When Toyota Advertises on Twitter and Snapchat, Users Listen

While the Facebook empire might grab the majority of marketers' social advertising dollars, some allocate budgets specifically for Twitter and Snapchat. eMarketer's Tricia Carr spoke with Nancy Inouye, national media manager at Toyota Motor North America, about the benefits of advertising on Twitter and Snapchat, what it achieves through its paid efforts and the lingering creative challenges the brand has to overcome.

Inouye was interviewed as part of eMarketer’s October report, “Snapchat and Twitter 2018: Many Challenges, but a Few Things Advertisers Still Like.”

Twitter not only broadens awareness and improves opinions of our model marketing, but the channel also amplifies live or culturally relevant events for Toyota, like CES or Daytona 500. We’ve seen that our marketing efforts on Twitter can influence how users talk about our brand and cars, as well as positively influence consumer sentiment towards Toyota.

Similarly, Snapchat also supports awareness and improves opinions. It's similar to Instagram Stories in terms of features and paid ad products, but Snapchat seems to be pushing the envelope for innovation and augmented reality firsts—their Lens product is a perfect example. There’s also a higher propensity for a younger, exclusive audience.

Specifically on Twitter, we’ve seen that our marketing efforts can change overall sentiment for Toyota during campaigns compared with the "before" period.

On Twitter, for example, premium paid ad products like Promoted Trend and First View are often used for Toyota campaigns focused on an event where we want to make a big splash. Otherwise, in-stream video ads, promoted video or website cards have been effective for driving objectives from top to mid funnel.

For example, we ran a paid campaign on Twitter supporting our 2018 CES keynote livestream with Akio Toyoda. We started with a tune-in strategy to remind users when our press announcement would go live. Then we leveraged the platform’s live capabilities to showcase our announcement the day of, following up with supporting media afterwards. We saw phenomenal results—brand lifts, millions of views on the livestream, and the highlight was Toyota and Akio Toyoda were pushed to trending topics on Twitter from all the surrounding conversation.

It has become more important to conceptualize creative ideas and develop assets specifically for Twitter or Snapchat, or any other social partner, because we learned that re-using creative straight from broadcast or digital was not driving optimal performance. With the evolving social landscape, we expect to push our Toyota creative to appear as native as possible with changing social user behaviors.