Getting Social with Twitter Ads

Manufacturers and suppliers have always had to fight for sales on two fronts; B2B for retail buyers and B2C for brand recognition and demand generation. This divides resources and producers must invest their time & money wisely in order to maximize the impact of both. The goals of social media marketing are to increase brand recognition, grow follower base, pick up influencers, and ultimately generate sales. This Marketing 101 will outline the benefits of creating Twitter advertising campaigns.

Social media is a growing trend and even the B2B sales process has evolved to incorporate a company’s or product’s follower count in addition to the traditional plan-o-grams and catalogs. There are a few organic means to accomplish this, however to maximize the time investment, paid advertising is a potent tool for every marketer that wants to incorporate social media into their campaign activities.

Building a B2C campaign using Twitter is simple; utilize a targeted list of company handles that represent the retailers likely to carry your products and leverage Twitter’s “follower look-alike” settings. By doing so, you are reaching people likely to follow those companies; i.e. their customers. This can be used in multiple ways including generating brand awareness, increasing followers, growing website visits, and providing promotions or other communications to a wider audience.

Let’s get started. Chain Store Guide’s PLUS/Premier subscribers have access to thousands of company level social handles which include preformatted Twitter accounts. Simply go into the online database, build your general targeting query (suggestion: search by product type/line for retailer that could carry your products) and under the Companies tab, select Twitter for the companies that have social handles. Export the file and copy/paste up to 100 handles from the spreadsheet into a campaign’s follower look-alike section. You will have additional controls to expand the reach even further or define the audience to match your product’s target customer.

In addition, the exported company list can be used for B2B multi-channel marketing as well. By taking the export and creating an “audience”, you can target the companies on that list and show your advertising just to those users. This is a good addition to your LinkedIn, email, direct mail, and phone marketing campaigns.

If you would like to know more about the benefits of using social media in your marketing strategy or need to start your subscription, please contact us at 1-800-927-9292.