7 Ways To Use Twitter’s New Lead Gen Cards To Drive Qualified Leads

7 Ways To Use Twitter’s New Lead Gen Cards To Drive Qualified Leads:

from B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify by Uri Bar-Josep

Over the years, I’ve covered Twitter’s developments pretty closely and have been a strong proponent of Twitter as a lead generation channel. In 2009, I wrote about the keys for a successful Twitter campaign and when reading it today, the core elements haven’t changed much. We’ve seen Twitter change and morph from a celebrity-hyped tool with somewhat simple and limited UI to its new slick UI with added features like Vine integration. We’ve also seen it venture into the paid social media space and successfully become the best social media channel for lead generation. Twitter has become an important tool in the marketer’s tool belt, helping with brand awareness, message control, visibility and obviously, lead generation. But this was just the beginning.

On Wednesday, Twitter released its new Lead Generation Cards, a way for users to express interest in your offers directly from within the Twitter platform. According to Twitter’s blog:

“Users can easily and securely share their email address with a business without leaving Twitter or having to fill out a cumbersome form.”

In other words, Twitter made lead generation using Twitter easier and faster, with literally the click of a button. Combine that with Twitter’s increasingly better targeting and the ever-growing usage, and you get a lead generation machine that is the dream for every marketer.
Yesterday, we got the opportunity to start using Lead Gen Cards and were able to easily integrate it with our Salesforce account. After spending a few hours on the new feature, we were very excited to share our initial experience and a few best practices we came up with.
But before you jump to say, “I want that,” you have to be aware of the constraints and shortfalls of this new feature:

1. All you get is users’ Twitter information. Users who click on the Card to accept your offer (essentially converting to a lead) give you only the info that they give Twitter: name, email address and @handle. In most cases, that information is not enough to qualify and follow up with leads. However, you can still do a lot with this info, like add users to your house list for nurturing.
2. They have to be on Twitter (this is an obvious point but one worth stating nonetheless). If you are targeting an audience that doesn’t use Twitter, i.e., doctors, this might not be the channel for you.
3. You have to have a CRM/marketing automation solution – a place for that lead information to go once users have submitted it. Twitter partnered with Salesforce and MailChimp for a fairly smooth integration and lists several other marketing automation solutions, including Optify, as other options.

7 ways to use Twitter’s new Lead Gen Cards to drive qualified leads

1. The key? Complete Audience – promotion – offer – follow-up alignment.

The key for a lot of lead generation campaigns is alignment, but with the Lead Generation Cards, alignment is crucial. Twitter did a good job enabling you to ensure alignment throughout most of the process, with very good targeting (using profiles, keywords and behavior), subtle integration of promotions into the UI, and now with the design of the Cards and the seamless integration of the Cards into the UI. But Twitter only gives you the platform; it’s your job to make sure that the full alignment exists in the message, the visual, the Tweets, the actual offer and the follow up.

2. Treat each Card like a unique landing page.

The Lead Generation Cards were designed very similarly to a landing page, just without the form. It includes a title and a teaser (the Tweet), an image, a short description and a call-to-action. Treat each of those cards as a unique landing page and design each from scratch including the image, the teaser and the details on the back end (what information Twitter will send with the lead information).

3. Visuals are essential.

Since the image on the Cards is positioned as the centerpiece, it might make or break the performance. It also gives you the opportunity to be creative and design images that complement the Card, like a combination of text and image, a call out or a blending image that looks like part of the Card. Make sure they adhere to the image dimensions specified by Twitter.

4. Have a good autoresponse email to immediately follow up.

Since Twitter doesn’t send the users to a Thank You Page, you will have to deliver the offer via email. Design a good autoresponse email that is fully aligned with the Card. You can use the same image, or elements from the image on the Card, include a Twitter logo and maybe even address it to the @handle of the lead.

5. Leverage cross-channel marketing.

With the Cards, Twitter is becoming the gateway for leads into your owned media – your emails, website and other online assets. Leverage these mediums to remarket to your leads. For example, you can include a retargeting pixel on the follow-up email and Thank You Page and design the retargeting ads triggered by that pixel to be specific to Twitter. You can also use them to learn more about the leads you get from Twitter with a good visitor tracking solution (like Optify).

6. Nurture.

Getting the lead from Twitter is only the start, and as I mentioned at the beginning, you only get very limited information from Twitter. Use lead nurturing campaigns to gather more information and nurture the lead until they are ready to be engaged in a sales conversation.

7. Measure performance and test different offers.

Twitter did a phenomenal job with its reporting and analytics and it allows you to measure very effectively the performance of each of your campaigns. With the integration they offer with Salesforce, you can set up hidden fields for each Card to allow you to measure the effectiveness of each Card and compare Cards and offers using all the metrics in the marketing and sales funnel (leads, opportunities, deals, ROI, etc.)

This is a new and very exciting feature that is not yet available to all users and in all countries. We will keep experimenting and sharing our findings with you.
In the meantime, download this presentation to guide you through the set-up process of the new Lead Generation Cards. You’ll be on your way in no time!