Sneaker Twitter Marketing 101 pt.2: Delivering your brand
Part 2 of the series revolves around how exactly you should deliver your messages. Keep in mind — marketing, in general, is very, very broad and these are just my thoughts from my working experience. That doesn’t necessarily mean that whatever I do is the ‘right way’, but I hope it’s enough to inspire you to do more.
You’ve given some thought to your brand image and vision (if you haven’t, it’s high time you should: check out my first post here regarding brand image and why it's important). Now, you’re probably wondering about the execution — aka, the delivery of your branding.
Much of Sneaker Twitter revolves around a Business to Customer model (B2C), which often relies on companies attracting potential customers via their social media pages. As explained in the first post, it’s important to stay true to your branding so that the wider public can capture the essence of what your company is about via your tweets. For this post, I’ll be using our old proxy company, Whisk Proxies, as a viable example of how I planned and sent out tweets accordingly.
Understanding the market
First and foremost — you should ALWAYS do some initial research and plan ahead. You, as a new/existing company, must be aware of the current market trends as well as your competitors. Secondly, you need to understand — the product you’re introducing probably already has been done, and done over and over again. What sets your new cookgroup apart from the dozens that already exist? “Fast Monitors?” that wouldn’t catch anyone’s attention in today’s market.
There is absolutely no way you can stand out without understanding these basics. Put it this way — if you don’t know what the girl you like enjoys eating, how could you possibly think of cooking up a feast to impress her?
While I strongly encourage marketers to try and use some research/monitoring tools. It’s really important (I think I’ve said this maybe 3 times now, so you get the value) to find out where your potential consumers are, what they are thinking, and what they want. While a lot of the good ones are not free and costs a bomb, I recommend using Tweetdeck, Followerwonk and mentionmapp — or you could simply just scroll through twitter or search up certain keywords with Twitter’s in-built Advanced Search. Set up your keywords for specific targets (cookgroups, bots, proxies, etc) These tools can provide you a big insight as to what the general Sneaker Twitter populace is talking about. This is also where you can narrow down your target market and curate a series of tweets that can attract them to your company.
It’s also important to identify and examine what your competitors are doing — follow a bunch of accounts, look through their tweets, and see what works and what doesn’t. You want to learn how these established companies navigate through the clutter and find their place in the industry; while also reflecting on companies who might not necessarily do well and try not to do the same thing.
Like with anything else in the world — research is the first step and probably the most important thing you need to do before you even think about hitting that Tweet button. Understand your consumer's demographics, likes, hobbies, wants, yada yada yada.
Implementing your branding: an example with Whisk Proxies
You’ve set your sights on a brand image you like, and one that you think will click on with your audience. Now it’s time to implement your branding into your tweets.
What exactly do I mean by ‘implementing your branding’? As a straightforward answer, it’s basically inserting elements of your brand while also promoting your features. If you have a good brand image, the delivery of your tweets will come really easily. It might be hard to try to understand it, so I brought along an example in Whisk Proxies — a proxy company that we started back in March 2020.
(Take note of the keywords I use below)
As with our initial consumer research and insight exploring, we found out that proxy customers focus on a few things, which are basically: speed of the proxies, coverage, reliability, and price.
Proxies are largely inexpensive in the grand scheme of things, however, they are vital to any botter. Without good proxies, you won’t be touching anything on any site. We managed to secure a provider that gave us cheap and reliable residential proxies, but speed and coverage were kind of an issue compared to other providers. Having satisfied 2 of the 4 requirements, we went on to decide our branding.
We also found, through our initial research, that consumers have a high tendency to relate ‘cops’ to ‘cooks’ — therefore we hatched an idea to revolve Whisk literally around ‘cooking’.
What’s something inexpensive, but yet vital in the world of cooking? I was walking around a department store when the kitchen section caught my eye. There’s a lot of tools, but ultimately I settled on ‘Whisk’ — if you don’t know what a Whisk is, it’s that instrument you use to blend ingredients together in a process known as whisking or whipping. And there you have it folks — that’s literally our branding.
So we themed our entire brand to simulate a ‘restaurant/kitchen’ of sorts. Our users would be the chefs in the kitchen, their bots would be the oven, and our proxies would serve as the mixture to craft that perfect recipe. With the server and Twitter account set up, now it’s time to actually execute.
You see, with proxies (and literally any product out there in the market), the age-old, cookie-cutter way of business tweeting is to simply show off your products’ features, success and of course, giveaways. While that might have worked in 2019, you need to understand that with each and every week, a new product that’s similar to yours is being created and fighting for a piece of the pie. Adding a little bit of branding adds hype and anticipation for your product, no matter how good or bad it is. Take a look at one of our first few tweets for example: I could have simply tweeted stuff like:
“We provide cheap and reliable proxies!”
but that wouldn’t really catch anyone’s attention, would it? Instead, I spiced up the tweet a little by inserting our branding and a bit of market trend into it.
By adding just a bit of thought into your tweet that aligns with your brand image, you can add a lot of spice and interest into an otherwise ‘dull’ product that the market is already aware of. We also had our designer curate a series of cute graphics, peppered with lingo from both baking and botting that ended up being very very fun to play around with.
