X (Twitter) have announced the launch of X (Twitter) Polls, meaning we will all be able to create polls on X (Twitter) on any subject and get superfast feedback from specific audiences. We believe this is going to be very powerful and valuable for both brands and consumers, to the point where participation is incentivised and collaborative consumers feel like they’re helping brands form their future.
Why Is This Exciting?
A company making customer-led decisions is a fundamental pillar of building an engaging customer experience, with the likes of Lego at the forefront of this way of working for a while now. The announcement of X (Twitter) Polls has now placed the ability to make customer-led decisions within the reach of all marketing teams, even those without the huge budgets to match the likes of Lego.
The possibilities are almost limitless when you think of the ways you could benefit from real-time audience feedback on your business decisions. Here are just a few to spark your creative thoughts:
Better Decisions For Product Owners
“Hoverboards seem pretty cool, do you think we should develop one?” I’m sure that’s a question being batted around a few product teams at the moment. Before investing in expensive focus groups or surveys, coupled with time and resources invested in R&D, you could quickly ask your audience with a poll.
Of course, every product owner isn’t looking at developing things as fanciful as hoverboards. Product owners in small-to-medium ecommerce businesses might be looking ahead to the key Christmas period and be asking themselves, “Do I look to add a quicker delivery method? Or do I add a gift-wrapping and personalisation service?” A quick poll could help make the right (i.e. more profitable) choice at a key time in the business’s calendar.
Better Direction For Creative Content Teams
According to IDC, 90% of marketing material goes unused by sales teams. I’d hate to even start calculating what this means regarding wasted marketing budgets. There must be trillions of pounds worth of effort sitting in a huge marketing landfill. What a waste.
But what if you could quickly poll your customers and prospects before you started producing content?
This is another area in which X (Twitter) Polls might help: creative teams can pre-pitch concepts and ideas with their key audiences before committing the budget and effort required to move into production.
Better Performance For Advertising
Split testing ad creative is a must – however, all those ad clicks to choose a winner do eat up budget and, if your losing creative variant really tanks, you’ve just burned a load of your budget.
With X (Twitter) Polls, you can quickly conduct a test to prove concepts or ideas before you commit to budget. This could help you reduce the cost of experimentation by eliminating as many dud ideas from the process before you start spending money on ad clicks.
Audiences And Advocacy Are Key
You’ve probably spotted this already in regards to the recent General Election. Polling is only as good as your audience, and not every brand has a passionate army of advocates that fall over themselves to provide honest feedback.
In fact, even with a large audience of organic followers, unfiltered polling with all your followers might not be a good idea. Getting the feedback from focused audiences containing your key customers or prospects is much more valuable.
Here’s where X (Twitter) Custom Audiences and Sponsored Tweets come in very handy.
First, create your desired audience using CRM or Marketing Automation data. Then use that data to create a custom audience in X (Twitter) Ads. Once you’ve created your poll, you can use sponsored tweets to ensure it reaches your audience in a controlled fashion.
Using custom audiences and sponsored tweets has a couple of distinct advantages:
- You can control who is eligible to participate, removing competitors and staff
- You can reach a larger sample size than what would be available in your organic following
- You can control the response window. The half-life of an organic tweet is just too short to guarantee visibility
Working Inclusively Is Great For Your Audiences
Asking your audience what they think about your ideas, products, messaging, or creative will include them in your business in a new way. They will feel like they are shaping it and therefore like they are part of it. When you feel like you are part of something and have some control or vested interest you will always invest more, emotionally AND financially.
And what brand wouldn’t want that?