Reimaging Advertising Tools For Small & Medium Businesses On Twitter
Quick Promote is the easiest way for a small business to advertise products on Twitter. Acting as the primary revenue driver for the Self-Service Advertising sales team it had remained largely untouched since it had been launched in 2015.
Despite being a team that had not been resourced in over 5 years, Quick Promote had continued to grow quarterly driving ~$4m in sales for the Self-Service Advertising Team, and offering the potential to grow into a longtail business for Twitter in a $73B industry market cap.
I led the redesign of Quick Promote across iOS, Android, and Web surfaces. Working with an international team encompassing engineering, product, and research with impact across the consumer app and revenue product surfaces.
Partnership With User Research To Develop Insight Into Existing Behavior
User Research led the team through a walkthrough of a literature review — the purpose being to assess who were the primary users,, what were their pain points, how did they leverage Quick Promote to grow their audience, and how could we improve this experience in its next iteration.
The challenges within the existing product included:
- Entry points into Quick Promote were hard to find and nested in an underutilized surface on a Tweet’s detail page that wasn’t frequently visited
- The design of Quick Promote wasn’t aligned at all to the current design system, it looked like it was out of place and was leveraging illustrations, language, and typefaces that couldn’t be found in any other surface on the consumer app
- The first step in the Quick Promote flow involved showing users a checkout screen which forced to pay for a promotion before having an opportunity to set up and define the constraints around their advertising campaign
- The cost of campaigns started at $500 a day whereas competitors started as low as $5
With these insights as a foundation, I had an understanding that Quick Promote today had several failure points. While the tool targeted self-serve advertisers (SMBs) the functionality proved very difficult to work with for us as an internal team.
Understanding How Different Products & Surfaces Were Strategizing Ad Formats
While Quick Promote generated roughly ~$16m annually, competitors on other surfaces were generating and capturing a significant amount more of the $73B market. Utilizing benchmarking and documentation to compare the various surfaces and interactions, I gained insight into how self service advertising could function on surfaces with dedicated products.
Themes that I documented throughout the audit included:
Simplifying The Targeting Strategy
Tools like Snapchat’s Self Service Ad Center simplified the experience of building an audience. Their tool made it easier for businesses to target in themed groups of advertisers for ex: Teens interest in fashion — taking the guesswork out who to target and how to identify them
Hand Holding Through The Campaign Set Up
Mobile first products like Facebook & Instagram encouraged businesses immediately after business account creation to produce content that could be promoted in a series of quick and automated steps with hand holding at each level
Leveraging More Than 1 Product Surface
Competitors were using new and modern ad formats across multiple different surfaces — allowing an SMB to run a campaign that regardless of the amount of days being run had the opportunity to impact people at different touch points through the consumer product
Designing A New Entry Point — Introducing The Promote Button On Tweets
Quick Promote in its current state needed a visual update — I had an opportunity to propose a new and modern direction to the design system that was aligned to the future state of Twitter.
Knowing that the entry point had previously been nested in the Tweet Detail view, one of the most obvious touchpoints missing was an easy entry point into Quick Promote on Tweets. As one of the most notable surfaces of the product, it was important to stress test this entry point with a breadth of designs. Through explorations, I provided a stress test of entry points into Quick Promote on both the Tweets & Tweet Detail views.
Working Backwards From An Ideal State To Ensure Engineering Execution
As we moved into a North Star Vision for Quick Promote we wanted to align the updated direction to industry best practices. This gave me an opportunity to introduce new features to the design system and unify the consumer and revenue products with a view that had been largely ignored.
As the engineering team began to dig into technical feasibility we uncovered numerous limitations and restrictions that wouldn’t allow us to build 1:1 with our initial direction. This provided us an opportunity as product, design, engineering, and content to rebuild our initial thinking into a product that would allow the engineering team to build in for Web and mobile simultaneously.
By introducing the use of an iFrame we had to refine our approach and the designs to align with a direction that could be technically implemented (and this led to some of the best partnership I’ve ever had with an engineering team).
Working Backwards From The Ideal State To Accomplish Technical Feasibility
While we knew we were going to work backwards from our ideal state, examining the maximum state that we wanted to create for this product was an invaluable design and engineering exercise.
The product had key areas that needed to be addressed, including:
- Improving targeting functionality, and making it easier for businesses to target new audiences based on their products, goods, or services
- Decrease the required spend amount and lowering this to a significantly smaller dollar amount
- Moving checkout to the end of the flow - and ultimately encouraging businesses to save their credit card information so that for future campaigns they could be quickly run
By refining the product and ensuring that the technical requirements could be accomplished we delivered a product that continues to grow and increase the visibility of SMBs on Twitter.
