Posts Tagged ‘Lead Generation’

Put Twitter lead generation cards to work with LoopFuse marketing automation

Monday, July 1st, 2013

Twitter recently launched Twitter Cards for Lead Generation to give marketers an additional tool for lead generation via social media.  Twitter Cards provide an enhanced content experience as well as a simple one click “sign up” for Twitter users to take advantage of a promotion, offer, or other type of call to action.

We’re strong believers in the lead generation possibilities of social media as evidenced by our Nearstream social campaigns to identify, engage, and capture demand signals from Twitter (you can find this under Campaign>Social Campaigns in the LoopFuse product menu).

So we’ve put together a quick “how to” video and additional instructions on how to connect Twitter Cards to LoopFuse to capture these leads and put our nurturing, scoring, and CRM integration capabilities to work.  We’ve also added the detailed instructions posted below to our support site so you can reference them there as well.

Twitter Cards are a feature that allow you to capture leads directly from your Twitter stream. One click allows you to capture their name, email address, and twitter handle just as you would a regular Form registration. We’ll need to set up a Lead Capture Form in LoopFuse and use information unique to that form to set up the Twitter Card.

Set up the Lead Capture Form

We can use the wizard to set up the new form for this Twitter Card. Go to Prospect Management -> Lead Capture Forms, and click on the wizard.

Choose the option for “New form not found on my website”. Click “Next Step”.

Give the form a name. Choose to “Re-Route to a Thank-You page” and provide a URL. This setting really won’t matter much because of the way things will be submitted to us from Twitter, but you need to supply something in these fields for the wizard to continue. Add these registrations to a list and choose whether to Export to CRM or not (your choice depending on your business needs).

Manually map out three fields that are coming from Twitter. Keep in mind that the names we use on the left under “Form Field Name” will be what the field is called in Twitter. The name on the right is the field name in LoopFuse. You may need to set up some custom LoopFuse Fields before you create this form if you want the information passed on to Salesforce. For this example I used “email”, “twitterName”, and “twitterHandle”. Click on “Save Form” when done.

The final step of the wizard will let you click in to the form itself:

Click on “View HTML” to see details that we’ll need in Twitter. Leave this window open so you can get the information later.

Add or Edit a Twitter Card – Enable it to capture leads in LoopFuse

Go to your Twitter Ads account (http://ads.twitter.com) and access your cards. Create a new card or edit an existing one. Edit the Card Content as needed. Under the Technical Settings is where we will connect the card to your OneView account.

Here are the settings you will need for this section:

  • Choose POST as the submit method (it should be the default)
  • Input the submit URL – lfov.net/webrecorder/f
  • Put in your Fallback URL
    A Twitter Card has an end goal when deployed, a call to action where you want users to end up when they click. Make sure to use that URL in the Fallback URL section for best results. You will still get their basic information captured automatically but this may be a good opportunity to get more information from them if they are interested.
  • Link to your Privacy Policy

Next we’ll add values that will get sent to LoopFuse when someone clicks on Card.

  • In our example above, Name was to be submitted to the form as “twitterName”. It can be whatever as long as this value under “Custom Key Name” matches the value under “Form Field Name” in LoopFuse. Fill in all three fields to match the LoopFuse values.
  • Reference your form in LoopFuse for the “Custom Hidden Data Values”. From your form properties, click on  “View HTML”. Look for “formid” and “cid”

Once you put the values in these fields, accept the terms, and save the card, a test registration will be sent to your account.

Check your LoopFuse account for the registration. Once you verify that it is there you can check the box that you received the data. Once you’ve acknowledged receipt of the data you can use your card!

What’s Your Lead Velocity Rate (LVR)?

