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In the hustle of holiday shopping, moving into social commerce may seem a little intimidating—but don’t let the ability to communicate freely with customers overwhelm you

Put simply, “social commerce” combines social media marketing techniques with the sales potential of e–commerce. This interactive evolution of e–commerce allows for brands to participate in customer communities; leveraging their networks to drive sales, increase revenue, and build powerful brand ambassadors.

Ultimately, moving into social commerce is easy and can be segmented into 3 simple dimensions:

Social Shopping: Social shopping seeks to mimic the interactions found in brick and mortar stores by involving a customer’s friends in the shopping experience. Group shopping sites (like Groupon), recommendation engines, and online marketplaces all bring customers together in a central location allowing for an interactive, social experience.

Customer Reviews: Easily accessible user forums ease customers into making educated purchase decisions. By harnessing the wisdom of crowds, positive reviews can be game changers in a customer’s decision to choose your brand.

Peer–to–Peer Referrals: Proven to be the most effective way to drive new business, happy customers will take their satisfaction a step further than a positive review and share a peer–to–peer referral with friends and family. In fact, according to a Nielsen study, customers are four times more likely to buy when referred by a close friend.

With social referral software built into your e–commerce platform, you can easily reward customers for sharing information about their purchase, referring new friends, and driving sales. If social commerce is all about promoting word–of–mouth activity, implementing a customer referral program is critical to successfully entering this new marketing sphere.

You may have noticed a common theme: establishing a trust–based relationship is critical to effectively leveraging social commerce.

Shoppers today have an inherent distrust of branded messaging. Instead, they look to friends, family, and online communities for purchasing wisdom. The choice to utilize social commerce for commercial gain is simple. Now it’s up to your brand to act on it.

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More and more companies are generating real revenue from referral marketing and affiliate marketing channels. To maximize their effectiveness, though, it’s important to understand how the two are different, and create specific plans for each. To create an effective strategy for a word-of-mouth campaign, it’s helpful to understand the motivations of both affiliates and ambassadors.

Read next: “The Primary Use Cases for Referral Marketing Software“

Referral marketing is done by your brand ambassadors. Brand ambassadors are people who will shout from the rooftops, praise your product because there is something about it they love. Perhaps it’s the product, the company, both, are any number of other reasons. Some ambassadors just want to be the “first” to let their friends know about your product. Whatever the reason, their motivation isn’t entirely financial.

Affiliates are more likely to be incentivized by a financial gain. They probably have less of an attachment to your brand. Typically ambassadors know the person they are referring the product to, affiliates do not.

One of the easiest ways to inspire referral behavior is to leverage the motivation for sharing. An easy way to do this is by adjusting the reward structure of your referral program. Here are three alternatives to a financial reward structure that you can use to incentivize ambassador behavior.

Reward Structure: Dual-Incentive

Works best for: Any

Communicates: “I love this product. You’re going to love this product. Trust me. Here’s 20% off to give it a try.”

Why do we share so much on social media? It’s obvious, because we want to be liked. To many, being liked is more important than financial reward. What’s the easiest way to be liked? Give gifts of course! You can create gifts that your ambassadors can give away by structuring your commissions using a dual-incentive reward structure.

A dual-incentive structure rewards both the referrer and the new customer. An example would be when an ambassador shares a one-time 20% discount to the referral for signing up (SaaS), or $10 off the referral’s next purchase (ecommerce).

Reward Structure: Swag

Works best for: Ecommerce

Communicates: “I love this product so much I want to wear it!”

Branded swag is a great way to build trust between ambassadors and referred customers. If the referred customer discovers that the ambassador is earning branded swag as a commission, the discovery will reenforce trust in the recommendation.

Branded swag has the added bonus of being a great conversation starter.

Reward Structure: Product

Works best for: SaaS

Communicates: “You need this product for your business. It’s easy to use, the support is terrific and we significantly increased revenue because of it.”

One of the best ways to incentivize user behavior is to determine your currency. What value are you providing your users?

Dropbox asked themselves this question and determined that it was extra storage space. Once they understood what their currency was they were able to offer the extra space as a referral commission. As a result, the number of referrals dramatically increased.