And the results were great. We had a big wave of interest despite the fact that at it’s very core, the product is, well, as simply put — residential proxies. Of course, sustaining interest and purchases boils down to how good your product actually is, but having these sorts of tweets always attracts a lot of attention and interest from potential customers.
At this point, some of you will be thinking: “This isn’t all that hard if you have a solid branding at the start!” Well, yes. That’ why my very first blog was about having a solid, thought-out, and researched-upon brand image — I hope you begin to see how important that first step is.
If your product has already been in the market for a while or you’ve just joined a company hoping to turn it around, you can also use these tips as a springboard to success. Re-think your branding and ensure that your tweets align with them. Think of it this way: you’re selling the story, the hype, rather than the product because the success will speak for itself in the future. TL;DR, you want your company to be known as a ‘fun’ and ‘helpful’ outlet? Then start seeing what jokes are floating on Twitter or in our community and start implementing them into your tweets.
Having said all of that, there are a number of companies with bang excellent branding and tweets in my opinion. Some of them include PokeMRKT for their Pokemon Cards reselling, The Essentials for their advanced botting information, ScoutApp_AI for their innovative tools, and RushAIO for their comical engagement-enticing tweets off the top of my mind. They’ve all made a mark and solidified their positions in their respective fields, and it’s really great to see them succeed.
What else do I tweet?
When it boils down to execution, besides the implementation of your branding, you also have to connect with your audience. Twitter is a very chatty platform that almost always encourages replies, so here’s a few simple tips on how you can bridge the interaction with your followers:
- Be human.
Yea, no one likes to talk to a wall or a robot. I mean, you want to interact with an actual person who listens and absorbs — so you have to do the same when you tweet rather than a corporate ‘identity’. Make sure you personalize your tweets and opt for plain accessible language, without making your tweets sound way too overboard for the common person to understand. - Be original!
Always innovate and find something new to tweet about. Don’t just stick to posting giveaways after giveaways, success after success, feature after feature. Find new alternatives to tweet about: maybe a special feature on one of your members using your tools, or maybe a screenshot from your #chat to show how life is like inside your server. Whatever it is, go off the tangent and be original. - Create conversations
Building off point 1, creating conversations encourage engagement. Try asking your followers some questions (by questions I don’t mean “WHO’S UP?!?!?!”) and have them think about an answer. It’s a fun way to quickly add a new layer of interaction with your followers, and something that can easily be achieved. - Use Polls and images/GIFs
Twitter has a variety of native tweet tools you can use. Polls are a really great way to get people involved in the conversation. At the same time, each tweet has a 280 character limit — so use images to catch people’s attention. A simple “good morning” tweet could be boring, so why not explore the GIFs section and find something that relates to your company? - Less RTs; more Ts
Building on an earlier point — stop thinking that RTing success is all that matters. Yes, it builds upon your product’s reputation, but again — there are tons of other products in the market that literally offer the same thing. Stop RTing, start Tweeting — use your own words to market your product and offer a little more information. Simple steps pave a long way towards building your overall brand.
Evaluation
Last but not least, you need to review the results of your tweets and see how it’s going for your account. What tweets worked? What giveaways worked? What’s the best time to tweet? Do a monthly review of your performance on Twitter and highlight days that you don’t have a good engagement rate — that way you can work on it and attempt to fix it.
Again, there’s a lot of tools for analyzing, but the good ones are expensive. I really like HootSuite, but in all honesty even Twitter’s in-built Twitter Analytics tool. Find out what organic tweet produces the best sort of engagement you want to see so you can plan around your next set of tweets. At the same time, you can also use Analytics to see what companies you should be hosting giveaways with, rather than agreeing to every other group and spamming your account with non-stop giveaways. I’ll probably be covering giveaways in a future post, so stay tuned for that.
You can also check in with other marketers/ “PR”s, company owners, and general public members to evaluate and see how your tweets are doing in their opinions. Any feedback is good feedback as long as you stay humble and accept them.
Additional Twitter Tips
These are more general tips that anyone and everyone can apply to their accounts right now.
Quality AND Quantity: I know there’s a lot of different recommendations as to how many times you should be tweeting on your company account, but from my own research via CookBeast and Alien’s Twitter accounts, around 3–5 tweets per day (that doesn’t include RT-ing success, btw!) usually works pretty well. Of course, the substance is also a factor, so don’t do too much of those “👀 SOON” tweets cause it’s honestly annoying more than anything.
Scheduling Tweets: Twitter only allows 280 characters per tweet — which is why it’s important to plan, re-plan, and plan again before tweeting. I highly recommend using a tool such as Tweetdeck where you can schedule tweets beforehand. With a strong brand presence on Twitter, you can make your brand stay relevant in an otherwise cluttered market.
Responsive Messaging: Something I don’t see really often, and something I really want to encourage everyone to do more of. Responsive Messaging (RM) is basically interacting with the people replying to your tweets and your DMs. Don’t just put out tweets and expect engagement; curate the engagement by responding to your potential customers. No one likes to be ignored and it creates a negative association that they are not important; it leaves an impression if you reply and if you reply fast. In fact, 80% of customers see social media as a channel that has made companies more accountable. So start responding to replies and DMs and don’t leave people hanging.
That’s about it from me today, and thank you ever so much if you’ve read up to this point. As always, I hope that this has helped some of you improve your marketing sense. If you need more help, feel free to drop me a DM on Twitter on Discord and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
