Industrial manufacturers and resellers are the biggest industrial users of Twitter right now. Unfortunately, they are using it too often as a “flyer” to promote what they offer. The power of Twitter lies in your ability to engage your target audience groups in a conversation about topics important to them. “One off” tweets that do not generate discussion are tantamount to two four year olds engaged in a parallel conversation where statements are made but nothing comes of them: “I have a race car. Look.” The other four year old looks and says, “I had cake for lunch.” Both pieces of shared information are soon forgotten. You get the idea.

So what do you do now? Here’re some ideas:

Identify a topic of importance to your target audience group. Ways you can do that:

• Ask your sales team to relate concerns raised by customers.
• Read the trade news for issues that concern them.
• Read their company news for issues that concern them.
• Select a topic from your company news about something you offer or have introduced that helps their business to do better.

Make a list of possible Tweets. Imagine how the conversation online might go and prepare thoughts and responses in advance. It may not go the way you plan but you will have thought about it and researched it thoroughly so you will be prepared to guide the conversation more effectively.

If you haven’t done so already, invite customers to Follow you. If you really want to spark interest and build your Followers, announce the discussions you have begun on your home page, in an email, or some place you know you can reach your target audience groups effectively. Learn how to integrate Twitter into your site here.

Start tweeting, beginning with the most provocative tweet designed to get the conversation going. Keep tweeting on the same topic with your participants so that it makes it to the Trending List (seen in the right column on Twitter).

If your efforts are working but you still haven’t made it to the Trending List, sign up for a Twitter ad campaign once the ad service becomes available to everyone (I’ll let you know so keep checking back). Select keywords that will structure your campaign around the relevance of your established topic.

To support your ad campaign, select from your existing tweets relevant messages that will be promoted during the campaign. Simply click on any of your tweets that are already an organic part of Twitter to make them a Promoted Tweet.

Users who are not yet Following you can learn about your topic from related hashtags in their own timelines or by searching relevant terms that have to do with your topic. Once a user interacts with your Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends they can opt to Follow you, Retweet it, or Reply.

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends can also be used effectively with regard to trade show or other sales and promotional event appearances or sponsorships your company is planning. One final point, remember to closely monitor, measure, evaluate and make adjustments as needed to ensure the best results.

While you are waiting for Twitter to invite everyone to start advertising on their ad platform, adjust your approach to how you tweet and what you tweet about. Whether it’s a policy issue, a new product your introducing, or an upcoming trade show you will be participating in, actively engage your target audience groups about what interests them. Twitter can be an effective channel to keep your company name in the thoughts of your existing and potential customers by demonstrating your knowledge of and interest in topics important to them.

Additionally, I encourage you to communicate with Twitter at this time about the specific needs of the industrial business to business (B2B) marketer. Typically last to embrace new media technologies, industrial marketers are not generally considered during development phases of ad platforms so their unique needs are seldom addressed. By voicing your requirements now, you may avoid having to conform to a system that was designed to meet the needs of business to consumer (B2C) enterprises.

For all intents and purposes Promoted Tweets “are ordinary tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.” What makes this service different from traditional search advertising models is “all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets [with] not a single “ad” that isn’t already part of Twitter.” To maintain broadcast control, Twitter “will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. This applies to a stream that may be user based, search based, or other.”

Another aspect of the service is ‘Promoted Trends.’ Working much the same way as Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends refer to conversations, called Trending Topics, that are being discussed on Twitter but that may not have made it onto the Trending Topics list yet. Twitter will place paid Promoted Trends initially at the bottom of the Trending Topics list to help them to garner some attention and traction. When a user clicks on the Promoted Trend he will be able to Follow it, Retweet it, and Reply to it. All the while he is reading or interacting with the tweet, a persistent Promoted Tweet will appear at the top of his page.

In my next post I will discuss how industrial marketers can get the most out of Twitter and its new advertising services once they become available to everyone.

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Manage Online Campaigns with the Right Performance-Based Metrics

Heidi Cohen, one of my favorite digital marketing experts and ClickZ contributiors, recently published 25 Digital Media Questions Marketers Need to Answer. This excellent article is a must-read and offers invaluable insight to help you develop ways to embrace the new challenges in online marketing.

Cohen identifies the three marketing hurdles digital media must overcome as:

1. Expand Reach
2. Improve Advertising Effectiveness
3. Drive Engagement

It’s not that these hurdles are necessarily new but the approaches to overcoming them must be performance-based and demonstrate a clear understanding of the behavior of your target audience groups. Heidi writes, “Tina Sharkey of BabyCenter pointed out, it’s important to be present when and where prospects and consumers are discussing needs related to your product offering.”

Without a doubt you need to discover where your target audience groups are spending time online discussing either your products/services or the types of products/services you offer. To improve overall advertising effectiveness, Cohen suggests “behavioral targeting where relevant ads pop in a non-targeted context.” The idea is to avoid ad fatigue by reaching at least some portion of your target audience group in an environment that doesn’t offer hundreds of ads selling what you’re selling. It really is important to be represented in both contexts, targeted and non-targeted, because online branding often leads to offline sales further along the timeline.

Read Heidi’s article. It provides you with 25 great questions to ask concerning:

• Audience
• Format
• Branding
• Social
• Revenues
• Costs

The key to any successful online initiative is first to clearly establish your conversion goals and identify what needs to happen for you to achieve them. Next, as Heidi points out, you need to identify the performance metrics that provide you with the information you need to accurately track your results. By making the necessary adjustments to your campaigns over time based on the right information you can tailor your campaigns to produce the results you desire or discontinue them if need be.

Acquired 26 Million Unique Visitors in April

Why do you read the news or your trade journal? For that matter why do you watch television or rent a movie? Content. You want to experience the content that the source provides you. Yahoo certainly understands the power of content and has been engaged in efforts to acquire a partnership with the Huffington Post, currently valued at $125 million, according to MediaBuyerPlanner.com.

Attracting more than 26 million unique visitors in April alone, reports MediaBuyerPlanner.com, the Huffington Post “is currently the biggest blog online, now covering more than 20 news categories, and successfully uses social media to spread its content across the web.”

You may not be Yahoo or the Huffington Post but the same social media vehicles being used by these sources are available to you too. The strategy behind the publishing sites is to offer diverse categories of content that attract a broader audience. They reach out to these audience groups through Facebook, Twitter, Newsvine, Email, and other social media channels by adding links to the content as well as inviting reader participation in a conversation stimulated by the content they provide.

Without tying yourself to a publication schedule you cannot manage, discover ways to keep your target audience groups connected to you through the free content you provide. To reach more of your targeted audience groups, broaden your categories by matching targeted content with the specific interests of each group. Subdivide your monthly or bi-monthly newsletter and your blog into these categories. Add new sections to your website that specifically speak to the interests of each targeted group. Basically, divide and conquer.  People get used to routine so keep your publication schedules consistent. You can keep the content fresh and interesting by relating it to a current event in the news or addressing a real life client concern you experienced.