Following on from last week's blog on Facebook custom audiences, it could be argued that using Twitter tailored audiences is even more important, depending on where your audience roams. With its unrestricted ability to communicate with others and its real-time news updates, Twitter tends to be more B2B.
As a business you can use this to your advantage to start conversations and get noticed. Tailored audiences allow you to target custom groups of Twitter users, who have already expressed some interest in your brand and therefore will be more likely to engage with your marketing messages. Higher engagement is also a great way to increase your Twitter quality score and make your ads more profitable.
Getting started
Setting up a tailored audience is similar to setting up other ads. Start by logging into the Twitter Ads Manager. Once you’re in, use the top navigation to enter the Audience manager.
Once you’re in the Audience manager, choose from three tailored audience types.
Types of tailored audience
There are several methods to remarketing to your audience:
- Tailored Audience Lists
Lists target specific users by identifying them through their email addresses or Twitter handles. You can also exclude audiences from your lists, enabling you to exclude existing customers for a lead generation campaign, for example. Unlike Facebook, where you just need 100 individual users, Twitter specifies 500.
- Web Audiences
Target users who have recently visited your website. A tracking code needs to be implemented on site which collects the cookie IDs of visitors and matches them to specific Twitter users.
- Mobile App Audiences
Reach users who have made a conversion (download, site visit, sign up etc) on your app. This can be set up via conversion tracking. This requires the use of an approved third party partner.
- Flexible Audiences
Flexible Audiences allows advertisers to target specific sets of users by creating combinations of existing Tailored Audiences and adding filters based on the recency and frequency of engagement events. This however is still in beta.
Enhancing your tailored audience
Once your tailored audience has been created, you can build on this to help increase your campaign’s effectiveness.
There is an option to expand your reach by targeting similar users. This can include your existing database, or exclude these users so they aren’t marketed to. These could include existing customers, and customers in different stages of the purchase funnel where the campaign won’t be relevant or as effective to them.
Next steps
The final steps after building your tailored audience is to assign a budget to your campaign (set a daily maximum or a lifetime budget), and to choose your campaign creatives. There are different sizes for these, so check what your min/max dimensions are to save time.
Don't forget to A/B test your creatives and messaging too, to establish the highest performer.
5 (more) killer tailored audience strategies
Following on from 5 killer custom audience strategies for Facebook, (which can also be applied to Twitter!), here are five more. We’re nice like that.
1) gain pr placements
Any journalist worth their salt will have a Twitter profile, so create a tailored audience based on where you want publications and use this to deliver tailored messages or news to them.
2) retarget to your email subscribers
If you have an existing list of email subscribers but a low open rate, you can also upload a spreadsheet containing their details and target them on Twitter. Since these users are already aware of your brand, they have a higher chance of engaging with your company.
3) influencer & relationship building
Find out who already knows about your brand using your backlink profile to extract the Twitter accounts of those linked to your website. This list can then be uploaded and a tailored audience campaign can be created.
4) offer exclusive content & offers
Reward customers and entice potential customers with exclusive content and offers.
5) tailored audiences by location
Segmenting point four in a different way, you can also tailor your audience by location if you have physical stores to entice customers into your shop.
Further reading:
Twitter Tailored Audience CRM Management
Analysing Ad Performence: Twitter Analytics
