Marketing in Telegram: How to Promote Your Channel and What to Post

In the era of digital communication and information saturation, Telegram has become an indispensable part of everyday life for millions of users worldwide. This messenger not only provides confidential and secure communication but is also becoming an increasingly important tool for marketing and promotion. From brands and startups to bloggers and communities, more and more people are turning to Telegram for connecting with their audience, expanding their influence, and increasing sales.

Modern marketing in Telegram encompasses not only interacting with the audience but also creating communities, developing a brand, and engaging in dialogue with customers. In this article, we will explore strategies, tools, and tactics to help you promote your channel and create appealing content.

The popularity of Telegram and opportunities for marketers

Telegram is more than just a messenger; it is a complete ecosystem for information exchange and audience interaction. Since its launch, Telegram has attracted millions of users, and this number continues to grow. It is important to note why Telegram has become a popular platform for marketing:

Large active audience: With over 500 million users on Telegram, their activity and loyalty to the messenger create the potential for significant impact and reaching the target audience.
Advanced features and tools: Telegram provides a wide range of tools such as channels, bots, chat groups, voice messages, video calls, and many more, making it an ideal platform for diverse content.
Privacy and security: Telegram is known for its data protection and message confidentiality, which can be a compelling argument for users.
Visual content opportunities: Support for stickers, GIF animations, and other multimedia formats allows marketers to create attractive visual content.

Effective Marketing for Telegram Channels: Marketing and strategy in Telegram hold high importance, and this is linked to several key factors:

Direct audience contact: Channels and chat groups on Telegram provide marketers with direct access to the audience without intermediaries. This means you can interact with your subscribers directly, creating excellent opportunities for feedback and interaction.
Brand creation: Your Telegram channel can become a platform for establishing a unique brand and voice recognized by your audience. This helps strengthen the bond with your subscribers.
Multiple content formats: As mentioned earlier, you can experiment with various types of content, including text messages, images, videos, audio recordings, and interactive bots. This allows you to approach your audience with diverse and engaging content.
Analytics and optimization: Telegram provides tools for analyzing statistics, allowing you to monitor the results of your marketing efforts and make adjustments to enhance effectiveness.

Creating and optimizing your channel

Channel Name and Description

Choosing the right name and description for your Telegram channel plays a crucial role in its successful optimization, audience attraction, and attracting advertisers. Here are a few tips:

Clear and Concise Name: Your channel's name should clearly convey its theme and content. Avoid overly long and confusing names.
Descriptive Description: In the channel description, describe who you are, what your channel is about, and the benefits and information your audience will gain by subscribing. Don't forget to leave your contact information for collaboration.
Keywords: Whenever possible, include keywords and phrases related to your channel's topic to improve its visibility in Telegram search.

Avatar

Your channel's avatar is one of the first things users see when they find your channel in Telegram search or visit it directly. Creative avatars can capture attention and make your channel more appealing. Important points to consider:

Professional design: Use high-quality images with clear photos or utilize a video avatar.
Consistency with brand: The cover and avatar should align with your brand or the theme of your channel to create a unified and recognizable style.
Informativeness: The cover and avatar can visually convey your channel's theme or key aspects of its content. This helps potential subscribers understand what your channel is about, which is especially useful if you have a small channel without an established reputation.

Connecting with exchanges and bots

Your Telegram channel is a platform where you can expand your brand, reach an audience, and even earn. To achieve maximum efficiency and automate processes, there are several tools and approaches.

Collaboration with Advertising Agencies:

You can collaborate with an advertising agency to save time on finding and communicating with advertisers. This allows you to focus on content creation and engaging with your audience.

However, it's essential to note that advertising agencies typically take a percentage of advertising expenses, which can increase your operational costs. It's important to carefully select a partner and negotiate the terms of cooperation.

Using Bots:

Bots can significantly simplify channel management on Telegram. They can assist in creating content with additional features such as post buttons, embedded articles, and more.

Bots can also automate post publishing and content planning. You can configure a bot to automatically post at specific times or according to a schedule.

It's important to note that self-developed bots can be more secure in terms of data privacy than third-party bots that might be vulnerable to hacking or acquisition.

Bots allow you to incorporate nearly any function into your channel, from automating responses to frequently asked questions to creating interactive games and contests for your audience.

Definition of the target audience

Before starting to effectively manage a Telegram channel, it's important to identify your target audience. Understanding your audience will help you create content and a style that best caters to their needs. Here are some steps for defining your target audience:

Demographic Characteristics: Study the age, gender, location, education, and other demographic data of your audience.
Interests and Preferences: Determine which topics, hobbies, and interests are important to your audience. This will enable you to create content that appeals to them.
Behavioral Traits: Try to understand how your target audience interacts on Telegram. How frequently do they use the messenger, what are they looking for, and how do they engage with other channels?
Issues and Needs: Identify the problems and needs of your audience that your channel can address. This will help you create content that provides real value.

