You have conquered Google Adwords and Bing Ads with relative ease.

You trounced over Facebook’s Ad system and made an absolute killing.

You have decided it is time to defeat the world of hashtags.

Like many of the other advertising platforms available online, Twitter has its unique personality to deal with.

What can Twitter ads do for your business?

Unlike, Google Adwords though, you do not need a manual to get started.

In fact, Twitter might just be one of the best options for a newbie advertiser to get their cyber wallet wet with.

So whether you are a small business owner just getting started or a grizzled, veteran advertise this is our guide to getting started with Twitter ads within the day.
(Good Read: “How Twitter Ads Can Help Your Business“)

But, before you begin – make sure that you have confirmed that your potential customers live and hang out on Twitter.

Nothing worse than learning a new advertising platform, and discovering that your “tribe” is not active there. Twitter management can be made fun.

Understanding Your Main Goal

Before you drop one dime on using Twitter’s ad system, you will have to decide on what your main goal is.

With that in mind, are you looking to gain more Twitter followers, leads, or brand impressions?

Getting To Know Twitter’s Advertising Program

Once you know what your goal is and what you expect to gain from Twitter it is wise to have a basic understanding of how their advertising program works.

Twitter uses different styles that is designed to promote either accounts, tweets, or trends.

Similar to Facebook, Twitter allows you to target people through their interests, locations, and other demographics.

It is an exceptionally easy way to get targeted traffic from Twitter. With Twitter, the ad marketing term used is known as “Promoted”.

This helps Twitter users understand the difference between an organic post and one that is paid.

Where Twitter excels right now is in the amount of ad cost. What that translates to is that it is less expensive to get Twitter traffic. This is a pure advantage for smaller businesses who are looking for the biggest bang for their buck. Important: cost is relative of course. If your cost per click (your adspend) is less than what you are selling, you win.

While Twitter may give you the benefit of being able to work within a smaller budget, and still get results, it is limited in a few other ways. The ad interface is can be somewhat complicated for a beginner to get the hang of.

The problem we personally have with Twitter as of right now is its inability to truly customize the ad experience. This can run into a problem with your ad spend. For example, if you do not want ads to be displayed after 8 PM EST, you have to log into your Twitter account to change the settings.

This can be difficult if you have many campaigns running at once. So if you are looking to get the absolute most out of your daily ad spend you will always have to stay on top of your ad settings to get the best performance.

Now that you understand the basic ins and outs of Twitter PPC campaigns it is time to see how easy it is to set one up!

Four Simple Steps To Getting Your Message Out To A Twitter Audience:

Step One: Choose Your Weapon

As we discussed earlier one of the first steps in creating a Twitter ad campaign is making the decision to promote either tweets or your account.

This is going to be you first big decision, but don’t panic, it’s not that hard. If you are looking to build up a large following on Twitter in hopes of taking over the world or breaking the internet, promoting your account will be the way to go. Basically, promoting your account is just an excellent way to make yourself feel / get popular.

For most marketers, the better option is going to be promoting your tweets.

Here you will be able to craft some ingenious and witty tweets to entice your followers to click thru to your landing pages. With good copy and targeting, you will be able to convert these followers into leads and customers.

Choosing to promote a tweet gives you the power to show your audience what you want them to see at any given time.

Step Two: Choose Your Audience

Once you have decided on what you will be promoting it is time to decide on who you want to see your message. You want to make sure you are paying for the right type of traffic that will convert into leads and customers.

The more interest a person has in the message you are trying to convey the higher your chances are in getting that conversion.

Twitter allows you to target your campaigns by keywords, interests, and followers. Not to get too technical, but you can also scrape visitors from your database or a list of website visitors using the Tailored Audience feature.

Not sure how you should target?

If you are looking to create a campaign by targeting followers and interests, you will need to gather a list of users with similar interests as the followers.

For example, you could create a list of all the followers of Tim Ash and Amy Africa, two top online marketers. From this list alone you should have more than enough of an audience to promote to in the internet marketing niche.

The same tactics would be used for anything from dog training to culinary cooking.

If you choose to target through the use of keywords you will be seeking out users who have used your keyword in a tweet or search. Your tweet will either show up in the search results or their personal timeline depending on your preferences.

Through this type of targeting, you may be able to focus in on a more specific audience than the other way.

If you are brand new to Twitter as an advertising platform, I would suggest creating a campaign by targeting followers and interests.

This will put you in front of a large new audience very quickly. Once you are established on Twitter move into creating keyword campaigns.

Step Three: Drill-down Targeting

Now you are in for a real treat as we can further drill down our audience.

This is where things really start to pick up and get exciting. You can begin to drill down your audience by sex, age, location, and even device platform.

If you are a small business owner, looking to see locally, you will want to use these setting.

If you are a dog groomer looking to get your name out in (local ad strategy) New Jersey, this is where you do it. Likewise, if you are selling a digital weight loss product you will want to think globally.

If you are looking to target people who are always on the go you can drill down to mobile users or find those who are still attached to their desktops at home.

Once again these are the setting you will need to tinker with to get the ultimate in conversions.

Lastly, if you are looking to promote muscle builders or a testosterone enhancer you will want to promote to men.

Whereas, if you are promoting beauty and pregnancy, a female audience may be more in line.

Step Four: Ready, Set, Tweet

Believe it or not, all the hard work is done!

Can you imagine you are ready to get your ads live on Twitter? How long did this take, maybe a half hour? Regardless, let’s finish this rodeo up.

You have done all the research and targeting and now it is time to start creating your tweets. (You may already have tweets in your history that are performing well. You can use those if the messaging and the targeting makes sense).

Of course, if you are not skilled at creating good copy this can be outsourced to a capable freelancer.

You do have a couple of options here.

If you have tweets that you have already crafted you can resend them out as promoted content. Or as we have touched up send out brand new tweets.

When you compose a new tweet you can send it out as a standard tweet which is a regular organic tweet or as a promoted only tweet.

Once you have completed these tasks you have to decide on a daily budget and what you want your maximum spend to be.

Always keep these numbers with something you are comfortable with and will be OK with if by some chance the campaign doesn’t work (which is very possible on your first try). All that is left it to hit the publish button and your ad will go live. Please validate and test.

So… was that good – or GOOD?

You are now well on your way to dominating the Twitter demographic.

Whether you are an experienced internet marketer or a small business owner just getting started with paid advertising, Twitter can be a great tool to connect with your audience to drive sales and leads.

With a little bit of time and dedication, you may find that Twitter is your new love in the paid ads community.