Now that Twitter has launched its self-service advertising interface, companies large and small will likely pile in and use some of the new advertising solutions. There are effectively 2 options.
Promoted Tweets:
Your tweets are shown in search results and in the timelines of Twitter users. Those who see the tweet depends on the targeting that you select. This is ideal for direct response marketing looking to promote a special offer or event for example.
Promoted Accounts:
Your account shows in the “who to follow” section as well in people search results to users that Twitter deems are likely to follow you. This is more suited to brand building.
Promoted Trends:
This is not available in the self service interface but essentially involves buying space in the “trends” that appears on the left hand side of your Twitter page under the “who to follow.” This would be suited to a company looking to create a buzz around a product launch or event perhaps.
I will do a post on the pros and cons of advertising Twitter and a more in-depth look at the interface as my next post but in this post I want to return to an area that I talk about a lot: attribution. Even the smallest businesses these days are advertising on Google (typically with SEO and PPC), maybe on the display network ideally with re-marketing (maybe dynamic product re-marketing), on Facebook with adverts and cost per like campaigns and now they can use Twitter too. The more advanced will be doing email marketing, video promotion on Youtube and maybe LinkedIn depending on the type of business.
As the sales cycle becomes more complex and dynamic, the number of single touch-point conversions are diminishing. Users are having to be “touched” multiple times before converting. Below is typical of a multi-channel conversion report in Analytics.
This complexity tends to either excite or frighten businesses. The engaged, pro-active, intelligent businesses see this level of data as an opportunity to gain competitive advantage. Their less progressive counterparts look at this complexity as being too difficult, too much work and say that they are “too busy” to look at data. The former cohort will eventually put the latter out of business. I am seeing SMEs that fail to take on board the complexities associated with client acquisition in a world with ubiquitous connectivity go the wall with more and more regularity. Regrettably, SME owners who want to pay a few hundred Dollars per month to a marketing company such as DPFOC and then shout if they aren’t over-run with leads are more prevalent than those who want to engage with a marketing partner to endeavor to understand the complexity and use it as a source of competitive advantage. Perhaps I shouldn’t write this but out of over 300 clients, I could count on two hands those who actually have taken on board our recommendation on the need to embrace attribution. We are not asking our clients to become students of online marketing but we do need their cooperation. For example, we were recently chastised by a client for advising them that if we don’t set up e-commerce tracking on their e-commerce website, we really couldn’t manage their AdWords spend effectively as we would have no clue as to where conversions were coming from. They advised us that they don’t need this tracking and to “just get on with it” and “just make sure we’re on the top!” Another advised us that “we didn’t need to know gross margins on his products” despite the fact that us not having this makes setting target CPA impossible. This lack of sophistication or desire to embrace the complexities involved in modern client acquisition presents, to my mind, a massive opportunity to those who do embrace it.
Those who embrace attribution within their companies get better data and make better decisions. They understand the channels that work and those that don’t. For example, if they set up a promoted tweet campaign, they can get a pretty good idea at its conclusion as to the cost per acquisition associated with it and could make an informed decision as to whether to do another. Of course, to even know what is an acceptable cost per acquisition, one must have a tight grasp of the company’s numbers and again this is too much like hard work for a lot of SME owners.
As the sales cycle looks set to get more complex with more and more channels contributing to leads and sales, only those companies that take a scientific approach to their marketing and their business in general will thrive. Those whose approach to client acquisition is to pay small sums to a consultancy and then shout when things are not going as planned will, deservedly, disappear leaving the sophisticated market participants to eat their lunch.
