Today’s announcement by Twitter of the launch of its new Lead Generation Card represents a major milestone in the evolution of both the microblogging site and performance marketing. Lead Generation Cards are part of the suite of Twitter Cards, which are essentially expanded tweets that allow organizations and businesses to promote their content and offers.

For Twitter, it is a recognition that engagement and social media buzz are great but the days of advertisers being able to live solely off of that as justification for investing in social media campaigns are quickly coming to a close. As Twitter said in announcing the new direct marketing offering, the key goal for many marketers “boils down to one more theme: generating leads and ultimately driving purchases.” We couldn’t agree more.

For performance marketers, Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards should become a useful tool in their performance social marketing campaigns. Performance marketers have longed argued for more lead-gen-specific capabilities within social platforms. As we wrote recently, Facebook’s recent development of CPA bidding for direct marketing advertisers is an important step toward making that social network a more performance-marketing-friendly advertising platform.

So how do Twitter Lead Generation Cards work? Here is how Twitter explained them on its blog:

Twitter Cards let you bring rich experiences and useful tools to users within an expanded Tweet. The Lead Generation Card makes it easy for users to express interest in what your brand offers. Users can easily and securely share their email address with a business without leaving Twitter or having to fill out a cumbersome form.

When someone expands your Tweet, they see a description of the offer and a call to action. Their name, @username, and email address are already pre-filled within the Card. The user simply clicks a button to send this information directly (and securely) to you.

For now, Twitter’s lead-gen cards are only available to “managed clients” but the social network plans to make them globally available soon. As Marketing Land’s Matt McGee writes, we can expect a “fair amount of small business owners will want to kick the tires [by testing lead-gen card campaigns] when that happens.”

Interestingly, Congress.org points out that the release of Lead Generation Cards by Twitter may have the added benefit of helping nonprofits and advocacy groups increase visibility and build their membership base.

At MediaWhiz, we’re excited about this new opportunity engage, acquire and retain customers via Twitter. Social media has opened up so many new opportunities for brand marketing over the last five years. It’s an encouraging sign that Twitter, along with Facebook, are finally bringing some of their marketing magic to the performance marketing world in the form of direct response, lead-gen capabilities.

What do you think? Will Twitter’s new Lead Generation Cards amount to anything? Will you be using them for your next lead-gen campaign?

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Ahh, summer. That most glorious time of year. The sun is shining, the beaches are beckoning and everywhere you look, people are on their smartphones — shopping and watching entertainment.

At least, that appears to be the trend for summer 2013. According to Adweek, “brands are preparing for what could be a break-through quarter in mobile advertising as consumers spend more time outdoors while constantly checking their iPhone or Samsung.” Summer, according to Brian Ng, marketing director and lead for brand strategy and trademark development at Del Monte Foods, presents an “unstructured environment” in which mobile is key to bridging the “planning-to-purchase divide.”

Mobile marketing and the summer go together like peas and carrots, to quote Forrest Gump. And to that combination a mobile performance marketing functionality, such as mobile lead gen, and marketers could see a big growth opportunity for their brands over the next three months.

eMarketer estimates that 15% of all US online retail sales in 2013 will be made on a mobile device, an increase from 11% in 2012. As I wrote in a recent post, mobile marketing is starting to positively impact brands’ sales trends. With more consumers using their mobile devices for shopping-specific actions (e.g., comparison shopping or searching for a store near them), the opportunity to reach consumers with relevant information, exactly when and where they need it, is the true benefit of mobile marketing.

Researching products and prices on mobile is the most popular consumer shopping activity. Seventy-two percent of consumers report they use their phone to research prices or seek a better deal online, according to a study of U.S. mobile Internet users conducted by AYTM Market Research.

Stats like that lend credence to our recent launch of MediaWhiz Mobile, our mobile performance marketing practice. As more consumers adopt a mobile-first approach to all aspects of their lives, particularly shopping, the ability to engage, acquire and retain mobile customers in an ROI-positive manner will be crucial for most brands.

Right now, many mobile marketing campaigns are centered around branding and apps. That’s all well and good but there is a great need for mobile-specific customer acquisition that taps into consumers’ mobile-shopping habits and needs. MediaWhiz Mobile is here to meet that growing demand.

