Whether you are a Cloud technology provider or an experienced managed IT services provider, if you want to keep a finger on the DevOps culture and best new Cloud technology practices you should be very active on Twitter.  The average Twitter user follows five businesses, and 80% of all Twitter users have mentioned a brand in a Tweet. In the IT world active developers, system administrators and engineers now are helping IT pros and organizations connect the dots between DevOps, cloud-native technologies, and open-source.

Moreover, modern development practices are tweeted, retweeted and bring more value to the world-class operations teams. This makes Twitter a good platform to connect with IT people and contribute to Cloud technology ecosystem. And you know what? Your competitors are already there – connecting with IT experts and influencers, inspiring conversations. So if you want to revamp your Twitter strategy, first you should take a look at your competitor’s accounts.

Driving Up Engagement

Now when you know your audience can be reached via the platform you can create and publish content which differentiates your business from the others. No matter if it is a new technology that should be brought to a larger audience or you want to discuss the existing practices that keep you in the pace of the ever-changing Cloud technology, you can connect exactly with the specialists that are professionally interested in the topic.  

With Twitter Ads businesses can easily bring an audience of their choice for increased exposure and visibility. Advertising on Twitter can wider your target audience, bring more followers and also lead to a discussion where professionals from the same sphere start conversations on mutually interesting topics. 

 

Boost Your Business By Advertising On Twitter In Six Simple Steps

1. Set goals

When you have objectives and goals in place, you can easily measure the results of your performance on any social media site. Having goals also helps determine when your strategy isn’t working and can help you get to the right place. Each of our campaign objectives is specialized to fit specific goals and serve each part of the marketing funnel. You’ll only be charged when someone takes that action. 

You can choose from the following objectives: 

Awareness: If you want to maximize the number of people you see your Promoted Tweet, than you are billed per 1,000 impressions.

Consideration: Choosing this objective means you are billed only when you reach people for the exact goal you set earlier. For example, if you want people to watch your video, you are billed for every view. If you want to drive more traffic to your website then you pay for link clicks (cost per click). Moreover, you can wider your audience and pay based on how many engagements you get on your tweet or based on how many new followers you get.

Conversion: You want people who already have your app to open and use it. You’re billed for each app click.

2. Target Your Audience

You can filter by demographic and audience features, including follower look-alikes targeting, event targeting, interest and conversation targeting, re-engage targeting or create your own custom audience list. 

With location targeting, you can get as specific as a particular metro area or even a postal code. Or you can be broad and target a whole country. The ‘Audience features’ section allows you to target your ad to users based on specific interests like events, interests, behaviors, and even specific keywords.

3. Visualize

Make tweets that stand out. Use appropriate media, videos and visualization that differentiates your business and helps to make it clear what your brand represents and what message you want to address to your audience.

4. Keep It Short And Simple

The rules of Twitter are pretty simple: Keep your messages short and sweet, tweet regularly, and don’t just tweet about yourself. 

When thinking about adding value on social, try asking yourself if your tweets advance an idea, entertain, or educate the audience. Without any of those three things, your content is likely to fall flat. Additionally, remind yourself that the purpose of Twitter is to connect and spark conversations.

5. Budget

The price of Twitter Ads is up to you; there’s no minimum campaign spend. You choose a daily budget for your ads during campaign setup, and it will never go over this amount. We strongly recommend setting budget at least on two levels – campaign and daily, so that you can control your spendings. 
6. Analyze And Measure Results

Once you set up your Twitter ads account you will have access to Twitter Ads Manager and its many features, like tracking your advertising campaigns and analyzing metrics. In that way you can measure the results of your campaign and the amount of targeted audience you reached.

A general tip for measuring your performance on Twitter is to focus less on vanity metrics. Vanity metrics, like impressions or follower count, are often high numbers that look good on paper but don’t help you meet your business goals.

It’s more important you know how many people clicked on the link you tweeted, or how many people are interacting and engaging with you out of your total audience number, so you have a firmer understanding of which content is most popular with your audience, and what translates to the highest amount of leads.

Consistency Leads To Results

It takes time to build a loyal and interactive Twitter audience. Once you start, you should tweet regularly and have a clear marketing strategy for your Twitter advertising. Being consistent in publishing content should attract new followers, encourage new leads, boost conversions, and grow brand recognition. Furthermore, those followers who already recognized you as a meaningful content creator, are likely to boost even more engagement on your account.

It is not that hard to establish a brand. But running a business and developing in the long-term doesn’t seem so easy. So what is next? 

