In Part 1 and Part 2 of ‘Alternative Advertising Platforms to Reach your Target Audiences’, we explored how you could use platforms such as Twitch, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and YouTube as alternatives to advertising on Facebook and Google. As we know, Facebook and Google are great advertising platforms for most online marketers. However, given their very broad audiences, you may find more success using alternative platforms. Whether there is a larger sense of community or their user bases are very specific to a certain demographic or gender, the platforms we have discussed provide you with the opportunity to reach a highly targeted audience.
Below, we will discuss the details and benefits of using the final three alternative advertising platforms in our list: Twitter, Quora, and Tumblr.
Twitter is a massive social media platform, and their ads are a great way for you to get more likes, promote your website, increase CTR, and amplify your brand message. With over 330 million global monthly active users, their ad platform provides the perfect opportunity for businesses to promote themselves and their products.
When your business advertises with Tweets, you are also able to connect with new audiences. One of the main reasons users go on Twitter is to discover new content, which includes yours.
Targeting Twitter users
Twitter ads have great targeting options in order to help businesses reach the right audience. Here are some of their most useful targeting options.
Followers: By targeting specific followers, you can reach those whose interests align with your company’s offerings. For example, you can target “users who follow conference handles with ads linking to their blog”.
Keywords: Keywords are another way you can find users with specific interests and characteristics. For example, a company promoting skin cream can target users who have tweeted about beauty products, featuring a Twitter-exclusive discount code and link back to their website.
With Tailored Audiences, you can target your existing customers using three methods:
- Tailored audiences from lists: Upload your list that includes email marketing lists, mobile phone numbers, Twitter user IDs, or mobile advertising IDs.
- Tailored audiences from web: Target your website’s visitors. This information can be collected via Twitter’s website tag, or by using Twitter’s website tag partners.
- Remarketing: Target the customers who left your website without making a purchase.
Advertising with Twitter
Twitter ads use automatic bidding. With the auction model, advertisers can choose from three options: automatic bidding, maximum bidding, or target bidding. This is dependant on which campaign objective you select for your advertisement.
In addition, there is no minimum ad spend for Twitter ads.
Ad Specs
Here are some of Twitter’s creative specifications:
Plain text tweet: 280 characters
Image website card: 256 characters
Promoted video: 280 characters
Conventional ads: 256 characters.
Visit the following link to see their full list of creative specifications: https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/advertiser-card-specifications.html
Quora
Quora does not always come to mind when businesses are searching for great advertising platforms. However, the questions and answers platform brings in over 200 million monthly visitors, which make up a unique audience that businesses should connect with.
People go to Quora to ask questions and find answers, which includes finding business reviews and recommendations. Moreover, Quora users are highly engaged and find a sense of community on the website.
Targeting Quora users
Quora has many audience targeting options available, including: lookalike audiences, website retargeting, question targeting, multiple topic targeting, and interest targeting.
- Lookalike audiences: Target users who have similar characteristics to your existing customers.
- Website retargeting: Target audiences that have visited your website in the past.
- Question targeting: Cater your content to specific questions that are asked on Quora.
- Multiple topic targeting: Target multiple topics with your ads by uploading Google keywords to find match topics on Quora.
- Interest targeting: Target users who have voted on certain answers, followed questions, and more.
Quora’s targeting is powered through their pixel.
Advertising with Quora
As we mentioned earlier, one of the biggest avantages of advertising on Quora is that you are targeting a highly engaged community. Advertising on Quora can help increase CTRs and then number of quality leads.
According to Adstage, 93% of traffic came from new users when they experimented with Quora ads. They also added that Quora had “fantastic CPAs that are cheaper than AdWords and Facebook”
You can keep track of your metrics using Quora’s ads manager. Below is what their ads manager dashboard looks like.
Tumblr
When used correctly, Tumblr can be a powerful advertising platform. With over 200 million blogs, and up to 80 million user posts per day, Tumblr provides brands with a huge opportunity to reach an engaged audience.
What makes Tumblr ads unique is that they maintain the look and feel of blog content. In this sense, they are like native ads. According to Hootsuite, many Tumblr users actually like seeing advertisements on the platform as well. They noted that “Sixty percent of users who have seen a Sponsored Post report finding the content fun, engaging, and of high quality. Out of the consumers who have seen a Sponsored Post, 70 percent say they perceive the associated brand more favorably as a result. Over half of the Tumblr audience took action and went on to research the sponsor afterward.”
Tumblr says “brands are welcomed as creators themselves with content users want to see.
Targeting Tumblr users
Since millennials make up for most of Tumblr’s audience, this is a good advertising platform for brands that are looking to target young users.
There are a number of targeting options on Tumblr ads, including: gender, interest, and location.
Advertising with Tumblr
Here are Tumblr’s three advertising options:
Sponsored posts: Sponsored posts are designed to have the look and feel of blog content.
Sponsored Video posts: These are similar native video ads for web and mobile.
Sponsored Day: Businesses can put their logos on the Tumblr dashboard for 24 hours. This is a great advertising strategy as the dashboard gets a lot of attention from users. It is also the easiest way for them to see and share your content. According to a Tumblr poll, 70% of users said that the Dashboard is their favourite place to spend time online.
The downfall of advertising with Tumblr is that it is expensive. Their minimum ad spend starts at $25,000. Typically, larger companies advertise with Tumblr. However, if you are willing to spend the money, there are obvious benefits to using Tumblr ads.
Bottom Line
Twitter, Quora and Tumblr are all unique and excellent alternative advertising platforms that you should look into using in your next ad campaign. Depending on who you are trying to target, you could find that your ads perform extremely well with these unique audiences.
Make sure to take a look at Part 1 and Part 2 of ‘Alternative Advertising Platforms to Reach your Target Audiences’ to see other useful alternative platforms.
[…] does not usually come to mind as an effective advertising platform. However, it is a great alternative to advertising on Facebook and Google. Quora’s audiences are unique, engagement is high among […]
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