Twitter Advertising Hack for B2B Lead Generation

Twitter has been a good social network for engaging your community, but for many B2B marketers, it has not provided quality leads and therefore has generated weak lead qualification rate. But if right twitter ad product is chosen, then Twitter can generate better quality leads. Here’s how:

Stage 1:

Many of you would be attracted towards using “Leads on Twitter” or the twitter card for lead generation, but I’d recommend using “Website clicks or conversions”.

The key difference to note here is – With twitter card, the viewers of your tweet can send you their email at the click of a button.

But, with website clicks or conversions, any visitor who clicks on your tweet, will straight away go to your landing page where you can collect the information in a structured way. When the visitors land on your page, you get a chance to engage them and when they leave their credentials, odds are higher that these leads will qualify better. Here's how to proceed:

1. From the campaign dashboard, select the “Website conversions” as the objective of your new campaign.

2. Within one objective, build two different campaigns with different “Audience Features” in order to target your potential visitors more efficiently and to understand which type of targeting feature is getting better results.

Build two campaigns by setting up following specific targeting parameters:

• Keyword targeting (+Add Keywords)
• @username targeting (+Add Followers)

In the first option you can promote your tweet based on searches or users who tweet with words you enter. These will be the words (keywords) that you think your prospects might use to look for your product or service.

Targeting with @usernames allows you to reach users with interests similar to followers of any of those accounts (@usernames). You can enter your competitor’s @username here to start with. For example, if you are into providing software advice to companies, then enter @Better_Buys, @ERPCloudBlog, @Capterra, & @Cloudswave1. These are a few twitter accounts which talk about helping businesses find the right software. This will help you to target people who are interested in receiving advice for making a well-informed software purchase.

3. Once you set up your targeting, you can choose your creatives and compose a tweet. You must provide the landing page where you want your visitors to convert. Here's how your twitter ad will look once ready:

Click on the image for larger view. This image is only for illustration purpose here in this blog.

You can now launch your campaign and track it in twitter analytics. You should also set up the online conversion tracking for your campaign by generating a new HTML code snippet from twitter dashboard.

Stage 2:

With the above approach, you can generate a lot of quality traffic, which will have a direct impact on your top line. In stage 2, you can use the email ids collected from Stage 1 campaigns and retarget these specific visitors who are active on Twitter in a separate campaign. You now have a lead nurturing campaign on Twitter!

Go to "+Add tailored audiences" when you are setting up the audience for your lead nurturing campaign. When you set up the tailored audience with email ids, your records are matched with people who are active on Twitter so that you can target them in your campaigns. The important point to keep in mind for this campaign is that your lead nurturing campaign here should have promoted tweets around some of your educational content that highlights true benefits to your prospects.

What do you think about Twitter as a lead generating network?

How to Generate Sales Qualified Leads With Lead Nurturing & Content Marketing

Digital marketers will agree that their biggest challenge (other than proving ROI, of course!) is to make sure that the leads generated by their inbound marketing efforts don’t slip through the cracks. But it happens in several cases.

There can be two main reasons for this to happen:

1. Lead nurturing process is not streamlined, and/or it is not a part of the digital campaign management team
2. Lead nurturing process is not mapped correctly with the organization’s content marketing strategy.

In this article I am going to focus on the strategy to develop your lead nurturing process that is well-mapped with your content marketing strategy; and my focus of discussion is keeping B2B organizations in mind. (I am assuming here that your organization has a proper content marketing strategy in place).

To start with, let us revisit the Inbound Marketing Funnel and see what digital marketing should achieve at each section of the funnel. Accordingly, we need to take actions for implementing our lead nurturing strategy.

Top of the funnel (ToFu) – Build, build, build, and build more! Build as much traffic as possible so that the odds are higher that the conversions of qualified leads will be higher. You need to do this through Social Media Marketing campaigns, AdWords campaigns, and your regular SEO best practices.

Middle of the funnel (MoFu) – Build a database based on how you have captured the leads. The database should be segmented based on the content type where the prospects have provided their contact details through your inbound efforts.

Your lead nurturing starts from this step onwards.

Use the segments that you’ve created for lead nurturing through Email Marketing OR Account Based Marketing through LinkedIn Sponsored Updates or through LinkedIn Sponsored Mails.

Bottom of the funnel (BoFu) – At this section, further segment the above database based on the actions taken by the prospects. Use Email Marketing for lead nurturing at this stage. Repeat segmenting the database of the prospects based on the actions that they take after every lead nurturing effort. Do this till your prospect is ready to meet the sales person for a demo. Your marketing qualified leads are now sales qualified leads.

Now that we have segmented database of marketing qualified leads, which content should be used at which stage? Here’s a figure which will help you understand just that.

Click on the image for larger view

It is evident that content marketing plays a big role in driving successful lead nurturing campaigns. There will always be an overlap of content type that you can use in your inbound marketing efforts, and as a fall-out, an overlap of content type that you can (rather should) use for your lead nurturing campaigns. As you proceed with your campaign and re-segmenting the database that you collect at various levels, you will realise that the content assets that you already have, can be (and should be) re-purposed.

With content marketing mapped with your inbound marketing funnel, you can have the following types of lead nurturing campaigns:

1. Qualified leads whose details were captured through SEO
2. Qualified leads captured through AdWords campaigns, and
3. Qualified leads captured through Social Media Campaigns

For every email series (or for every lead nurturing campaign) you should divide your content based on the purpose that it serves. Your goal should be to build a matrix of targeted relevancy of content. Here are various types of content that you should utilize based on the purpose that they serve:

1. Educational/Informational messages – send Whitepapers, blogs, videos, podcasts, invitation to Webinars, Infographics, and eBooks
2. Testimonials – send customer testimonial videos, industry reports showing your leadership, case studies, Infographics, Newsletters
3. Free product demo/trials, consultation request

With this you will have a sound lead nurturing process in place that will help reduce the sales cycle in your organization. A Demand Gen Report Survey shows that 61% of respondents found that with lead nurturing process they generate more warm and sales-ready leads. The study also highlights that nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.

To maximize your inbound marketing efforts, look for an aligned lead nurturing process in your organization.