How to understand your target audience in your Telegram channel?

To determine the characteristics of your audience listed above, you can use these three main methods:

Through content: Observe which content generates the most reactions and shares, and avoid posting content that doesn't receive engagement.
Through competitors: Analyze what your competitors post and how that content resonates with their audience.
Directly through statistics: In channels, you can view audience statistics, such as the male-to-female ratio or the percentage of premium subscribers. It's evident that channels with a financially capable audience that primarily uses Telegram will have a higher percentage of premium subscriptions compared to channels offering free product promotions.

What do you want to achieve with your Telegram channel?

The goals you want to achieve with your Telegram channel can vary depending on your specific situation, business, or project. However, in general, your goals may include:

Brand Expansion: Creating a channel to strengthen the image of your company, product, or personal brand. This may involve increasing recognition and establishing authority in your niche.
Building a Personal Expert Brand: Using your Telegram channel to establish yourself as an expert in a specific field or niche.
Increasing Sales: Promoting products or services through the channel to boost sales. This might include posting product advertisements, providing discounts, or offering exclusive promo codes.
Audience Engagement: Creating engaging content to retain your audience's interest, stimulate discussions, and encourage interaction.
Providing Information: Sharing valuable information, news, tips, or educational materials with your audience.
Gathering Feedback: Collecting feedback from your audience to better understand their needs and provide content that interests them as brand customers.
Community Support: Creating a platform for discussions on important topics, sharing opinions, and forming a community with common interests.
Monetizing the Channel: Earning through your channel, for instance, by selling ads, offering paid access to exclusive content, or selling educational materials.

It's essential to define clear and measurable goals for your Telegram channel. This will help you develop a strategy to successfully achieve these objectives and track your progress as you move forward. Moreover, these goals can complement and overlap with each other.

Content management

Types of content for the channel

Selecting various types of content can make your Telegram channel interesting and appealing to the audience. Examples include:

Text Messages: Posting informative and engaging text-based posts, including articles, tips, news, and stories. Text-only posts are typically published in expert and news channels.

Images and Photos: Visual content that may include photos, illustrations, memes, and other images. Entertainment channels often publish images without accompanying text. In other cases, the standard is text combined with images.
Videos: Publishing video clips that can be educational, entertaining, or informative. Videos tend to attract views, but it's advisable not to publish overly long or large videos since Telegram users first download the video to their cache before watching, and not everyone wants to fill up their storage.
Video Circles: You can post video circles on your channel. This is typically done by expert channels with a personal brand to showcase live interactions or by channels that exclusively post circles. For example, celebrity interactions or regular videos uploaded through a bot in circles.
Audio: Sharing audio recordings, podcasts, voice messages, and music. Audio content is relatively rare in Telegram due to the platform's poor reception of the audio format. If you post voice messages, be sure to provide a brief description.
Polls and Voting: Engaging with the audience by creating polls and votes on relevant topics. This can be used to increase engagement or for specialized content. For example, channels dedicated to polls. Many create artificial polls using emojis, such as "Vote under the post: thumbs up or thumbs down."
Interactive Elements: Incorporating buttons embedded in posts to allow the audience to interact with the content, such as for product orders, event registrations, or answering questions. They are often used for lead magnets or advertising.
Story-Based Content: Narrating stories or series of posts that can maintain the audience's attention and sustain their interest. In other words, content that "warms up."
News Updates: Providing current news and events related to your niche.
Stories: Stories are a new feature in Telegram that allows you to upload videos as standalone content to your channel and collect reactions. This requires channel boosting with votes from subscribers with premium subscriptions. Stories usually contain entertaining content and are used for advertising.

The choice of content types should align with your target audience and the goals of your channel. Diversifying the types of content can help satisfy the varied interests of your audience. It's often best to mix informative content with news, memes, and humor, but it ultimately depends on the nature of your channel.

Posting frequency

Posting frequency plays a vital role in maintaining your audience's interest and retaining subscribers. It's important to determine how often you'll be publishing content and adhere to that schedule.

The posting frequency depends on your ability to maintain the schedule and your audience's expectations. It's essential to be consistent and reliable in delivering on your publication promises.

On average, channels post 3-8 times a day. However, news channels, for example, are not limited by the number of posts because they monitor information 24/7.

Audience interaction

Audience interaction is a key aspect of your content strategy. You can choose the methods of interaction that are convenient for you as the administrator.

If you enable comments on your channel, be prepared to respond to your audience's questions. This strengthens engagement and allows for an open dialogue. Some channels disable comments because it creates additional moderation efforts. Comments often contain bots, self-promotion, and messages from other channels.

