Twitter ads for B2B Saas 2022 Best Practices⚡️
Twitter Ads are often overlooked by most B2B brands. But I strongly believe they’re an untapped opportunity. The mistake is often to treat it as a strictly “direct response” channel vs a brand affinity one.
Pls, read this full thread to uncover some of the best practices.
Twitter is an “intent” channel.
If you are looking for a solution or are looking for alternatives chances are you’ll ask your social circles (slack groups, friends, and of course Twitter). Tech CEOs, marketing, Sales folks are really active on Twitter nowadays.
Treating Twitter Ads as an intent channel means 2 things:
Surfacing your brand to people looking for solutions / talking about problems your product solves (active intent)
Tapping into audiences who are likely to buy (similar to FB /LI) based on folks they follow or # they tweet about. (Passive intent)
So how do you make Twitter Ads work for B2B Saas?
What's a good strategy? Build brand affinity!
Promote ungated content / tweets / blogs & even Twitter threads. The less someone has to click 'away' from the platform, the better the results are!
Use video / top of funnel content. Promote your organic tweets. It’s hard to get someone to signup for something off Twitter Ads but it’s a great assist channel for b2b Saas
Use profile spying tools like Audiense , BuzzSumo, Sparktaro, Listen.
Closely watch organic Twitter performance funnel rates and direct traffic increase after you started running Twitter ads.
Brand vs Personal Handles:
Most B2B SaaS companies have some sort of presence on Twitter. We see that a high percentage of them at least have a brand account set up on behalf of their company that’s well-filled out.
Though this is a good start, this isn’t enough. One of the big problems we see is that their company accounts lack any personality. Because of the nature of the content they tweet or share, their company accounts aren’t compelling enough to follow. Most times, their approach mimics one of two patterns:
Their tweets are promotional. We all have seen brands like this before. They’re the kinds of companies that only tweet when they’ve published a new blog post that they’d like to drive traffic to on their website. They see Twitter only as a distribution platform of outside content.
They only tweet responses to customer complaints. Many companies use their Twitter accounts solely as a point of contact platform with users. Their content is limited to responding to customer gripes with proverbial messages like: “So sorry for your experience, please DM us and we’ll make things right.”
Those two approaches are fine, but they leave limited impact from a digital marketing and advertising perspective. What we’ve found is that personal accounts are really where the action is. Ads on Twitter can perform well when you’ve promoted tweets of employees and insiders within your B2B SaaS company.
Ideally, you’d promote tweets of employees who already have their own platform. Many times these employees will be members of your growth or content marketing teams — people who are writers or have a public narrative voice.
Other times, it might be C-Level executives like your CEO or CMO as well as VPs. One company that does this well is Shopify. They’re one of the best in the world when it comes to leveraging Twitter, amplifying what their employees are already sharing about what’s going on inside the company.
We’ve seen higher CTR on ads on the personal handles vs brand handles. But use both to get your brand out there.
How to Measure the Efficacy of Your Twitter Ad Campaign
There are many metrics you can monitor in a Twitter ad campaign. But the key performance indicators we pay most attention to link click-through rate and engagement rate.
Engagement rate is important because it’s an indicator of how strongly your tweet is connecting with your audience. In essence, it’s a function of the number of people who are clicking to expand and actually see what your account has to say. The tweets with higher organic engagement are the ones you’ll want to amplify through advertising.
An engagement rate of 2% or higher tends to be respectable for most B2B SaaS companies on Twitter.
Link click-through rate is indicative of how much your cost per click will be. If you have tight audience targeting combined with compelling tweets, your CTR should be high. The higher the CTR, the lower your CPC.
We’ve found that a CTR below 0.8% is often the line between affordable and expensive CPCs.
If one or both of these metrics are underperforming, take that as a sign to optimize your strategy. You’re likely either targeting too broad or the tweet you’re amplifying isn’t resonating with your audience. Here’s what you can do to fix that:
Narrow your targeting down further to followers of hidden gems that would appreciate the quality of your tweets. The more specific, the better.
Change the content you’re promoting. Write new tweets and try boosting them instead. Keep testing until you find a winning combination.
Happy marketing!