Why should B2B businesses use Twitter advertising to reinforce core brand messages?
If you stop for a moment and think about how you use social media, you’ll realise that most people use social media to browse entertaining content in their spare time; it is not where—with the exception of LinkedIn—we search for business solutions.
When you read statistics like Twitter has over 192 million daily active users, you’re thinking your business has to be online because everyone else is, but it’s important to understand why you’re on each network and how being online will benefit your business.
The most crucial thing in marketing is knowing who your customer is and where they are most likely to interact with you. Social media helps to make your business more human by allowing you to interact with your customers and offer self-promotions along the way. This interactivity plus advertising model works for B2B businesses too, but less as a direct selling tool and more as an effective add-on to other marketing strategies.
Let us explain.
We know that LinkedIn is the king of B2B, but given the power of social, we think B2B businesses should also leverage paid social (alongside organic efforts) on networks like Twitter and Facebook to achieve their marketing goals.
Testing is in our DNA: we never throw out a bold claim without backing it up with data. So, a few months ago, when we felt the pressure to shift and adapt our business, we quickly revamped our website, launched a new marketing offer, and ventured into the realm of Twitter advertising to see what—if anything—it brings to the B2B table.
The evolution of our marketing offer
The ‘one step at a time’ marketing offer is simple: we promised businesses clear, achievable marketing outputs that address the business’ most important needs right now. Everyone in our team got their brains working, coming up with catchy post copy and powerful graphics to assure our target customers that we’re still here and stronger than ever.
First, we launched the campaign on LinkedIn to reel in potential new leads but also to widen our reach and to boost brand awareness. We created 15 ads each of which offered customers our specific services—like help with SEO, Google Ads, rebranding, or social media content and strategies—or the more general consultancy offer. When the campaign finished, we found that customers responded to the ads that addressed their specific business needs—namely Google Ads and rebranding concerns.
The campaign’s overall click-through rate was 0.8% which may seem low at first, but then think about our audience: we used highly-targeted demographic criteria to pinpoint exactly the people we want to work with so that if enough of them show an active interest in our ads and offer, we’re happy to consider the campaign a success.
Remember: the success of a campaign is not just in high metrics; make sure to set measurable KPIs and closely analyse your results to see what invaluable insights the data might unlock.
What about Twitter?
Next, we launched a paid social campaign on Twitter to explore how B2B businesses like yours and ours can leverage more casual social channels and succeed.
The idea is simple: we picked four best organically-performing tweets on our page and promoted them in three different ad groups to boost brand awareness and test which of our offers best appeals to our customers. As with the LinkedIn campaign, the ads focused on our key services—Google Ads and rebranding—or the more general offer.
The four promoted tweets:
We found that, like with LinkedIn, customers were more interested in our more specific offers like Google Ads and rebranding, with an overall click-through rate of 6.22%. Now you might be thinking: Hold on! 6.22% on Twitter compared to 0.8% on LinkedIn? What’s going on there? Well, initially, we thought the same.
Twitter seems to do much better when it comes to engagement, but who did we target in this campaign and is this audience as useful as the targeted one on LinkedIn? We created three ad groups; each one using a different targeting technique to see how close we could get to the level of specificity and flexibility LinkedIn allows.
So, which Twitter audience did the trick? It turns out: none of them. We tried to use the targeting options available on Twitter to target specific customers in our niche but soon realised that Twitter’s audience builder does not offer the breadth of features a B2B business may need when marketing online. But wait, all is not lost.
Through this social experiment, we have learned that while Twitter may not be the best social media platform for lead gen, it may be perfect to use in conjunction with your primary lead generator—like LinkedIn or Google Ads—to reinforce key brand messages and stay fresh in the minds of quality leads these sources deliver. After all, think about it: If you see a few sponsored ads on LinkedIn during work time and then come across similar content on a more casual network like Twitter, wouldn’t you be more likely to actually remember the business and find them more credible?
If with our first social experiment, our ads already achieved a 6.22% click-through rate, then Twitter is doing something right. Next: we explore how B2B businesses can become a Facebook advertising superstar in 10 easy steps.