Summary

Affiliate programs and referral programs are similar, but different. To maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns, consider the motivation of your users, and try and reenforce those motivations through your incentive structure.

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!

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One of the most important components of any marketing campaign – whether it’s email marketing, mobile, social media or traditional offline methods – is a clear and powerful call to action.

Successful calls to action can be used at varying levels of your marketing activities, depending on which method and what your goal is for each. For instance, you can have a call to action in your tweets that encourages people to click a link to read your blog post. Or, you could have a call to action on your website, driving visitors to complete a certain action, whether that may be signing up for your newsletter, downloading an eBook or purchasing a product.

Regardless of where you are in the process, calls to action are what will drive your audience to take that next step. Let’s take a look at some best practices for developing and implementing successful calls to action that will get you the results you’re aiming for.

Step 1: Define your goals.

You can’t begin influencing what people do until you identify exactly what it is you want from them. We mentioned previously that calls to action can be used at all levels of your marketing efforts, from getting your audience to connect with you on social media to actually pulling the trigger and becoming a customer – and every step along the way. You can (and should) be developing an effective call to action for each of these steps.

Step 2: Create a powerful hook.

Consider for a moment the 90/9/1 rule, which states that of the total number of people actively involved with social media, only 1% of them actually create content, 9% contribute and the remaining 90% simply lurk in the background. What this means to marketers is that in order to achieve overall goals, we must find a way to influence that 90%, or at least a portion of it, to stop lurking and take action in some way. To accomplish this, you must find a way to hook your audience and draw them in.

We live in a very “what’s in it for me” society. People aren’t going to take that next step unless they feel it will benefit them in some way. Determine what value you can offer your audience and you’ll have your hook.

Step 3: Create a sense of urgency.

Marketing isn’t just about outsmarting and outperforming your competition; it’s also about overcoming the inactivity of your target audience. Simply extending the offer of something your prospects may find useful, such as a coupon, isn’t always enough to get them to take that next step. Adding a sense of urgency to that, on the other hand, will.

Research conducted by Marketing Experiments showed that adding a sense of urgency to an email marketing campaign increased the click through rate by 15%. Make people an offer they can’t refuse, and more importantly, limit that offer so that it’s more compelling.

There are several ways to create a sense of urgency in your marketing. For instance, use urgent wording in your call to action (i.e. “limited time only”, “act now – supplies are limited”, etc.) and make offers time-sensitive. When people believe that if they don’t act now, they’ll miss out, they’re much more likely to pull the trigger.

Step 4: Optimize your messaging for best results.

There are a lot of ways to make your calls to action stand out and get noticed. Here are a few tips to hone your efforts for optimum results:

• Customize your message for each platform – I.e., simpler messages on Twitter versus more graphics on Facebook.
• Use engaging colors (yes, colors do matter in marketing).
• Keep it simple – Make taking the next step easy.
• Use verbs in with a strong imperative mood.
• Use strategic locations – make calls to action visible and place them throughout your site, not just above the fold.
• Be creative – Place calls to action in a variety of media, such as videos, not just on your site or in your SMM.
• Use eye-catching design – Not just “pretty” but effective. Test different designs, such as those that contain images and certain color patterns to see which get the best results.
• Include social sharing buttons.

Step 5: Measure and tweak accordingly.

You’re probably not going to hit the ball out of the park on your first try, so don’t get discouraged. Measuring the results of your calls to action on a regular basis can help you identify what’s working and what areas could be tweaked a little for better results. Set up some goals in Google Analytics and track the following:

• Impressions
• Click-Throughs
• Click-Through Rate
• Completions
• Completion Rate

This will give you a clear picture of how your calls to action are performing so you can hone your strategy moving forward.

Don’t just sit back and wait for prospects to do what you want them to do. Encourage them to take that next step by developing and implementing powerful calls to action in your messaging. This will boost your marketing campaigns to the next level and help to yield consistent results over time.

SendGrid increased their customers by 25% and you can too. We reveal SendGrid’s secrets in this comprehensive case study. Get started today!

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In March 2014, researchers found that an average of 67.91% of online shoppers abandon their carts.

While ecommerce sites will never enjoy zero abandonment, there are tricks marketers can employ to encourage more shoppers to complete their purchases. Part of lowering the abandonment rate is figuring out exactly where in the shopping process people are leaving; it is not always during the actual checkout process. To get the most from your consumers, be certain to adhere to these online shopping best practices.

