products and services from you, and you should never accept a bar of quality less than what your customers would expect.
Grow and evolve your Twitter campaigns alongside your brand. Inevitably, the results will speak for themselves.
We've talked a lot about in-store promotions, as well as picking effective contest prizes, but bringing your brand into the social media marketing world is a huge step in the right direction.
Improving your processes, as well as the things you offer your customers, are crucial to creating a brand that potential customers know they can trust - before they've ever purchased from you.
When it comes to improving processes, Northsail is working constantly to try and improve our own offerings, so we can continue being Ontario's #1 custom software developer.
That's why, we'd love to invite you to try a free trial of our newest service – ‘Horizon’.
Horizon allows you to quickly build high-performance landing pages, microsites, and begin collecting important customer data that you could be overlooking.
All we ask is that you take a few minutes to let us know what you think about Horizon, once you've had the chance to check it out.
It's a great deal, but you'll have to hurry. Our free trials won't last forever.
We’ll send you important updates about the early access program and your free invite when we are ready.
Your contact information will only be used for the early access program, not for future sales and marketing.