Social media is the best way to get the word out about your business. Sometimes it means engaging with potential customers through your digital profile, other times it means growing your network and connecting online. But oftentimes, it means advertising. If you’ve ever wondered about how to create a Twitter ad campaign, then this article is for you.
Building up your social media presence can be a great way to generate more leads and strengthen your professional network. But building an organic audience on platforms like Twitter can take a lot of time and energy. Even then, sometimes insurance agents struggle to find prospects and other relevant professionals to engage with their content. The good news is that insurance agents can try to get over the hump using Twitter ads.
Still, you need to know how to create a Twitter ad campaign that helps you reach your goals. Not every Twitter ad campaign will lead to success, but it can be a good way to test different marketing approaches, like building brand awareness or generating website traffic. Because you can set your own budget, you can often test campaigns inexpensively. There’s no minimum you have to spend, so you can try out whatever you’re comfortable with and go from there.
That said, you don’t want to just throw money around and hope that something sticks. By learning how to create a Twitter ad campaign before diving in, you can improve your chances of success. In this guide for insurance agents, we’ll walk through the main steps on how to create a Twitter ad campaign so you can grow your business.
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Choose Your Ad Campaign Objective
One option for advertising on Twitter is to use the platform’s Quick Promote function, but that has several limitations, like only being able to use existing Tweets. Instead, to get the full functionality of creating a Twitter ad campaign, you can use the Twitter Ads Manager. There, when you create a campaign, you’ll begin by choosing your ad campaign objective.
“Twitter Ads campaigns are objective based, meaning they are optimized towards the objective you select, and you are only billed for actions aligned with that goal,” says Twitter.
These objectives fall across three main categories:
Awareness
The first objective you can choose from is Awareness, where your ad campaign is based on expanding your reach. This could be a good option for insurance brands that aren’t necessarily trying to get new leads right away but want people to know about the company.
For example, perhaps you’re roughly at capacity for taking on clients but will soon hire additional agents. You want others to start becoming familiar with your brand. Or, maybe you’re trying to expand into a more complex line of coverage and want to start generating awareness before going for the sale.
Consideration
The next objective you can choose from is Consideration. This objective is connected to sales, though provides options for what action you want the audience to take. Some Consideration campaigns might be geared toward getting followers. For example, if you want to get on prospects’ radar but not try to convert them directly yet. Other Consideration campaigns might be geared toward website clicks, which could be more sales-oriented like if you want prospects to consider coverage via a landing page you’ve built.
Conversion
Lastly, if you have an app for your insurance business, you can use the conversion objective to run what’s known as app re-engagement campaigns.
“This campaign objective will keep your app top of mind, and drive brand loyalty and in-app conversions from your existing customers,” explains Twitter.
Set Your Budget, Bids, and Ad Groups
The next step in terms of how to create a Twitter ad campaign is to set your budget, bid strategy, and ad groups. You’ll start by adding information like your daily budget, as well as potentially choosing options like setting a total budget, and a campaign start and end date.
For bid strategy, you can either let Twitter automate the bidding, or you can set a custom bid based on your objective, e.g., paying $5 per 1,000 impressions. If you bid too low, your ad might not get seen much.
“Twitter’s ad format for promoted tweets works by taking the audience you have selected to target, gauging the size and the make-up of that audience, before generating data on what it believes other advertisers are bidding on to reach the same individuals.”
Verizon
You can also create multiple ad groups that have their own total ad budgets and start/end dates. But you might not want to make the jump into multiple ad groups just yet. To start, you can name your first ad group, and later on, you can create additional ones if you’d like.
“For your first Twitter ads campaign, you’ll probably want to stick to one ad group. But as you get more comfortable with Twitter ads, split up your campaign into categories to target different audiences, use different creative, or test different budgets and timing,” notes Hootsuite.
Define Your Audience
Once you have the financial aspects sorted out, you can define your audience for your ad campaign. For example, you can target your ads based on demographics ranging from geographic location to the types of devices they use. You can also use factors like keywords that Twitter users have engaged with, searched for, or tweeted themselves.
You can even choose your audience based on what’s known as follower look-alikes. “This allows you to reach people who share the same interests as the followers of an account. This is a great way to find a new and highly relevant audience group who shares similar traits to, for example, your account’s existing follower base,” explains Sprout Social.
Then, you’ll choose where to reach your audience, which could be within timelines, profiles, or search results. You could even choose all three if you’d like.
Getting your audience right is critical because you don’t want to waste your budget on people who aren’t the right fit for your business.
For example, if you just target the keyword “insurance”, you might draw in people who have engaged with tweets about health insurance, which might not apply to commercial insurance agents. So, if you have a limited budget, you might want to define a narrower audience. Even if that limits your reach, you might get more bang for your buck that way.
Set Your Creative
Lastly, but perhaps the most important part of how to create a Twitter ad campaign, is setting your creative. You can choose from past tweets, like if you want to get more engagement on a post you previously sent out organically. Perhaps a past tweet got good traction, and you want a wider audience to see that post.
Or, you can create a new post specifically for your Twitter ad. And, if you have the budget, you might want to engage with a professional like a graphic designer to help create a great Twitter ad that grabs people’s attention.
One tip from KoMarketing is to also include a call-to-action, even if your goal isn’t to close a deal right away. “Whether your goal is brand awareness or conversions, make the next step clear and focus on value — will they learn a new skill, stay up to date on industry news, or get access to a few features?” the marketing agency explains.
Following these steps enables you to create a Twitter ad campaign that can help you reach your goals. Keep in mind that there are a lot of social media platforms available. You may want to try other social channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. But Twitter can be a great place to start. Find and engage with other professionals, whether you’re looking to start conversations or drive traffic for lead generation. As you try Twitter ads, you can see what works well and what doesn’t and then adjust your budget accordingly.