Free Newsletter
Marketing on Twitter has some obvious hurdles. Tweets are short – even with the updated 280 character limit, your pitch needs to get to the point. It’s not as photo-driven as other platforms. And tweets quickly disappear, replaced by new ones, so your message needs to resonate.
To find out how retailers can leverage Twitter, we reached out for tips from professional digital marketers on making the most of the platform.
Nicolas Straut, a content marketing associate at Fundera, suggests retailers create special offers for followers.
“Customers can receive, say, 25 percent off special items by following a link to a website landing page created for the event,” Straut says. “Or show their cashier the tweet before the sale’s deadline to take advantage of the sale.”
Seth Worby, CEO and founder of Champ Internet, suggests using a specific Twitter list for your most loyal customers.
“Use that list to monitor any tweets from the group,” Worby says. “You can like them, retweet them or reply to them directly. This makes it easy to ensure that you are constantly engaging with your most loyal customers.”
One way you may be able to boost sales is by using proof of sales online, says David Mercer, who created SME Pals, a blog for small and medium enterprise. This marketing method can increase engagement, help you find influencers and increase purchases, Mercer says.
“By being able to show that more people are buying one product over another, you are able to convince more people to buy that product,” he says. “We use an hourly price tracker – it’s important that it’s hourly – to monitor the sales performance of competing products, receive alerts when those products experience surges in sales, and then provide tools to help them discover the marketing and promotions that drove those sales. In this way, it helps us understand and keep track of our niche market, gauge how our own products are competing, and helps us identify and focus on marketing strategies that are proven to work for our competitors.”
Syed Irfan Ajmal, growth marketing manager at ridesharing blog Ridester, has used an indirect marketing approach that he says has more than doubled visitors to the site. Ajmal has used the same technique to boost sales for online retailers.
“We think a more direct/aggressive approach is counter-productive when it comes to social media,” Ajmal says. “There is actually evidence to support that the best channels for branding, traffic and sales are social media, SEO and email marketing respectively.”
Ajmal’s company produces long-form content to increase relevance with Google. Longer, useful articles or blogs produce more search friendly keywords, helping to drive traffic to your site.
“We then create a list of influencers, bloggers, and journalists who are relevant to our content piece,” he says. “Then we reach out to them via Twitter to build a relationship and persuade them to link out to our content pieces from their blog or website. We never pay for the links as that’s against Google’s guidelines.”
Building these relationships, Ajmal says, can help provide your content with relevant backlinks “which, in turn, increases our traffic, leads, and sales.”
Andy Tweedale, head of social at Passion Digital, has helped clients in the furniture space create Twitter “tailored audiences” – sometimes called look-alikes, which can reach potential customers who are already interested in your products, for example, users who’ve recently visited your website or performed an action on your app. “You can target niche, engaged sources off the bat,” he says.
Using target keywords and hashtags that are currently popular on Twitter can also drive engagement, says Kristien Matelski, a digital marketing specialist at Vizion Interactive.
“A major way that Twitter differs from other social media advertising such as Facebook, is the ability to target keywords and hashtags people are using,” she says. “If you’re at a furniture conference for instance, and you want to target the conference hashtag that everyone is using, you can easily do that with Twitter, not so much with other social media,” she says. “Twitter is a great platform for retail marketing, both for driving sales online and bringing customers to store.”
To grow your knowledge of marketing with Twitter and through other social channels, join us at the PBM Next Conference, Sept. 24-26 in Austin, Texas. Register now at pbmnext.com.
