How To Build & Review Twitter Ads: Small Business Edition

Bubbling Up Your Goals to Your Business Objective 

It could very well be that Twitter isn’t the right medium for your business. That’s OK. There are plenty of other social media platforms that might better adhere to your audience. As the small business owner, it’s up to you to explore, survey and understand where your customer are.

Let’s assume that Twitter is indeed where many of your customers and prospective customers seek information and publish content to like-minded groups. If this is the case, then you’ll want to take the next step in ensuring your ad goals can be traced to your overall business objective.

For example, the case study I’ll be walking through further in this article was built with the intention of generating better brand awareness broad scale. For tracking, I used a mixture of Hubspot, Google Analytics and Twitter’s Ad campaign manager features.

Taking a step back, I asked the question, what is TheMarBlog’s overall business objective?

To drive a reputable business around the offering of freelance marketing services for small businesses through a mix of social media, paid advertising, SEO, content services, and customer referrals.

TheMarBlog.com’s Business Objective

The above embodies the primary objective for all the money you spend, the actions you take, and the time you allocate. If your campaign can’t drive back to your overall business objective of accruing customers or making money, then you should reconsider the ad campaign’s overall goal.

The next step is related to your marketing goals. All your marketing efforts should contribute to at least one of your primary marketing goals, which will help you understand how to track success. This in turn will help you track KPIs and inform the build.

In TheMarBlog’s case, the following are my three primary marketing goals entering 2021:

1. Increase Online Visibility Through a Strong Channel Mix
2. Personalize Marketing Personas Across Industries through Research
3. Improve Reach Through Engaging Content & Partnerships

TheMarBlog.com’s 2021 Marketing Goals

The Social Media Marketer’s Checklist Ad campaign bubbled up to the first goal, adding visibility around my services and themarblog.com. My goal was to gain as many impressions on Twitter for the Social Media Checklist post as possible and as a secondary objective, gain followers.

Reviewing Your Results & Defining Success for Twitter Ads 

Had I gone into my own campaign with the expectation of leaving with a signed client, I would have been disappointed.

For many small businesses, it’s difficult to keep from falling into what I call the “ROI trap.” This is the expectation that if every single marketing effort cannot be tied to the likelihood of an immediate positive return on spend, than it is not worth pursuing.

The challenge with social media, however, is that not every action can be tracked back. For example, consider the value of your conversations with customers on a social media chat feature, like Facebook direct messages. Let’s say someone on your sales or accounts team answers a question or outreach on Facebook and the individual leaves feeling more assured in their knowledge of how to proceed with your product or service.

That experience could have resulted in a positive referral to a friend or colleague. But ultimately when that second person reaches out, this metric won’t come through as a referral unless you have a tracked code for referrals to identify themselves. More often than not, this individual’s first experience with your brand will be in the form of a new visitor or follower on social media. In this instance, it’s harder to quantify the value attributed to that one conversation on Facebook.

For those softer interactions on social media that may result in longer-term brand affinity, how do you define success? I offer the following advice to small businesses when engaging in social media marketing.

Start Small

As the saying goes, don’t place all your eggs into one basket. Start out by advertising evergreen content that might appeal to a broader audience on Twitter or promote your profile to a specific people with selected keywords to gain momentum in your following.

Throwing hundreds of dollars toward something you haven’t tested or tried before is ill-advised. Similar to the old advice of diversifying your financial portfolio, diversify your ad spend.

Test. Test. Test.

Test the time of day, the content, the call to action, who you target. Everything. Every campaign you run can be run in parallel with another campaign designed to test a feature or element. Ultimately, you’ll start to see some trends in what’s engaging users on social media versus what’s not.

Track Where You Can

If you’re launching an app or looking for improved site traffic, you can establish destination goals in tools like Google Analytics to track visits to a certain page (like a ‘Thank You’ page or a landing page).

For the softer interactions like the Facebook example from earlier , you might have a promotion running where your chat reps notify customers of a new product or service isolated from your regular business. Identify the promotion period in your analytics tool and keep track of new site visitors and their referral sources to get a sense of whether people are coming through from Facebook as a touch point.

Wherever possible, you should include UTM parameters or other trackable link when you publish content on social media to be sure it populates in your analytics tool.

Case Study: The Social Media Marketer Checklist

Ok so let’s walk through an example of a Twitter Ad campaign. Back in December 2020, I created one for the Social Media Marketer Checklist. This was a promoted tweet with the intention of building brand awareness for myself and themarblog.com.

Since my goal was to get this content in front of as many people as possible, good click-through rate wasn’t a priority. This was the ad to familiarize myself with Twitter Ads and test out the appeal of the Social Media Marketer checklist.

Ad Campaign Setup & Build

Here’s the original Twitter post I promoted. It generated a decent amount of organic engagement, but given my small following, if I wanted to get this in front of the right people, I’d need to advertise.

For small businesses out there, check out TheMarBlog’s free Social Media Checklist as a quick how-to guide for kicking off your social strategy. https://t.co/UT3xWR4OaQ
#smallbusiness #smallbiz pic.twitter.com/a6iqlAdKBo

— Laura Bailey-Wickins (@laura_b_wickins) December 7, 2020

Here’s an overview of the campaign details and the selections made in the Twitter Ads fields on Campaign Manager.