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This is a conundrum that many schools and education marketers deal with. Some providers haven’t survived the changing landscape. Whether it’s falling behind with compliance requirements, or struggling to maintain enough traffic to stay afloat, many online education marketers and agencies leave the business and move on to other, less-quality driven industries.

But what is important to a college or university should be of the greatest importance to the school’s marketing sources. We all know that high-quality, compliant leads are necessary for success with any higher education marketing campaign, but a partnership with the right aggregator needs to be more than just that; and a school’s expectations should be nothing less.

Compliance, quality and an understanding of a successful admission life-cycle from the first point of contact with potential students to enrollment is what most satisfies a client. 

The Trust Factor

The focus of each school’s lead buyer should be the following: Do I trust this lead provider? Do they know what they’re talking about? And, do they know what I’m talking about when discussing goals, metrics and quality requirements?

The answer is probably. Your marketing partner probably knows what you’re looking to achieve, but is the entire marketing team on the same-page with you and your goals? Does their network know what you’re looking for? Does their SEM strategist understand your end goals? Does their creative team understand what will get you the most bang for your buck?

Fortunately, MediaWhiz has those tools and a team of Education Specialists to enhance the quality of all work, media and marketing going out the door.

By putting together targeted campaigns with the right marketing channels, partnerships and creative, the goals of each individual school are identified, defined and deployed with the school’s direction and insight, along with MediaWhiz’s direct-marketing expertise behind it.

So, think about your last marketing buy and think about your goals. When doing this, ask yourself this question: Do you have your goals identified?

Partnering with a marketing agency, such as MediaWhiz, that has the ability to spend time on your campaign, tackling it from all angles and using tools like compliance monitoring, sophisticated user engagement projections and true A/B testing will give you, the client, results you should expect.

The right direct marketing tools are crucial to a campaign’s long-term success. Yes, compelling copy is great, but if you have a company spending your marketing dollars you want to make sure the cost they’re incurring for quality users to “click” will actually convert on your landing page.

By using direct marketing tools and best practices, MediaWhiz helps clients increase the results needed from their marketing pieces. This gives your admissions team a better opportunity to engage the potential students you’re spending advertising dollars to target.

Don’t settle for poorly targeted marketing campaigns. Call us today at +1 646.264.0144 and learn how MediaWhiz can help you target the students you want to reach.

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Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of blog posts focusing on best practices for lead generation in the online education industry.

Year after year universities struggle with enrollment rates. At the same time marketers are testing new advertising channels, shifting budgets, designing new creative assets and everything in between to reach that seemingly elusive enrollment goal.

But why is nothing changing? Why are enrollment rates dropping after all that investment in time, money and effort?

It’s simple, really: The first point of contact is your first impression and it can make or break the success of a prospect’s enrollment. The best advertising campaign in the world is frustratingly useless if the admissions process deters prospective students.

Many universities with large marketing budgets fail to focus on what’s happening right under their nose, and in most cases, right down the hallway. I have seen everything from a first point of contact being a direct-mail piece to callbacks that occur two weeks after an online information request is submitted.

A successful online marketing campaign for a college or university isn’t just measured by a conversion rate. Performance marketing in education requires three critical components to be successful:

1. High-quality traffic sources: You need to have traffic (students) who are interested in learning more about a particular school.
2. Optimized creative: A high-quality landing page, great email design and banner ads that really catch the eye of prospective students.
3. Structured workflow: A cohesive admissions process that is ready to work a lead.

You can leave the first two requirements to the experts at MediaWhiz. We know what converts well in terms of website and landing-page design and we know what media mix will work best for you based on your program offerings, location and unique application requirements.

The third component is where you and your admission team come in. The admissions process needs to be prepared for these new prospects, armed with answers to their questions and the ability to guide them in the right direction based on their needs.

Below are a few best practices to follow to ensure your admissions team effectively and efficiently closes the loop from the time an information request is made to the ultimate goal of enrollment.

1. Your first point of contact should be a phone call. Anything less puts you light years behind your competitors who are using this tactic.
2. Call the prospect within 24 hours. Some schools call back within the hour, but manage these times within your team’s bandwidth.
3. Make sure your team has some sales background. At the end of the day you need your team to sell your school and help finalize the decision process for the potential student.
4. Make sure your Admission Representative:

• Asks open-ended questions
• Probes to identify buying motives
• Acknowledges prospects needs and concerns
• Links program details to buying motives
• Uncovers objections
• Addresses objections with solutions
• Creates a sense of urgency
• Gains commitment

5. Have a strong call closing. Assure that the prospect begins the application process immediately or that they have everything they need to begin the application  before ending the call. I’ve seen too many universities direct their prospect to an email that often ends up in the spam folder. Needless to say, the application process ends there.

