Marketing Your Webinar Using Twitter Ads in 3 Steps

Marketing Webinar Twitter

Marketing on Twitter is an essential supplement of an effective webinar promotional campaign. When considering which social media channels to promote your webinar on, Twitter should be on the list. Did you know that Twitter has 186 million active users daily? Or that out of that 186 million, 38 million of those located in the US?

Twitter’s reach is wide, and advertising options are deep. In fact, 66% of brands use Twitter for marketing. Along with that, people spend 28% more time viewing ads on Twitter than other social media platform. Due to the high volume of users and strong reader engagement, running a webinar ad on Twitter could provide the registration boost you are seeking.

In this post, we’ll first cover the different Twitter ad formats. Then we will discuss options for selecting your ideal audience target. Finally, we will go over how much to spend on marketing your webinar on Twitter. Let’s get to it!

Step 1: Choosing your Webinar Ad Format

Twitter has over 20 different ad formats to cover almost every marketing objective and budget! The advertising categories include:

  • Promoted AdsTwitter’s standard offering, versatile that can be combined with other offerings
  • Follower Ads ads to increase followers of your brand’s account
  • Amplify a video offering in alignment with relevant publishers. Some restrictions apply, so please see Twitter’s guidelines if this offering appeals to you. 
  • Takeover  – Twitter’s most premium offering to drive mass reach. If a Twitter takeover interests you, you’ll need to discuss your objectives, preferences, and budget with a Twitter account manager. You can learn more about this option on Twitter’s website. 
  • Livea live broadcast feature that allows users to join in real-time. Twitter Live may be a good option to pursue if you are interested in live-streaming your actual webinar or a pre-webinar mini topic teaser promotion. 
  • Ad Features options to enhance your ads and make them more interactive, including polls, buttons, and branded hashtags.

For this article, we’ll focus on the more mainstream and practical options for webinar promotions: Promoted Ads and Twitter Ad Features. But, of course, if you want to experiment with the other types of ads, we encourage you to do so and invite you to share your success with us!

Which Promoted Ad Option Is Best for a Webinar Ad?

With so many advertising options, it can be hard to choose which format best supports your webinar ad needs. However, your end objective is to generate registrations. So, you want to choose an appropriate format for your message that is conducive with the action of registering. The good news is you don’t need to limit your selection to just one format. In fact, using three or more ad formats increases campaign awareness by 20% and purchase intent by 7%.

Let’s dive deeper into the ad options and how you might use each.

  • Single image ads – a fairly common format, single image ads use one image plus copy to promote your message.
  • Video ads – just as the name suggests, video ads use video to drive users to your webinar registration page. If your organization is video-oriented and your team has the resources to produce a promotional video, this is the option for you!
  • Carousel ads – a combination of 6 horizontal images the user can swipe through, carousel ads give users a deeper understanding of your webinar. Carousel format is likely a little less common for webinar promotions.
  • Moment ads – allows brands to create, curate, and promote a collection of Tweets to tell an immersive story that goes beyond Twitter’s 280 characters. If you are a novice to marketing on Twitter, you may want to gain more experience before using this format.
  • Text ads – simple, text-only ads that blend in with standard Twitter content for a more natural appearance. Also a great option for those newer to Twitter advertising.

How to Improve the Interaction of your Webinar Ad

Once you’ve chosen your base format, use Twitter’s Ad Features to enhance your Promoted Ad and improve user engagement:

  • Polls – Consider using a poll as a stand-alone webinar ad, or in combination with a single image, video, or text ad. For best results, your poll should be relevant to your webinar topic. Not only do polls increase curiosity and user engagement, but once the poll has closed, you now have new webinar-related content.
  • Conversation Buttons – drive engagement and conversation with embedded buttons that prompt people to Tweet about branded content. Conversation buttons include call-to-action buttons and customizable hashtags.
A Twitter poll from The Barista Bar showing a person pouring milk into a beverage asking if people prefer cappuccinos or lattes

Again, if using a customizable hashtag, make sure it is related to your webinar and be sure to promote it in the live event, too!

  • Website Buttons – a clickable functionality to promote click-throughs to a specific landing page. Website buttons are very effective on single image and video ads especially.  
  • App Buttons –  clickable functionality to a specific App Store or Play Store app download page. For all practical purposes, this one probably isn’t going to be used by marketers to promote a webinar, unless you have a specific branded app.
  • Branded Hashtags – Twitter will help you create a branded hashtag, and you can view the usage across Twitter. For an unofficial hashtag, (or before using ANY hashtag!) do your research on Twitter to see what’s been used. Once you see which hashtags are out there, it’s time to create your own. Because hashtags can take a while to catch on, try using a broader hashtag for your webinars that can be repeated. This will encourage usage over time.