Monday, March 4th, 2013

If you run a recurring revenue business (SaaS, etc.) then this article by Jason Lemkin is well worth reading.  He points out that the best leading indicator of sales pipeline performance is your Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (LVR) which measures your growth in qualified leads month over month.  Jason knows a thing or two about this having been the co-founder & CEO of Echosign which is now part of Adobe Systems.  Here’s a great quote that drives the point home:

“But there’s a better metric, your Key Metric, you should track and score yourself to, and hold your VP Marketing and marketing team to – Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (LVR), your growth in qualified leads, measure month-over-month, every month. It’s real time, not lagging, and it clearly predicts your future revenues and growth.  And it’s more important strategically than your revenue growth this month or this quarter.”

Read the whole thing here.

We would love you to try out LoopFuse here.

To find out exactly what LoopFuse does, click here.

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A Lead: An Expression of Interest

Monday, October 4th, 2010

One of the largest and most frequent problems that plague the sales and marketing relationship is the quality and quantity of leads.  Tomes have been dedicated to the subject and some very smart consultants make a lot of coin advising on it.   Yet, the results are still very hit or miss.  The problem is that people have been trying to solve the wrong problem.

The real issue isn’t what defines a “qualified” lead, but rather what defines a lead itself.  Nearly everyone defines a lead as a person.  It’s someone you’ve just met who you hope will mature into a customer.  A lead can linger on in your database for months if not years.  If this is how you define a lead, let me stop you right there to say you’ve got it wrong!

A lead isn’t a person.  A lead is an expression of interest at a specific point in time.  Think about what that means.  We are all complex people and engage with brands every day.  Our motivations for engaging at any point of time can shift and vary.  It’s these motivations that drive what and why we buy.  Remember, people buy things to solve problems.  The same is true in our personal as in our professional lives.  It’s key, therefore, for brands to hone in on what’s motivating the engagement and seize on the immediate, relevant pain.

Defining a lead in this manner addresses the sales and marketing relationship in two ways.  First, it gets marketing thinking like sales.  Injecting this notion of an “expression of interest” gets marketing focusing on the things important to the customer, and why they will buy as opposed to a raw count of bodies.  Second, it brings standardization and repetition to the qualification process.  Never confuse the inside sales team with highly paid, external sales professionals.  Reducing their scope and funneling the outcomes will drive consistency and performance.

Step one in getting your lead generation process moving in the right direction; therefore, must begin with the right definition of a lead.

Takeaways:
– A lead is NOT a person
– A lead IS an expression of interest in time

http://www.tractionsm.com

The Quota Carrying CMO

Monday, November 30th, 2009

There is an interesting shift happening in corporate America at the moment with regards to performance evaluation of marketing departments.  While I suspect that this shift may be global in nature, I have only personally witnessed it in the states and will therefore limit myself from over-reaching generalizations (seems almost quaint in the blogosphere today).

About 7 months ago I was discussing marketing automation tools in general, and LoopFuse in particular of course, with a marketing SVP and highlighting the different value propositions for the sales department versus the marketing department.  Given his role, I focused my discussion primarily within the marketing side of the equation, but he repeatedly kept redirecting the conversation towards the benefits for sales.  Initially I thought he was simply trying to identify any reservations or concerns that the sales VP might have by asking all of these sales-oriented questions.  But as the conversation progressed I learned that this marketing SVP’s personal bonus was not tied to the traditional measures of marketing success (brand awareness, lead volume, events, etc.) but instead was based almost entirely on revenue.

At the time I considered his company’s personal performance measurement approach to be interesting, but not particularly relevant.  One outlier is an anomaly, two is a coincidence, three is a pattern, and four is a trend.  As of today I have encountered my fourth marketing executive who is primarily rewarded based on the success or failure of the sales department.  At first, this approach seemed unfair to the marketing department.  But as I see this trend growing I realize that almost everyone is rewarded based partially on the success or failure of others, especially at the executive levels.    In this case the CMO is actually carrying the company’s global quota just like the sales executive.  One potentially positive aspect of this approach is that your sales and marketing departments may find that there is significantly less friction between them because their respective leadership’s goals are now perfectly aligned.

Are you a marketing VP?  Is your bonus compensation driven almost exclusively through revenue quotas?  Tell us how it has impacted yourself, your team, and your organization.