6. Follow up on the prospects that are not interested at this time. If a prospect doesn’t sign-up after two weeks, it doesn’t mean they won’t sign-up in the future. All it costs is the price of a stamp or an email distribution to stay in touch with the prospect for as long as you wish. Some take up to a year to decide to attend college.

The purpose of advertising is to sell. It’s crucial, therefore, to have a strong admissions team that can sell the school and its programs and get the prospect to begin the application process while on the phone. Unfortunately, education will not sell itself. The competition in the education market is only getting stronger. If you’re not managing your lead flow efficiently, you could be handing hundreds of thousands of enrollment dollars to your competitors.

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There’s no question that mobile marketing and advertising is the hottest area of digital marketing at the moment. Big consumer brands are seemingly tripping over themselves to launch the fanciest mobile app.

We’ve written a lot recently about the foibles of mobile marketing campaigns that don’t have a direct lead generation or sales component tied into them. Heck, it’s for this reason that we launched MediaWhiz Mobile, our new mobile performance marketing service. Advertisers and publishers consistently tell us there is a big need to help them more profitably engage, acquire and retain customers and generate mobile-specific traffic.

And yet a number of leading advertisers complain that all of their mobile spending doesn’t improve their most important marketing metric: sales.

Mobile certainly captures a lot of eyeballs but its ability to produce a consumer action — leads, sales, downloads, etc. — is often lacking.

That may be starting to change, though. A recent eMarketer report shined some light on how mobile branding and marketing campaigns are starting to translate to sales and brand lift. And, most crucially for advertising, mobile marketing spending is beginning to make a serious dent in consumers’ purchase intent.

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), in partnership with IHS Global Insight, studied U.S. mobile marketing expenditures and their impact on sales for the “Mobile Marketing Impact Study,” released in May. The study found that this year spending on mobile marketing — including mobile advertising, mobile customer-relationship management and mobile direct-response marketing on non-mobile media — will reach $10.46 billion. By 2015, spending on the channel will approach $20 billion.

All of that sounds great, but what it does it mean for actual sales and leads generated? Well, quite a lot actually.

InsightExpress found that in 2013, mobile and tablet advertising got strong results across brand health metrics, raising ad awareness, purchase intent and brand favorability. Tablets performed particularly well.

The below chart breaks down how mobile marketing performs across several critical brand metrics.

While there is still quite a ways to go before mobile marketing becomes a true customer-acquisition channel, the key metrics are moving in the right direction. For performance marketers, where consumer purchase intent is crucial, this is a welcomed sign.

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What’s driving the biggest gains in Facebook’s worldwide growth? It’s not the U.S. It’s emerging markets.

According to eMarketer, India, Brazil and Russia, along with the Middle East and Africa, are contributing the most new users each month to Facebook. According to new estimates from eMarketer, Facebook will pass 1 billion active users worldwide in 2013 as the company sees particularly strong growth in its Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and Latin American user bases, with each region set to rise by about 30% or more this year. By next year, Facebook will reach 1.26 billion global users.

These astonishing numbers — the sheer fact Facebook will soon have 1 billion active monthly users worldwide — combined with Facebook’s recent implementation of new CPA bidding for direct marketers, portend huge opportunities for performance and affiliate marketers. Just tapping into 1/10^th of this user base could hold significant potential online marketing value to most brands.

What is your brand doing to tap into Facebook’s expanding performance marketing opportunities?

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SMX London is right around the corner, and the conference agenda is packed with some great panels discussing everything from prioritizing marketing efforts to advanced tactical recommendations. Search and social media are two intertwined topics on which there will be a great deal of discussion.

I will be joining a panel alongside Kelvin Newman, director of strategy at SiteVisibility and Justin Sanger, CEO of SupportLocal, to discuss Facebook’s new graph search and its marketing implications. Although Graph Search is currently available to a small beta this new search function will eventually be available to billions of users around the world.

This panel discussion will focus on the implications of Graph Search on SEO, including the opportunities and challenges it will present advertisers and publishers.