Don’t be afraid to test the different Twitter ad formats and ad features, too. If this is your first Twitter advertising venture, we suggest to start simple. Once you get going, you’ll gain confidence in no time. With this familiarity, you can create a mix of advertisements to best suit your organization and brand.

For a more comprehensive approach on using social media to market webinars, read “How to Promote a Webinar Using Social Media“.

Step 2: Selecting Your Audience Target

Besides a plethora of ad formats, Twitter also has extensive audience targeting capabilities. The demographic targets include:

  • Location
  • Language
  • Device, platform, and Wi-Fi
  • Age
  • Gender

Additionally, Twitter also offers different “audience types” to choose from, to make your ad highly relevant:

  • Conversation targeting, serving your ad based on the content people are tweeting about
  • Event targeting, serving your ad based on the events people are attending
  • Twitter engagers, retargeting those who have already seen and interacted with your paid or organic Twitter promotions
  • Keyword targeting, allowing you to reach or exclude users based on specific keywords
  • Movies and TV targeting, should you wish to reach users who tweet about TV or movies in specific markets
  • Interest targeting, an extensive selection of Twitter’s pre-defined 350+ interests and 25 categories 
  • Follower look alike, allowing you to create a target audience similar to those who follow your brand 

And for those who prefer marketing your webinar to a known audience, Twitter offers options to serve ads to only those who follow your brand.

With so many audience selection options, Twitter enables advertisers to reach the right people at the right time. Likely, their advanced segmentation is a contributing factor as to why Twitter users engage with ads more frequently vs. other platforms. Subsequently, more marketers are turning to Twitter to reach new audience pockets for their webinar promotions.

Step 3: Setting your Ad Budget

Now for the final piece: how much to spend. The good news is Twitter does not have a minimum ad spend! So if you prefer to start small, that’s not a problem. When you create your Twitter ad, you’ll set the dates you want your ad to run and the total budget you want to spend. 

In general, Twitter charges for ads in one of three ways:

Billable actions 

With this option, you’re charged based on your campaign objective. If your goal is more brand awareness or gaining visibility of your webinar, then your billable action would be impressions served. If you’ve included a webinar registration link or button, then your billable action would be when someone clicks on your ad. When setting your budget, use $.50-$2.00 per billable action as a guide for the reach your webinar ad will have, but how much in total you pay for a campaign is set by you.

Auctions 

The price you’ll pay in an auction is not a fixed rate. Rather, you’re bidding for advertising space. Therefore, how much you pay depends on a few criteria, including: 

  • How engaging your webinar ad is
  • The size of your target audience
  • How many other advertisers are bidding for the same audience
  • The amount of your bid

If you are targeting a popular audience segment, expect to pay more to reach them.

Bids

Bids are very similar to an auction, except setting a bid allows you to choose how much you’re willing to pay for the objective you’ve selected. No one has an unlimited budget, so bids come in handy. But buyer beware: if you bid too low and someone else bids higher, Twitter will show their ad more frequently than yours. If you’d like to learn more about Twitter bids and auctions, Twitter offers a helpful FAQ on their website. 

If the pricing options overwhelm you or you’re not sure where to start, we recommend beginning with the billable actions. After you feel more comfortable with running ads on Twitter, then you can mix it up. Testing advertising methods on Twitter is a great way to see what your audience is engaging with.

Evaluating Your Results

Once your webinar ad launches, keep an eye on the performance metrics available on your Twitter campaign dashboard. Your dashboard will show you critical metrics. These metrics include the impressions served, results, engagement rate, and cost per result of your ad. From there, you can calculate your cost per webinar registration and compare it to the other webinar marketing efforts you are doing. In doing this, you can evaluate the ROI of your efforts and net results.

Final Thoughts

With a vast base of users and extensive advertising options, marketing your webinar on Twitter can have a large impact. Twitter enables new advertisers to start with a small budget, familiar ad formats, and a variety of audience selection criteria. This ensures your ad is reaching the right people. For those with more Twitter advertising experience, the variety and combination of ad formats and audience targets will help your webinar promotions extend even further. Our advice: be curious, be creative, and of course, always testing.

Want more tips on how to market your webinar effectively? Download our free guide, The Ultimate Guide to Webinar Promotions.

Contentware uses AI and your landing page to create an entire, branded marketing campaign – in minutes. Want to learn more? Sign up for a demo!

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