Targeting

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Options

It’s important to know all of the demographic information that Twitter collects and offers for targeting options to deliver a user-centric paid media content campaign. Selecting the appropriate demographic targeting that is relevant to your campaign objective is essential for the success of your campaign. You can implement a targeting strategy on Twitter that focuses on region precision while eliminating waste.

The targeting options available on Twitter are:

• Interests
• Followers
• Tweet engager
• Language
• Gender
• Interest
• Device
• Tailored audiences
• Events
• TV
• Keyword
• Geography
• Conversation
• Behavior

Best practices

To stay ahead of the curve on your competitors, you really need to take note of these advanced best practices and tactics associated with each campaign targeting option.

Follower-based campaign

For follower-based campaigns, expand your username list beyond the obvious and consider the overall lifestyle of your audience and what other brands and personalities will live within that ecosystem. For example, if you were a health and fitness specialist looking to sell subscriptions to an online coaching program, consider adding usernames of popular fitness performance apps or online communities of fit-minded people.

Twitter recommends adding about 30 usernames per follower-base campaign. Know that even if you’re targeting base beyond followers, you can still refine target audience by adding additional criteria, by interest keywords or more.

Behavior-based campaign

For behavior-based campaigns, use this targeting option if you want to refine your larger audiences into more precisely qualified leads.

For example, if you’re promoting luxury or more expensive products or services, try targeting users that have the behavior of shopping at high end retail stores or that have above average online shopping tendencies. Similar to adding negative keywords to a Google Ads campaign, you can add negative behaviors to help avoid people that don’t fall within your ideal buyer persona.

Interest-based

For an interest-based campaign, know that if Twitter deems someone to be interested in a topic, it could also mean that they are positively or negatively interested. So if an ad is targeted at someone who expresses negative interest, they may react negatively to the ad as well. Think critically about how you target based on interests considering that if there are components of what they’re interested in that can narrow the possibility of wasting ads, ban reaching leads who were disinterested from the beginning.

Also, make sure you limit the number of target categories per campaign. The 25 major interest categories are largely varied. So play around with the number of sub-topics, not categories targeted. You might have more than one category that’s relevant, but consider running them as two separate campaigns to make your audience narrower.

Keyword-based campaign

And for keyword-based campaigns, keyword targeting is best used to advertise users experiencing in-the-moment pain points. So users who share their thoughts, feelings, highs, and lows on the go. For example, with this function an ice cream shop looking to get more food traffic in their store can advertise specifically towards users in their area who have been recently tweeting about something like hot weather, or pinpointed as “I want ice cream.”

Pair this with a social media listening API, you’ll be able to identify the perfect moment to strike or launch your campaign. Overall, think about keywords in the context of how people tweet about them, so you can better understand how your ad will be received and design your ad in the most relevant way.