One of the best ways to interact with the Telegram audience at the moment is through reactions in the form of emojis. You can select which emojis can be added to your posts to reflect the audience's reactions to the content. It's best to choose 5-7 emojis, but, again, it depends on your channel and audience. Some channels disable both emojis and comments.

Interacting with your audience helps build close relationships, strengthen loyalty, and makes your audience feel like an important part of your channel. It also helps you better understand your audience and their requests.

Character count and post length

Providing a definitive answer to this question is quite challenging, as it depends on the specific channel. However, if we rely on audience activity research from Popsters, we can conclude that the average post length is the most effective. Typically, 2-3 paragraphs are sufficient.

Channel Promotion

Promoting your channel on Telegram is a comprehensive and multifaceted process that requires a careful approach and an investment of both money and time. Effective promotion includes creating high-quality content, engaging with the audience, building partnerships, and utilizing advertising tools.

Your channel's audience will come and go, and more often than not, channels lose more subscribers than they gain. This is a consistent rule, and there's little that can be done about it. Organic subscriber growth doesn't make up for those leaving the channel, so increasing the number of subscribed users should be an ongoing effort, especially for monetizable channels. Here are a few primary ways to continually gain subscribers:

Promotional posts in other channels: One of the main and most effective methods is posting promotional content in other channels, especially in closed channels accessible by request. However, this may require significant financial and time resources for testing and finding the best channels and approaches. But without promotional posts in Telegram, it's almost impossible to grow due to the absence of a common feed.
Telegram Ads: Telegram Ads is the official tool for advertising on Telegram. It allows you to create targeted advertising campaigns. While this might be a more expensive method than seeding, it offers the ability to precisely target your audience and monitor metrics.
Short Videos: Creating short videos on popular platforms like TikTok, Reels, and Shorts, and leaving a link to your Telegram channel, can be an effective way to attract new subscribers. However, it requires time and creativity. This can be done in parallel with seeding.
Cross-Promotion: Collaborating with other channel administrators for ad exchanges and mentions can help you expand your audience. However, you'll need to accumulate a certain number of subscribers first, and not all administrators may be willing to cooperate.
Articles: This method involves writing high-quality articles related to your niche and publishing them on specialized websites, blogs, or platforms with links to your Telegram channel. In these articles, you can share expert knowledge, discuss important events, or offer solutions to your audience. At the end of the articles, include links to your Telegram channel so interested readers can click and subscribe. This method can help increase the visibility and authority of your channel and attract a target audience.

The choice of the appropriate method depends on your goals, resources, and strategy. Successful Telegram promotion often involves a combination of various methods for maximum effectiveness.

Analytics and Optimization

Data analysis is a crucial step in optimizing your Telegram promotion strategy. Analytics provide you with data to make informed decisions, enabling you to avoid random actions and rely on facts and figures.

It's best to use tools like internal statistics, third-party services like Popsters, and dedicated websites like TGStat.

Telegram's Internal Statistics:

Pros: Easy to use, integrated directly into Telegram, provides basic information about the number of subscribers, views, and content interactions.

Limitations: Additional details and metrics for deeper analysis may be missing.

Services like Popsters:

Pros: Offer more detailed analytics, including audience engagement, post sorting, content effectiveness, ready-made reports, and more. You can view your channel and others, as well as compare them.

Limitations: Requires a paid subscription, but there's a free trial period.

Websites like TGStat:

Pros: Provide detailed analytics, including subscriber growth, advertising effectiveness, and subscriber acquisition sources.

Limitations: Require registration via a messenger and may limit access to certain information.

For maximum effectiveness, it's best to use all these tools simultaneously. By the way, watch a video about the Popsters analytics service to better understand what it can offer you:

Analytics play a critical role in marketing and promotion, including Telegram channels, and here's what it can provide if you correctly implement the obtained information:

Strategy Optimization: By analyzing data, you can optimize your strategy and content. Effective use of analytics helps identify what works and what doesn't, allowing you to make adjustments.
Improved Audience Engagement: Analytics enables a better understanding of your audience's needs and preferences. This allows you to create more relevant and engaging content.
Risk and Cost Reduction: Data analysis helps identify inefficient strategies and resource-intensive approaches, which can help reduce risks and save resources.
Goal Achievement Measurement: Analytics allows you to assess how close you are to achieving your goals. You can measure specific metrics and track their changes.
Long-Term Strategy Creation: Data analysis enables the creation of long-term strategies focused on growth and success. You can see which changes have the greatest impact on your channel and business.

In short, analytics is the key to successful promotion and marketing. It helps you better understand your audience, improve your strategy, and achieve your goals more effectively.

Useful article on a similar topic:

Tools for Telegram analysis of channels and chats.