Generate High Quality Sales Leads Easily with Twitter

Twitter's lead generation cards can be a lucrative source of really high quality sales leads for your organization.

You only pay when users interact with your ad, and their CTA feature allow you to capture a logged in user's general information like name, email, and screen name.

The secret to maximizing the value of Twitter's lead gen cards is to make sure that your leads are hyper-targeted.

In this article I'll outline a growth hack that we have been using for the past 6 months with great success. The hack has helped us ensure that we don't waste any marketing spend, and target only the most qualified of sales leads.

Already a Twitter lead-gen master? Skip to the hack. 

Using Twitter For Sales Leads

In mid 2013 Twitter announced their lead-generation cards, in an effort to quell the "ROI of social media" conversation, and to position themselves for their upcoming IPO.

Twitter lead-generation cards perform like a regular sponsored tweet, with one major exception. The new cards enabled advertisers to embed a call-to-action directly inside the tweet itself.

This made it possible to capture a user's information directly within the Twitter ecosystem, and execute any action that could be performed using an HTTP POST request.

[notification type="warning_alert" title="Teach a dog to rest"]Learn all about REST from Apigee in "Teach a Dog to Rest"[/notification]

It's possible to use Twitter lead generation cards as a substitute for any basic form you would host on your website to capture basic information about a user:

• A user's email address
• A user's name (first name last name)
• A user's Twitter screen name

Ready to get started? Let's create our first leadgen card!

Building Twitter Lead Gen Cards

Building a Twitter lead-gen card is relatively easy and straight forward. Even so, a small amount of planning can drastically streamline the already easy process. Before we get started make sure that you organize the following items:

• A resource guide to send the user. Make sure the resource is valuable to the user.
• An image for the lead-gen card. The image needs to have an aspect ratio of 4:1 and be at least 800x200px. I prefer to use 1200x300.
• A link to your privacy policy. If you don't have a publically available privacy policy make sure you create one.
• A fallback URL. This is a publicly facing page with a traditional form a user can fill out as an alternative to Twitter's call-to-action.
• A thank you page (optional). I prefer to display a message as an alternative to a thank-you page, however you may want to use a thank-you page to host a conversion tracking pixel.

Lastly, you'll need:

• A URL to send a POST or GET request to.

For this tutorial I recommend building a Zapier catch web hook trigger. This will allow you to manipulate the data however you'd like.

From the Zapier dashboard create a new Zap and choose the "Web Hook Catch Hook" trigger.

The Zap action doesn't matter very much yet. I chose email for testing purposes.

Grab your web hook url from Zapier. It should look something like this: https://zapier.com/hooks/catch/821bjhkjxhs/

Once you have organized all your ingredients, it's time to get cooking. Navigate to ads.twitter.com. In the top nav-bar choose Creatives-->Cards to get started building your first card.

Fill in the required and optional information and name your card. You are ready to create your Twitter lead-gen campaign.

The Hack and Putting it All Together

Now its time for the magic. At it's core the hack is really quite simple, the best ones always are.

Internally, like many companies in the B2B space, we rely on a lead's domain name for lead scoring, @gmail.com is a sign of a lower quality lead, @hotmail.com; the worst. However, most Twitter accounts are attached to the user's personal account. We needed a way to ensure that the leads we were capturing were of the highest quality. Like a fine Italian wool.

We brainstormed the most likely Twitter communities where our high quality leads would be at their most dense. Like a bolt from Thor's Hammer it hit us, they were attending conferences. Conference leads were:

• Self selecting. Conference budgets are elastic, you don't have them unless your organization is generating significant revenue. Organization's sponsoring conference attendees have most likely achieved product/market fit.
• Focused on a specific topic. Whether it is social media, or AdWords, SEO, or Inbound Marketing, we could tailor our messaging to solve for specific needs in the marketing mix.
• Active on social media. Even inactive Twitter users will pick up their mobile's to tweet Seth Godin's priceless quips in realtime.
• Have a specific hashtag. We just needed to figure out what it is and participate in the conversation.
• Followed a predictable schedule. Get up relatively early and grab breakfast. Keynote. First session of the day. Lunch break out (and find a socket). Sessions all afternoon.

Conferences are our tribes' meeting places. Our next step was to make a list of all the conferences our marketing personas would love to attend. This wasn't too hard, since I personally fit very well within at least one of the personas.

[notification type="warning_alert" title="Marketing Personas"]Everybody should have a set of marketing personas. Make sure to build a set.[/notification]

Our next step was to create a list of all of the conferences with the following information:

• Name
• Website
• Dates
• Location
• Twitter Account
• Twitter Hashtag
• List of Sponsors

Even though we created the list early on in the year, we treat it as a living document. We're frequently adding conferences as we learn about them or removing them as our marketing personas change. Once we have a big list though I'll sort by time.

At the beginning of every week I create a new campaign for each conference that is happening in the next 2 weeks. I try and create a unique tweet for each day of the conference. After time you should begin to learn what tweets and time of day results in the most engagement.

I use previous results to inform my creative decision for the each new campaign, but don't be afraid to use your judgement based on your audience. The personas at a marketing conference are different from a sales conference or an analytics conference. Make sure to articulate the value proposition that resonates best with the attendees. 

Conclusion

Twitter lead gen cards are a great way to capture the same type information that you would capture with a web-to-lead form on your site. Make sure to get creative with your targeting, but don't make your targeting too broad. By being specific you can ensure that you are capturing only the highest quality sales leads. An easy way to do this is to target conference hashtags related to your industry.

Do you want to learn how to turn more of your customers, partners, affiliates, and fans into revenue generators?Request a custom demo from one of our referral marketing software experts today!