How to Inform Postcard Targeting and Messaging Using Twitter Ads for Small Business

As any experienced direct response marketer knows, successful marketing isn’t just about reaching a large audience, but about reaching a responsive audience.

Twitter’s advertising platform, which was recently rolled out for small businesses in addition to the company’s large base of corporate advertisers, is an excellent tool for small businesses seeking insights into their audience’s tastes and interests.

In this quick guide, we’ll look at how you can use Twitter to learn more about your audience’s tastes, interests, and passions, and use this information to think up great postcard ideas for marketing your business.

Generating direct response insights with Twitter

Twitter isn’t just where people go to socialize – it’s where they go to learn about the things they care about. From political leaders to musicians, you can learn a lot about your audience’s interests and passions from the people they follow on Twitter.

This is why Twitter’s new targeting options are so powerful for marketers. Twitter’s new ad platform allows advertisers to target users based on their @usernames – the accounts they follow and interact with.

As an advertiser, you can promote your content to people interested in CNN, Lebron James, ESPN, or any other account. Specialize in business to business sales? You can also target users that follow leading voices and companies in your industry.

Aside from the obvious direct marketing benefits of targeting people interested in the products and services you offer, Twitter’s @username targeting is a powerful tool for learning about the type of content your audience likes to consume.

Testing content campaigns on Twitter before you send custom postcards

Sending postcards to your audience can be a highly effective campaign idea, but it can also be costly if your message fails to create a response. Before you start your direct mail advertising postcards campaign, you can use Twitter’s @username ad targeting options to learn more about what your audience will respond to.

This makes it far easier to choose an effective angle for your campaign. From issues that you’d like to target for a nonprofit fundraising campaign to benefits you’d like to target for a B2B marketing campaign, Twitter makes it easy to learn what works.

Test your audience’s interests by using Twitter Ads to promote content you think could be popular. In the Analytics tab of Twitter Ads, you can see which articles or blog posts attracted the most retweets, favorites, and direct replies.

If your business already has a large following on Twitter, you can simply tweet the content directly to your audience. Analytics works for both paid campaigns and free tweets – there’s no need to advertise just for access to the Analytics dashboard.

For example, you could test several angles you plan to use to promote a new product or service to your audience. Pretend you run a business that helps consumers lower their bills. You could use Analytics to test the following direct mail sales headlines:

• Spend less on gasoline this year by increasing your vehicle’s efficiency!

• Lower your home energy bills without compromising your comfort!

• Learn how to strengthen your home and spend less on costly maintenance!

By testing several different headlines and angles with your Twitter following, you’ll quickly discover which topic has the greatest overall impact. Measure the retweets, favorites, and replies to learn which angles your audience best responds to.

Choosing the best content and messages for your postcard campaigns

By testing topics, issues, and messages on Twitter before you make them the focus of your postcard campaigns, you can quickly find the subjects that will produce the greatest response from your audience.

These subjects could be political issues, business or personal benefits, or simply an interesting, unique event that captures people’s attention and inspired them to take action.

The more responsive your audience is, the more effective your direct mail campaign will be. By carrying out small micro-experiments prior to your campaign, you’ll have no trouble finding the best mailing ideas for achieving your goals.

With these insights, you’ll be able to achieve far better results from your direct mail advertising postcards when the time comes to launch your next campaign.