Transparent Pricing

Many online merchants try to hide pricing from shoppers. One way this is often done is requiring a shopper to add a product to their cart in order to see the price. Not only is this an annoyance to the visitor, it will lead to higher cart abandonment rates.

Clearly Indicate Availability

Another inconvenience to shoppers is learning that a product is out of stock when trying to checkout. Do not risk having the shopper abandoning their entire cart over one or two items being out of stock. Backordering is fine, but let them know that it will be back ordered — along with an expected arrival date — before they put it in their cart.

Shorten the Checkout Process

There is a big push towards one-page checkout. The sooner you implement one-page checkout on your own ecommerce store, the better. This simple trick alone can significantly lower your cart abandonment rate. If you absolutely must deploy a multi-page checkout, it should be no longer than three pages. Whether it is one-page or five, never make the customer enter correct details twice. Abandonment will go up if a shopper has to re-enter all of their details because one field did not pass validation. Going even further, use logins and cookies to pre-fill as much data as possible.

The Home Depot doesn’t utilize a 1-page checkout process, however they make sure to display where in the checkout process the user is, and how far they have until they are finished.

Keep it Clean and Simple

Do not overwhelm your customers with product details. Sure, make them available, and provide enough information to encourage a sale, but use a tabbed container to hide details most consumers will not care about, like technical specifications. This will keep the page design clean while still allowing those who want to see the details to do so.

Use tabs on your product detail pages to hide technical information.

Enable Different Payment Methods

There is no sound business reason for not accepting payment through third party providers like PayPal and other digital wallets. Make it as easy as possible for customers to pay you using the method they prefer. Once enabled, feature these payment methods early in the shopping process so that customers know they can pay using them. Allow users to save preferred methods of payment for an even more seamless process the next time around.

Make sure to let your visitors know early on what types of payment methods you accept.

Use Remarketing

Remarketing can be done both on the web and by email. Remarketing by email is a great way of getting shoppers back to your site. Try different ways for wooing them back, such as emailing discounts or coupon codes. Remarketing on the web will place your ads in front of shoppers as they surf other sites. While they may not have been ready to purchase when they abandoned their cart, remarketing is a great way to stay top of mind. Since the user has already been introduced to your brand, your remarketing ads are more likely to catch their attention.

Instill Trust

A shopper that does not trust your site will not make a purchase. This is doubly true in an era of increasing theft of credit card details. If employing cookies, be sure to have a page explaining exactly what they do. Also have a page explaining your sites security features for those weary of providing their credit card details. Publish a clear and easy-to-understand privacy policy that explains to customers exactly what you will do with their private information and how you will protect it. Make sure to use an SSL certificate from a reputable source like verisign, and include a seal on your site to show that your data is encrypted. Customers are more at ease when seeing the logos of recognized brands, so if you are selling the products of these brands, put the customer at ease by using logos where appropriate.

Optimize

It is true that changing the color of a button or even moving it can increase sales and decrease abandonment rate. Use an A/B testing tool like Optimizely to A/B test everything on your site. Start with broad tests and narrow them to be more specific as you gather insights.

Speed it Up

Pageload speed not only affects your placement in Google, it can also drive away shoppers. Milliseconds matter. Do everything you can to speed up your site. You can keep an eye on page load times from inside Google Analytics in Content > Side Speed.

While the above tricks will not drop your cart abandonment rate to zero, implementing them should improve your overall metrics. Every ecommerce site deals with cart abandonment; the best proactively minimize the chance of it happening. At the end of the day, these tricks will lead to more transactions, sales and profit.

Customers referred by other customers have a 37% higher retention rate. Schedule a free consultation to learn how else a referral program can help you achieve your ecommerce goals.

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These days, consumers are turning to the internet more than any other source to learn about brands and make purchasing decisions. In fact, according to a study by GE Capital, 81% of consumers say they turn to the web to do research before making a purchase. What if the information that’s floating around in cyberspace doesn’t necessarily paint your business in the best light? While you can’t completely control what’s said about you on the web, you can take measures to counteract and protect your online reputation. If you’ve had a few mishaps in the past and your online persona could use a bit of a makeover, here are a few tips to get you back on track.

