Abstract
This legal tech startup serves consumers, as well as businesses like Adobe, J.D. Power, and Transamerica. The marketing team uses insights from SparkToro to inform their overall approach to marketing. This helps them speak their audiences’ language and reach them where they are across numerous verticals including finance, legal, auto and real estate.
A Bit of Context
One seven-year-old startup has credibility in their space and the ripe opportunity to engage their multiple audiences. Since they serve customers across the B2C and B2B landscapes, they know how important it is that they reach each of their target audiences and address their unique pain points.
They do this by meeting their audiences where they are. They take a research-informed approach to their marketing strategy, and they do it with the help of SparkToro.
A Hashtag Lover’s Dream
When this SparkToro customer’s social media manager first brought SparkToro on board, she was in the midst of a massive revamp of their social media strategy. From what the brand posted, to who they followed, to what hashtags they used, she examined every detail and how it could be improved. Enter: SparkToro’s “My Audience Frequently Uses the Hashtag…” audience research query.
The social team began inputting their frequently used hashtags to examine a few key criteria.
- Is anyone in their target audience actually using these hashtags?
- For popular, key hashtags like #LegalTech or #MobileNotary, what other hashtags are users also using?
- Who do people follow that use these hashtags and should we be following and engaging with them as well?
By answering these questions and more, the social team was able to rebuild their list of hashtags for their B2C and B2B audiences as well as discover new influencers to follow on Twitter.
A search for the hashtag #LegalTech presents an impressive list of other hashtags and Twitter accounts to follow, including lawyer and journalist Bob Ambrogi. And sure enough, the startup’s CEO recently appeared on Bob’s LawNext Podcast to discuss how the company is disrupting an age-old legal process.
This third-party validation helped the startup’s marketing team see that their CEO’s guest appearance truly reached their target audience.
Aside from learning more about their audiences via the hashtags they use online, the customer also used SparkToro’s data to refine their Twitter Ads strategy.
A SparkToro-Driven Approach to LinkedIn & Twitter Ads
The brand recently relaunched their blog. To drive their distributed audiences to this new content hub, they set up verticalized LinkedIn Ads and Twitter Ads.
On LinkedIn, they set up ads targeted by job titles, industry and company size. On Twitter, they found keywords through SparkToro’s Text Insights to inform their ad copy. Then they found the top 20-50 accounts that people in their audience were following — and plugged those in the lookalike data. The marketing team didn’t guess the influential Twitter accounts across their verticals. They found the influential accounts through SparkToro’s data.
The result? With a $2,000 budget for Twitter Ads, they saw an above-average cost-per-click (CPC) of $0.08 with a click-through rate (CTR) of 3.5%. They also saw an uptick in users who joined their newsletter email list.
According to WebFX, the cost to promote a tweet ranges from $0.50 to $2.00 for each first action. The average cost is about $1.35 each time someone clicks, replies, or retweets your promoted tweet.
Standard CTRs for Twitter Ads range anywhere from 0.86% to 2%, with Brafton reporting an average CTR of 0.86% and CXL reporting an average CTR of 2%.
How to do this for your own brand in the SparkToro dashboard:
Step 1: Run a relevant SparkToro query. For instance, search by how your audience self-identifies: “My audience uses these words in their bio: mom; father; product manager; marketing director.”
Step 2: On the left, click on the Social tab and take note of the top 20 social media accounts. Be sure to double check these accounts on Twitter to make sure you have highly-engaged accounts.
Step 3: In your Twitter Ad platform, go to Custom Audiences. Scroll down to Targeting Features, and under “Follower look-alikes,” enter the Twitter accounts you found via SparkToro. You’ll see that your Audience Estimate will increase with each account that you enter.
Pro tip: This same process (with tweaks based on the platform’s targeting options) works remarkably well for LinkedIn Ads, YouTube Ads, and Reddit Ads, too!
What’s Next for This SparkToro Customer
Over the past year, this legal startup’s success enabled them to expand their marketing team with new hires across email, product and demand generation marketing.
Soon, they’ll explore podcast sponsorships — starting with the top influential podcasts based on their SparkToro audience research.