Reach the Unreachable: How to Target Telegram Premium Users?
We’ve already said a lot about WHY Telegram is a great source of traffic. We won’t repeat it here – just scatter useful links around this article. Today, our agenda is Premium TG users: this elite class of the messaging world!
How to include them in your target audience, why is it important, and what are the pitfalls?
Who Are Premium Users And What’s The Problem With Them?
Telegram is a free messenger, but users can purchase a premium subscription. One of the Telegram Premium features is an ad-free experience: such users don’t see official TG Ads in channels like this:
These ads are always located at the very bottom of a channel, so even non-premium users need to scroll to the very end of the feed.
Meanwhile, Telegram ads are costly enough: with 2 EUR per 1000 impressions and a minimum budget starting with 150 EUR, if you purchase traffic via resellers, it is not the cheapest option. So, does it mean you pay and then miss a good deal of users, e.g., everyone with a Premium subscription?
We asked Max Rudenko, the founder of the advertising agency SMIT.Link, if this creates a serious issue for media buyers.
Max Rudenko: An important fact is that Telegram allows premium users to enable ads – and many business owners or marketers do it, because they want to monitor competitors’ creatives. What’s more, not all the financially capable users subscribe to premium.’
The SMIT.Link sales team conducted a small study based on their customers’ accounts. Here’s what they found:
44% of users had premium accounts, while 56%—more than half—stayed without one. As most of SMIT.Link’s clients are related to digital business; we can also suppose that the number of wealthy people without Premium accounts is even higher.
However, taking the Telegram Ads prices and target audience into account, they are mainly about elite niches – with a long sales cycle, more time- and money-consuming campaigns, and expensive leads. So, the question remains open:
How to Target Premium Users Who Don’t See Ads?
And stop losing about half of your audience? The good news is that not all the users you need have Premium subscriptions. Even better news: you can reach those who have (and choose not to see TG official ads), too.
Here are four ways to do it.
The Most Native Way: Paid Ads in Telegram Channels
Big Telegram channel owners sell ad spaces. These ads are simply posts in the channels – like this one:
They have some serious advantages over Telegram Ads:
- Your ad creative can be a long post with photos and videos, which warms up audiences better than short messages in official Ads.
- You don’t need to follow strict rules of Telegram ads: for example, they prohibit iGaming ads, or can decline your creative for an extra comma.
- Such ads look natively. Some channel owners write ad posts themselves, so they look like genuine recommendations for subscribers.
However, according to Max, such an option might become time-consuming if you handle ad placements directly with channel owners and cost a lot, especially if you work via advertising exchanges.
Besides, channels in the ‘elite’ niches might overprice their ad placements. Finally, there’s always a chance that a channel’s audience or its part is fake and consists of bots, so you need to do some extra work to check it.
So, maybe anything else, with fewer pitfalls?
The Most Professional Way: Telegram Traffic Funnels with Bots
We have a very detailed post about marketing funnels:
In short, a funnel leads from learning about a product to a purchase, and Telegram is a perfect place to create them easily thanks to its tools: channels and bots. To be honest, Telegram marketiing funnels are worth a separate article, so in this piece, we’ll just give you some basics.
Max Rudenko: ‘A Telegram channel or chat doesn’t attract traffic itself: it’s a landing place where you direct traffic. And, it’s difficult to promote a channel or a chat without paid promotion: the organic growth is limited enough.’
So, creating your own channel might most likely become an expensive and time-consuming investment, especially if you run traffic in various verticals and attract people from different GEOs. However, a bot can become a great part of your funnel – the first step to a conversion for Telegram users.
Here is an example from our partners: a media buying team promoting a utility app – a habit tracker. Their funnel with Telegram looked like this:
- They created an informational bot for Telegram. In this bot, a user shared some personal info—their name and age—and picked healthy habits they wanted to obtain.
- Then, they launched a promo campaign for this bot via Instagram and PropellerAds.
- Users who added a bot, received useful posts daily, and a link to a tracker app once in 2-3 days.
- As users also indicated their dates of birth in a bot, it also sent them a special birthday discount for the app subscription.
This is just one of many funnel options – and you are free to design your own with the help of bots. Here is a quick overview of what they can do:
- Collect personal information before giving a link to a product or Telegram channel;
- Help a user place a pre-order;
- Give a special promo code or link to a private channel;
- Send messages to warm up a user, sharing the most inspiring information on a product;
- Perform some tasks for users, working like a Utility app: send notifications, download videos, create stickers, etc.
Max Rudenko: ‘You can also treat bots as an extra touchpoint with your audience when you run a channel. Even if a user unsubscribes, turns off notifications, or archives your channel, you can still re-engage them through bot messaging.’
So, overall, bots can become a superpower for your funnel – no matter if it includes a Telegram channel, or not.
The Most Creative Way: Telegram Sticker Packs
If you still want to include a channel in your media buying funnel, here is a bit of an unusual way of how to do it.
Telegram has built-in stickers, but it seems nobody cares about them anymore: the real stickers are user-generated content. Any user can create a sticker pack with their cats, friends, or favorite memes – and promote their channel with its help.
How exactly? The recipe is simple: you create a sticker pack that many users might like and want to save, and leave your channel’s name in the pack’s description:
Here is a brief instruction on how to create a high-quality pack:
- Use a sticker creating bot (for example, Fstick). Download the photos you want to turn into stickers, and get a ready pack.
- Download it through StickersConverterBot so that they don’t lose in quality
- Upload it via the official Stickers bot, by using the /newpack command.
Note: you can also create a pack of original emojis; such emojis will be available exclusively for Telegram premium users.
When the pack is ready, show them to the world – or at least to Telegram users – all of them: luckily, Premium doesn’t offer a feature called ‘Never show stickers’.
Here is how you can do it:
- Add your stickers to catalog channels, where owners share their own or others’ packs;
- Use commenting bots that can share stickers instead of sending simple messages;
- Collaborate with big channel authors and create packs with links to both usernames.
As our partner media buyer claimed, ‘I’ve witnessed how tiny channels gained 10k+ new impressions thanks to stickers. The more installs your packs receive, the bigger traffic volumes you’ll get for your channel. However, you might need more than a single pack: for example, I created 50 packs and got 27k installs in total, for all of them.’
So, that’s a pretty fun way to send traffic to your channel – but is there something that requires less time and artistic vision?
The Easiest Way Overall: Mini App Telegram Ads
Yes, there is, and we are talking about ads in Telegram mini apps: small interactive applications right within Telegram chats. They can be anything, from games to channel catalogs – and most importantly, everyone is equal here.
We mean, even the premiumest premium user will sooner or later see something like this on a mini app – and this can be your next ad:
Max Rudenko: The importance of bots and mini apps in Telegram is rapidly growing, as the Telegram team takes this direction very seriously.
So, what are the advantages of this method of targeting Premium users?
- Mini apps are very engaging: they send regular notifications via chatbots and have plenty of hooks for users: gamification elements, rewards, or exclusive offers.
- You can place ads in mini apps easily via the PropellerAds platform: just create a campaign via a self-service platform.
- And when you do, you don’t have the creative headache: PropellerAds will automatically add ML-generated images, so all you need is a catchy copy.
We described even more advantages of mini app ads here:
Overall, mini apps are the quickest and the simplest method to drive Telegram traffic to offers. And you can try it out right away:
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