Marketing For Telegram: How To Attract Subscribers

We have collected five cases of business promotion in Telegram. In each of them, the client has different tasks, and we managed to solve all of them using special approaches on one of the most relevant advertising platforms.

Our client is an online survey service. Companies use it to conduct research and get statistics from user-filled questionnaires. You can complete the survey for free or for a cash reward. But in any case, you must register before you start.

Registration on the portal has become our goal. We chose Telegram as our new lead source. The decision was not accidental: we already conducted an advertising campaign for this client — we launched the context, and Telegram worked in conjunction.

We have selected about 30 Telegram channels, the audience of which is housewives, students and interns. We needed users without special training, ready to earn extra money in their free time.

We checked all the selected channels, and got rid of the obviously dubious ones — for example, those that were too expensive or in which the audience was screwed by bots.

The last three stages are:

When publishing a post, we placed UTM tags. So we were able to determine the effectiveness of each of the channels. Promotion results: 3 days and 36 leads.

The client is an online service for designers: it allows you to quickly create a portfolio of design projects. The task is to bring new users to test the service’s tools. The ultimate goal is to purchase a template on the site.

The mechanics looked like this: users download a demo block in the service and go to the site to buy a template. This time, our client decided that the product promotion should go through Telegram. We needed native advertising from bloggers. To do this, we have selected 87 channels about web design: author’s blogs with life hacks in working with Advertising and other graphic editors, practice, trends in graphic design.

Together with the client, we selected target channels — only four. They also launched ads: test texts and videos. Approaches and topics varied, but the offer was the same — «complete your cases in a portfolio in 30 minutes».

Promotion result: users submitted 23 forms and then purchased a template. We noted that the highest-quality target audience of web designers is not located at all where an expensive channel and a huge audience are promoted. On the contrary, three thousand subscribers will bring more results than a channel for 50,000 people.

Our client’s product is the installation of a terminal for non-cash payment of tips. The target audience in this case is decision makers, cafe owners. The customer came with a request to bring traffic to the site: users should leave a request for a callback there.

At the first stage, we tested targeted ads for two weeks, but we didn’t get any leads. telegram was chosen as another source of lead generation. Three telegram channels and a bot for thematic mailings were selected to attract the target audience.

Our client didn’t have much confidence in Telegram as an advertising platform, so we chose channels based on two criteria: not only those with the target audience, but also those with the lowest ad cost.

We checked the analysis and sifted out suspicious channels — they were too expensive, with bots cheating them. As a result, they left only two channels for baristas, but they had a lively audience.

We placed promo posts with an offer and a call to leave a request, one post in each of the two channels. The text was about the same.

Telegram has a more interested audience, which gave us the following result: one channel brought three applications. Since the installation of a terminal for paying tips by bank transfer is considered quite an expensive service, the leads from telegram cost us very cheap.

We were approached by a customer from the field of B2B-a service for selecting offers for the repair and maintenance of trucks and the sale of spare parts. The company’s goal is to lead an audience that will become their customers in the future. In this case, the telegram channel about the benefits of a product in a complex business topic worked effectively to attract new subscribers.

In order not to overpay for advertising in channels, we decided to conduct the test using a bot. We chose from several categories based on the following criteria: suitable topic, average number of subscribers, daily news.

A bot from the same B2B business as our customer came up. It was determined as the most relevant one and there they launched a post containing an informational text and an invitation to subscribe to the tg channel.

Advertising in Telegram for two days brought 200 new subscribers. The advantage is that such a live audience is active in the channel, leaves comments and likes.

We were approached by a medical laboratory with the task of bringing new subscribers to its telegram channel. In the channel, the company talks about the services provided by the laboratory, so it is important that readers turn into customers.

We took into account that it is necessary to build the trust of subscribers — this is the specifics of medical topics. Initially, we focused on useful informational posts, but we didn’t get the expected result.

We realized that we would need a new entry point to get subscribers, so we decided to test advertising with bloggers. We chose among medical-related channels. There were quite a lot of them: posts of different quality, different number of subscribers — somewhere a more active audience, somewhere less.

Along with channels, we considered telegram bots: we were interested in useful mailing lists on the medical topic. Dubious bots were rejected immediately, so we excluded cheating and low-quality content.

As a result, we have 12 channels left, of which we managed to bring more than two thousand subscribers to our client’s medical portal with the help of bloggers and bots.

We have prepared posts to publish them from time to time for three months. Here’s what the themes looked like:

In three months of operation, the channel received 2,043 new subscribers. It was cheaper to buy in bots. 

However, the low cost of subscribers did not affect their quality in any way, the channel continued to gain active users. In turn, the effectiveness of posts depended more on the placement than on the text itself. Texts of up to 1000 characters performed best.