As part of the discussion, I will present a history of Facebook advertising as it pertains to the evolution of search within Facebook. I’ll how Graph Search fits into the direction Facebook is going with its search and advertising options. Of course, knowing how and why an advertising medium has evolved can provide some very strong clues into what the future of marketing through Facebook may look like.

Together, the panel will dive deeper into Graph Search by providing an overview of how Graph Search functions, as well as offer some detail into Unicorn, the system that powers graph search.

We will also discuss best practices for leveraging Graph Search for marketing, the future of Graph Search and its current limitations. This will provide detail on some of the planned updates that are currently in the works. Finally, we will look at some ways that Graph Search could be improved to provide a better experience for users and more opportunity for brands.

I welcome all who will be in attendance to introduce yourself and ask questions. Feel free to let me know how you plan to utilize Graph Search for your marketing initiatives. See you there!

Are you going to SMX London? If so, we should meet! Email me at mpurtell@mediawhiz.com

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What are your plans for early June? An early beach vacation, perhaps? Maybe you’ll be stuck at work, patiently counting down the days until your two-week siesta in Madrid. Better yet, why not join MediaWhiz at the annual Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) Convention and Expo.

That’s where you’ll find us June 5-7 at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando, Fla. There, you can chat with Kristen, Kyle, Caroline and Shon from the MediaWhiz team at booth #708. We’ll be on-site throughout the convention to discuss our education-specific performance marketing services, including our new education portal, ChooseYourColleges.com.

About MediaWhiz’s Education Marketing Services

MediaWhiz has the lead-generation tools to make your student prospecting strategy a success!

We offer a comprehensive suite of performance marketing tools and services designed to help advertisers, colleges and universities engage, enroll and retain prospective students. Our education-specific Internet portal, ChooseYourColleges.com, offers a well-balanced lead-generation platform that helps students narrow their search by curriculum, geography and affordability.

By using a variety of online marketing channels MediaWhiz can accurately target, attract and help match prospective students to schools that meet their needs. We ensure a consistent flow of highly qualified candidates for our advertisers and abundant traffic for our publishers.

Must-Have Information

MediaWhiz will be exhibiting at the APSCU Convention and Expo, June 5-7, at Rosen Shingle Creek resort, Orlando, Fla.

Meet us at booth #708.

Contact Kristen Pulver for more information or to schedule a meeting with us at the show.

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Editor’s note: “Ask the Performance Marketer” is a regular series in which MediaWhiz’s performance marketing, SEO and digital media experts answer some of the most popular questions we from clients. 

To get more answers to your performance marketing questions, download our free eBook, “The CMO’s Guide to Performance Marketing.”

DOWNLOAD THE FREE EBOOK   

Mike Sisto, MediaWhiz’s director of performance marketing, has worked in performance marketing for 14 years. He’s seen it all, from the earliest days of the industry to the current evolution in which media, mobile, content, SEO and many other digital media channels are mixed together. Needless to say, he knows how to help his clients engage, acquire and retain customers more profitably.

Recently, we sat down with Mike to discuss some of the most common questions he gets from clients about accountability in affiliate marketing campaigns, email acquisition and optimizing lead quality.

How do you ensure accountability of affiliates for campaign and creative materials compliance?
We first establish accountability with each affiliate by employing a suite of external and internal tools to monitor advertisements. We hold publishers accountable for compliance violations. Once our high standards are made clear, the possibility of losing out on business due to compliance violations exerts pressure on affiliates to comply with advertiser guidelines. With adherence, publishers have the opportunity to cultivate a long-term business relationship with MediaWhiz as they continue to provide quality traffic via compliant marketing practices.

My company isn’t very familiar with email acquisition marketing. Where does MediaWhiz get its opt-in subscribers and what are the CAN-SPAM-compliance steps we need to adhere to?
Our WhiteDelivery™ list management division has arrangements with thousands of publishers to monetize their opt-in email data. These publishers range from finance, dating, news, travel, etc., and each list’s characteristics are segmented in a manner to match each audience to each advertiser in the hopes of acquiring the most customers from each mailing. The tens of millions of records we have access to generally are available on a pay-for-results model, making branded acquisition campaigns extremely scalable and immediately profitable for marketers.

