How Promoted Tweets Reduced Advertising Costs By 88%

Since Twitter announced Promoted Tweets in 2010, companies have been exploring their uses to determine if it’s a worthwhile investment of time and money. Many that have tried Promoted Tweets haven’t achieved the success they were looking for. They get plenty of attention and followers, but marketers and business leaders questioned the value of those results. What did Promoted Tweets really achieve, from a revenue perspective?

We asked ourselves that question and decided to test it out. What if Promoted Tweets could be used as more than just an audience-builder? What if we could refine our methods to make them function more like a traditional AdWords-style campaign, with the goal of B2B lead generation? Could we do it, and would it work? With Promoted Tweets, you can tune your budget, targeting, and results with great granularity to achieve astonishing accuracy. As with many forms of paid media, the more focus and the narrower your target, the less expensive it tends to be become.

What we found

For our promotion, we chose one tweet about our upcoming webinar in July 2013 that directed Twitter users (talking about the topics related to the webinar) to a dedicated landing page. Our budget for this test was a total of $50 on this tweet. Out of 11,537 impressions, we received 81 clicks. How good is that, you ask? Compared to a standard B2B lead generation campaign on Google AdWords, where the cost per click is typically around $5 per click (and it goes significantly higher more often than not, up to $50 or $60 per click), our Promoted Tweets cost per click was only $0.62, a mere 12.4% of the cost of a similar Google AdWords campaign.

You’re probably wondering how many of those 81 clicks actually signed up for the webinar. Did it convert? It did indeed. Our conversion rate was 8.6% and one of those conversions became a SHIFT client! While we can’t share exact ROI details, it’s more than fair to say that we got our $50 back and then some.

Change your thinking about Promoted Tweets. It’s not just a method for reinforcing your earned media (though it’s certainly excellent at that). It’s also, when properly configured and tuned, a powerful lead generation tool for any complex sale, B2B or B2C. As long as you manage your targeting and costs intelligently, it can deliver powerful results on par with any other form of digital advertising.

If you’re considering Promoted Tweets and would like some help, please feel free to contact us. We’re happy to lend a hand.

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