How to target customers to create relevant campaigns and reach tailored demographics as part of a successful Twitter marketing strategy.

Twitter is a powerful social marketing tool with 80% of all Twitter users mentioning brands in Tweets. A Twitter marketing strategy can help your business promote content, boost brand awareness, create loyal relationships with your clients, maximise your website's conversion rates, encourage new leads, and increase sales.

With almost 400 million global users, an optimised Twitter marketing strategy is a plan which distributes content and marketing copy centred around your client; the percentage demographic of that 400 million your business is targeting.

A form of inbound marketing, your strategy must be tailored to draw in your customer with high-value, high-impact, and directed content. For a successful Twitter marketing strategy, you must know who your audience is and how to target them.

Create Marketing Personas

Marketing personas are character profiles of your customers. They represent who your brand, content, and marketing are talking to.

Marketing personas may detail your customer's industry, age range, where they are located, their education level, and gender. They may also note your client's primary challenges, and drives, what publications they read, the social networks they use, how they use the internet, and how they use your product/services.

Traffic analysers like Google Analytics give information on how your customer engages with your company online e.g. mobile, tablet, or desktop. Twitter itself is also a great outreach platform for collecting tweet responses to questions posed to your customers about your customers.

A great option is to host a Twitter Chat, where you schedule a time and date, choose a topic, and create a chat hashtag. You host and everyone participating will be able to see responses, questions, and comments. Not only is this a great way of compiling more advanced information for marketing personas but also allows you to gather feedback on your products and services.

Further methods of gathering information for marketing personas include market research, surveys, social media polls, and telephone or email interviews. All can be used to gather the answers needed to construct your marketing personas and offer your client base the chance to impact and improve your brand.

Three to five persona templates can accurately represent your majority audience.

Target Your Twitter Campaigns

When planning Twitter marketing campaigns, remember curious customers will visit your account to build an idea of your brand. Don't display identical promotional posts, instead tweet a variety of links varying imagery, media, call-to-actions, and copy.

Each post as part of a campaign should have a hook tailored to your marketing personas. Think about how your content lends itself to different forms of copywriting. Copy doesn't necessarily need to be informative but it must catch your customer's attention, and the better you know your target client, the easier this is to achieve.

Twitter’s geo-targeting enables you to tailor your campaigns to target demographics with options such as location, age, language, and gender. When using geo-targeting remember options are subtractive meaning each added option decreases the audience size your campaign reaches. For example, if you set your campaign to show to London-based males aged 18-24 it will not show to London-based males aged 35-49.

A Twitter List is a selection of Twitter accounts grouped into categories. Creating a list for target audience allows you to direct tweets only to those accounts. If you feel your tweets are still getting lost, for a monthly fee promoted tweets mean Twitter will put your tweets in a daily campaign targeting your ideal customer base and showing your tweets in their searches.

For individuals and small businesses, MissingLettr.com is a free resource which automates Twitter posts. MissingLettr creates a series of tweets and will show you suggestions for copy and media based on the URL link which can then be edited. These will then automatically post to your timeline according to a pre-set schedule.

Twitter allows you to go into an open conversation with your customer, with an audience targeted marketing strategy, Twitter is an opportunity to establish trust by presenting the tailored content, insights, and solutions your competitors haven't, generating brand authority.