CAN-SPAM-compliance for both WhiteDelivery™ and the advertiser’s brand are of critical importance. While federal law requires certain timelines for suppression files and unsubscribe language within email creatives, our standards offer higher degrees of respecting consumer privacy requests. This level of compliance reduces advertiser complaints, improves our reputation with the major email Internet service providers (ISPs), and maintains brand integrity — all of which produces the greatest amount of consumers with genuine interest in particular offers, and opts them out quickly when there isn’t an affinity.

How do you optimize the lead quality over time?
Web traffic is not a one-size-fits-all pool. Having thousands of disparate audience segments to market an offer to, MediaWhiz’s media planners take the first step of strategic campaign analysis. With more than a decade of past performance metrics to cull from, our team has the directional insights for each category of offer from the outset, thereby placing new campaigns into environments where profitable acquisitions have historically occurred. These placements, over time, could further be whittled down to the cream-of-the-crop with frequent collaboration with the advertiser on their lead-nurturing efforts per traffic source. Our employment of industry-standard URL, subID and transaction ID recordkeeping makes for a start good and ensures our clients receive high-quality leads.

Have a question about performance or affiliate marketing? Drop us a line in the comments below or tweet us at @MediaWhizInc. 

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MediaWhiz Senior Vice President of Media Services Peter Klein is a fount of information about performance marketing. Especially affiliate marketing. The guy loves affiliate marketing. The good kind, of course. Not the fraud-based affiliate marketing of the past. That kind of junk pains him. It

It’s with this perspective in mind that I recently sat down with Pete, who oversees MediaWhiz’s affiliate marketing business, to discuss a topic that he is particularly passionate about: launching performance marketing campaigns. damages the industry’s reputation, he says, and makes it harder for reputable affiliate networks, such as MonetizeIt, the MediaWhiz affiliate network, to earn the trust and business of today’s digitally savvy CMO.

Pete’s so passionate and informed about this topic, in fact, that he’s written an eBook on it called “The CMO’s Guide to Performance Marketing.” You can download a free copy here.

Download the Free eBook

Recently, I asked Peter to describe how marketers can launch their own performance marketing campaign. Here he outlines the five steps every marketer needs to take to launch a successful performance marketing campaign:

Step 1: Define Your Goal

Defining the goal is important because in most cases campaigns fail because there is no strategic goal in place. What are your goals? Are you interested in generating leads or interested in generating sales? It’s best to figure out what your desired outcome is and have a defined goal that you will be targeting for the campaign.

Step 2: Choose the Right Affiliate Network

I highly recommend conducting thorough due diligence when searching for an affiliate network, just like you would with any other business partner. Make sure you figure out how long they have been in business. What kinds of support team is in place? What verticals do they specialize in? Learn the affiliate network’s financial background and history.

All of those factors are important when figuring what affiliate network you want to work with. Once that is done, it’s best to start with one affiliate network because it will allow for a smaller budget at the start of the campaign. Get some success under your belt with a small affiliate campaign and then start branching out and expanding your campaign with multiple affiliate networks.

Step 3: Plan the Media Mix

The beauty of a media mix with performance marketing is that you have access to so many different media channels like social, mobile, display, search, email, incentivize, co-registration and so much more. The list goes on-and-on.

Make sure you know how much money you want to spend and what channels you want to test. After picking your channels invest between $5,000-$10,000 in each channel. Based on your results, either hone in and remove channels that didn’t work or expand into other channels.

Step 4: Monitor the Campaign

Once your performance marketing campaign has launched you must follow the key objectives and needs of your campaign. There are compliance issues and regulations that could arise. It’s important to ensure every aspect of your campaign – and the work of your performance marketing agency or affiliate network – is compliant and that your brand integrity is being maintained and accurately represented within the marketplace. It’s also important to ensure results are trending in the right direction, your budget is being filled in a proper manner and your key performance indicators are being hit.

Step 5: Optimize

Optimizing your performance marketing campaign comes down to looking at all your media spend and making sure that within each channel you are paying appropriately for the leads. Some quality sources might be fantastic and you might want to pay more for those leads in order to bring in a larger volume. Other quality sources might be poor but will still viable. In that case, you may want to pay less for those leads. Really focus on optimizing to hit your target return on investment.

To get a more detailed description about affiliate marketing and how to start your own affiliate marketing campaign download our free guide, “The CMO’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing.”  To keep up to date on all things MediaWhiz follow us on Twitter @MediaWhizInc, like us on Facebook  and follow us on LinkedIn

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