It is not like all your potential and real customers just appear from anywhere. You are the one who should reach the people who are most likely to engage and seek your offering. Furthermore with the big competition on the market and the economic uncertainty nowadays you should constantly review the ones that are most likely to seek your product and services. Without regularly revisiting their target audience businesses tend to fail, decline their sales or stagnate at best.

Building a brand and turning it into a meaningful organization that generates revenue and grows is a very long journey. But what is really a target audience and how you can define it? 

Business owners tend to make assumptions about who is their target audience based on their wishes. Actually, the target audience is a group of potential users that want to engage with your business. They are likely united by some common characteristics, like demographics and behaviour. Targeting your audience must be based on research and your data should contain concrete information to validate the identified audience.

Why Do you Need To Define A Clear Target Audience?

To find the right channels
Now when you know the characteristics of your audience it will be easier for you or your marketing agency to reach them. For example, if your target is males between 30 and 55 years interested in cloud computing, you will spend time advertising and creating content in channels which are used mainly by them. For example Twitter, LinkedIn or specific websites like TechTarget or ZDNet. When you dive even deeper into the demographics, nationality, interests, hobbies, etc. characteristics of your audience for sure you will save a lot of precious time, effort and money.

“$37 billion is wasted in ad spend every year from ads that fail to engage the target audience.” – a white paper says

To market in social networks

With social media, it is easy to reach and connect with the specific groups that show interest in your brand. As you develop your target audience definition, you can get highly specific. Starting with the people who are already buying your product and/or following your account, you can excel in reaching those potential clients with the characteristics’ you previously established. The more specific you are, the better results you will get. Make sure that you include age, language, interests, location, specific technical skills and interests. B2B businesses even consider the sizes of businesses they want to approach and the exact people who are making the buying decisions (the CEO, IT director, social marketing manager, etc.) – the so-called account-based marketing. Social media can be even a way to double-check your research because based on the statistics provided you can improve your listing and go ahead one step in your journey of being recognized among your clients. This is especially important at a time when consumers expect every ad to be personalized and highly targeted.

To develop your product 

Marketing demand and customers are changing and so should your product. Reaching those who tend to be connected with your brand might turn into the development and improvement of your products. You can learn from your target audience if you try to understand them and interact with them. In fact, 80% of consumers say they are more likely to do business with a brand that offers personalized interactions.

Meet your audience’s demand by analyzing: 

• Market demand
• Purchase motivations and influences
• Gap analysis
• Optimal price points
• Existing buying behaviour
• Customer trade-offs
• Purchase triggers
• Customer and purchase journeys

To improve your business performance

If you choose the customer-centric approach you will not only retain and make feel special those who buy from you but you will develop your strategy to suit your customers. Overall aren’t all successful businesses structured to meet their clients’ demands?
 

Ways to determine your target:

1.Search among your base

Probably you already identified a group of people who buy your product. Try analyzing them deeply: how old they are, where they live, what are their interests, are they decision makers or supporters, try even to search specific events and pages they follow. This is how you will know where to search for audiences with similar interests and characteristics and you will reach more people.

2. Conduct Market Research

Dive deeper into the obstacles that don’t help your business to grow. Search trends of similar products so you can fill the gaps in your business strategy. After that, you can focus what are the specifics of your product that bring your customers additional value.

3. Take a look at your competitors

Always take a look at your competitors. Even if your competitive product is more worthy. They might have used some online and offline channels that got them clients that still don’t know about your products. Search for them if they show interest in similar products to your offerings.

4. Specify your typical clients

The idea of that is to have a very clear idea of the people you want to reach. This is how you will get a general idea of the demographics, personalities and needs of your audience. Such a complete view of the buyers can be defined based on data, surveys, digital engagements and any other information marketers can pull from. 

5. Define who you don’t need to reach

For sure there will be people who are really close to your clients by some characteristics of your target. Still, you have to define them so you don’t take effort trying to reach them without any beneficial result for both them and your business.

6. Optimize often

Once you gathered information about your target audience you can upgrade your list and you should continuously revise it. When you interact with them you will have a clear idea of who they are and how you can gather more information and reach more similar people.

7. Use Google Analytics

The tool offers a lot of data about those who visit your website and exactly what kind of content they are interested in. Based on Google Analytics you can make many data-driven decisions and improve your connectivity with the audience.

Creating a target audience is essential for knowing where to focus your sales and marketing efforts. This helps you to understand who your target customer is and what they care about. Otherwise, sales is an uphill battle. You can’t be everything to anyone. It is easy to sell only after the upfront work of getting to know your customers. This becomes a solid foundation that you can use to grow your brand. Specifying why your business is essential just for the specific group of interest will be beneficial both for the development of your product and your business.