Keep track of what’s being said.

You can’t correct a problem if you don’t know it exists. You need to stay on top of what’s being said about your business online – good or bad. Set up a Google alert that will send you a notification any time your brand is mentioned online. That way you can step in and take the appropriate measures right away.

Google alerts work with the same advanced search operators as a regular Google search. Add filters to exclude false positives. For example I would add negative keywords like “-Jake” and “-baseball” to eliminate results for the minor league baseball player Jake Skole from alerts for my name (Jordan Skole).

Looking to get more advanced? I recommend taking a look at Moz’ Fresh Web Explorer. Tools like Sprout Social can help monitor social media mentions of your brand terms as well.

Respond in a timely manner.

When it comes to online comments or complaints, timing is everything. If someone writes something about your business, product, service or employees and you fail to respond, it can give the impression that you don’t care. If you come across a compliment, say thank you and make it as personalized as possible. If it’s a complaint or negative comment, apologize, offer a solution and if necessary, offer to take the conversation offline before it gets out of hand.

Stay positive.

The manner in which you respond – especially to a complaint or negative review – can make or break how your business is perceived moving forward. 62% of consumers say they would stop doing business with a brand following a negative interaction while 29% say they’d increase their spending following a positive experience. Always focus on customer satisfaction and keep all responses as positive as possible.

Be active online.

If the only online activity associated with your brand is negative comments, what do you think will be at the top of the Google search the next time someone looks up your company? One of the best ways to combat a not-so-stellar reputation online is to establish a solid, active presence on the web. This will provide much more robust results when someone conducts a search for your brand. Be active on social media, blog frequently and join as many relevant groups and forums as you can manage.

Keep communications personal yet professional.

There is a fine line that businesses must skate when engaging with customers and prospects online. The ultimate goal is to develop relationships with your audience while also remaining professional. If you read negative reviews or comments, keep responses positive and respectful. Don’t take it personal. Just remember, once you put something on the web it’s there forever, so choose your words wisely.

Recruit passionate brand ambassadors.

You obviously can’t be everywhere at all times, so why not tap into your happy customer base to help spread the good word about your brand? Not only does this provide more credibility for your business, but it’s also a much more powerful way to reach more prospects. While 84% of consumers say they trust recommendations from people they know, 68% still place more trust in the opinions of other consumers that they don’t know over ads and other professional marketing efforts.

Use negative feedback to your advantage.

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.” – Ben Franklin

Nobody wants to see negative things written about the brand they’ve worked so hard to build, but since you can’t keep everyone happy all the time, it’s bound to happen. Take these negative comments as an opportunity to further improve and grow your business. Your online reputation will ultimately make or break your business. By staying on top of what’s being said about your brand, knowing how to respond and leveraging other ways to boost your image online, you’ll be able to overcome any negative info that may be out there and still come out on top.

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Once upon a time, businesses went out on a limb to embrace social media networks for sheer people power. There were obvious reasons for businesses to move to the social enterprise. Some of those benefits were loyalty, consumer support, brand building, awareness, and traction.

Social media, however, had more in store. As senior social marketing manager at LinkedIn Koka Sexton puts it, the rise of social selling is reality today.

According to the folks at Dynamic Signal, more than 85% of high-performing social sellers used social networks for networking. At least 78% of them use social networks for prospecting.

Dynamic Signal – 2014: The Rise of Social Selling

The number of LinkedIn connections of a sales rep (or a business owner) directly correlates to meeting sales targets. For social selling, the average conversion rate is a whopping 15% (5 times more than normal marketing conversion rate).

CSO Insights research, in their annual survey of more than 4000 firms worldwide, reveals that social selling is now a competitive advantage. More than 57% (update since the survey results: that number is now 70%) of buyers complete their purchasing cycle even before engaging a vendor.

All that talk of social selling and social media power won’t be complete without the mention of social CRM (or at least CRM solutions that plug into social media). Here’s what you ought to know before you use a social CRM for your business:

Social Networks Are Not Marketplaces

Granted that more than half of the world is currently updating, sharing, posting, commenting, liking, and following as you read this. Social media is big and your buyers are lurking there. Yet, it’s not a marketplace. It’s not exactly a place where your buyers are looking to buy. It’s not the hustle pot. In fact, social media networks have low tolerance for sales.

