The awesome HeroConf a few months back had so many sessions that we held some back for a later time – today we review Twitter Advertising and recap on the sessions from Merry Morud and Robert Brady where they discuss how to better use social media to promote business. Overall, their messages were loud and clear:
- Know your target audience
- Use your persona research
- Think parallel to the box
Twitter with Merry Morud of aimClear
https://twitter.com/MerryMorud
Like much of social advertising, twitter allows you to target users to either follow your handle or interact with tweeted content. Merry suggested NOT enabling any promoted tweets to like your handle, because follows that don’t really enjoy your content don’t do much use when you’re really trying to leverage a social media channel.
Consider:
- Lead Gen Cards
- Dark Tweets
- Twitter Ad Website Cards.
Dark tweets are unpublished tweets that are only used for advertising purposes, much like an unpublished post on Facebook. Merry suggested that dark tweets be targeted to different demographics individually so you can engage each of those types of personas in your customized messages, rather than having 15 tweets in your feed that speak to 5 different personas. That would annoy your current following and give your competition complete insight behind your strategies and target audiences!
Website cards will help you drive traffic directly to your site. Merry was really excited about these and mentioned they are quite a bit like page post ads in Facebook.
Even when you’re sending traffic back to your site, Merry was adamant: Everything on your site is content! If you have something on your site that you want someone to see, that’s content! And you need to have the appropriate goals for that content. Even here, however, the content needs to fit the intended audience. If you want bloggers to find your content, then you need to target them with content they would be excited to share.
Merry reviewed the targeting metrics of twitter, but gave a suggestion for how to manage all of these tweets. She suggested making a content calendar in Excel or gSheets that lay out all of the copy and assets that’re needed for your posts, then place a Calendar Alert with all of the information about your tweets and a link to the gDoc where you planned this content release. She mentioned this keeps her on track and helps keep a clear outline for all of the things she wants to keep her fingers in.
LinkedIn Advertising with Robert Brady of LinkedInPPC.com
https://twitter.com/robert_brady
Robert also reviewed some of the more technical aspects of LinkedIn advertising, but pointed out one large observation: LinkedIn Data is incomplete.
- 30% of users have a profile with no specified job seniority
- 37% have no job function
- 25% have no industry
- 2% assume no gender
- 64% have no age
- And – 120% have a continent (area?) Geographic advertising is “a little off”
He also mentioned that LinkedIn reporting is set to GMT by default and you can’t change it. So keep this in mind while working with some larger sets of data and pairing it to rise and fall of traffic on your site…. Because LinkedIn also does not have its own conversion tracking (hint: Tag Everything)
And Robert would know better than most. After his presentation, he mentioned that LinkedIn only have 7 people worldwide managing the advertising on-site. With the size of clients that he’s working with, he is as invested as you can be.
Robert made a really good point for thinking about parallel targeting. Google will provide “Similar Audiences” but you can also compose these from your well-crafted personas as well. For example, if you are a grass-fed beef farmer, you can’t target users on LinkedIn who say they like grass-fed beef, but you can target other people who are outliers in typical societal norms. After a brainstorming session, other people who like to opt-out of systems would be home school instructors, because they are doing things differently than most people. They could possibly have a larger interest in other things that are not kept in stores. This is parallel targeting based on your initial key persona.
Because targeting is really difficult on LinkedIn given the lack of complete data, you can also target people based on similar groupings they might be interested in, skill sets, seniority, and job function. Or, you can negative target them to get the left over users. There are several ways to get to your target audience, you just have to know what they are interested in.
Key Takeaways
Thinking parallel to the box (for parallel audiences) will require some serious mental space. It’s a really good idea to have people to bounce ideas off of who also knows your personas. Make really solid personas that are very detailed. The more detailed your persona documentation is the easier it will be to understand who it is you aren’t targeting yet and how to get in front of them. You might not always have complete data to work from, so do your best to get the right answer with the tools you have.