Ironically, social selling is on the rise. How you ask? It’s all about relationships and conversation management. Just by “being there,” “establishing credibility,” and “willingly solving problems for free,” brands leverage the power of social selling.

If all this makes you think along the lines of “Pitch and grab the sale,” you’re mistaken. In fact, it’s like this:

“Don’t pitch. Just solve.”

“Don’t hustle. Deliver value and wait for the sale.”

“Don’t follow up. Give remote support and digital handshakes.”

When that handshake happens, however, your clients will find their way as entries into your social CRM.

From then on, it’s all about management of the relationship you just established.

Social CRM Software is About the People

For long, management gurus have advocated the importance of customers as living, breathing beings. They are not entries, ID numbers, or customer numbers; they are people. Social CRM solutions have this built into their dashboards.

You need to keep track of your customers’ social updates, and gather profile data such as birthdays, anniversaries and all those things that matter to them from these updates. Use the built-in features of your social CRM to help you keep track of this mind-numbing information about your customers. Social login and social sharing tools help you automate this. Ambassador too can help you manage campaigns and promotions using social data through a single dashboard.

While you do that, focus on the final goal: streamlining this rotating information exchange between your customers and your business, staff and vendors.

Social CRM Software Isn’t a Standalone Solution

There are enterprise-level CRM solutions, and then there are tools for small businesses that involve bits and pieces of social or CRM. Social CRM solutions came to the fore almost as an afterthought.

Yet, social CRM solutions are not standalone solutions. Either your CRM solution comes with social plugins (like Salesforce with Chatter) or the CRM is built from social-first approach (like Nimble CRM).

CRM solutions are not complete without the social part. Your CRM is not doing justice to customer relationships if it doesn’t have a social component to it. Amanda Nelson of Exact Target declared that relationship management has entered 21st century renaissance. She suggests basic onboarding for teams who have to deal with social media networks and get them used to the concept of social selling. In any case, social selling is best internalized when you lead by example.

Social CRM Software Only Does so Much

Using a social CRM isn’t going to guarantee you success. What it does guarantee are better processes, uniform information management, streamlined support for customers, and an unbreakable chain of effort to keep yourself updated when it comes to your customers.

According to this infographic by Numero, most of your customer interactions flowing into social CRM could start with requests to respond on issues, praise or feedback about service, or complaints.

The fact that at least 93% of Americans feel that companies fail to exceed customer service expectations makes a compelling case for social CRM adoption. With a CRM solution in place, you could very well grant yourself the opportunity to respond to customers faster and in a more efficient manner.

Social CRMs help tame the sales cycle

Whether you have a completely offline business model, a pure online business, or a hybrid of both, you’ll find that social CRM helps streamline customer data input.

With multiple touch points available for customers to interact with businesses today, it’s incredibly hard to track customer flow, let alone important metrics such as lifetime value of a customer or ROI. That is why some sort of CRM is being built into tools of all kinds, without explicitly defining it as such. For instance, ecommerce stores with a physical presence have started using mobile Point of Sale systems that incorporate reporting tools to track customers and sales made online or offline. This makes it easier for the retailer to spot trends and gain insights by grabbing data off random customer interactions and save data in a central database for the whole team to access.

Image source: Shopify POS

From a lead to a customer for life, you’ll be able to tame the sales cycle and be in control of the entire journey with the help of social CRM just by making sure that the data is accurate, updated, kept secure, and is made accessible on the cloud.

That, precisely, is the premise of a full-blown social CRM system.

Do you use social media for business? Is your use limited to engagement or do you also have a social selling strategy in place? We’d be happy to hear your thoughts!

Rohan Ayyar works at E2M, a premium digital marketing agency specializing in web analytics, creative content strategy, and conversion for startups. He is an avid blogger, with posts featured on MarketingProfs, Social Media Today and Entrepreneur, among other places. Rohan hangs out round the clock on Twitter @searchrook – follow him and hit him up any time for a quick chat.

The post 5 Tips to Keep in Mind Before Using Social CRM Software appeared first on Ambassador.

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 1200×300.
• 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!

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