SMB Digital Marketing Conference: Twitter Drives Towards SMB Marketing

Last week at SMB Digital Marketing, Russ Laraway, Senior Director, SMB at Twitter added to the marketplace chorus espousing the notion that Content Marketing is king.

Many of Twitter’s moves in this area are well known, as content marketing is at the heart of the company’s monetization strategy, estimated $1 billion revenue, and the driving force towards its freshly announced (tweeted) S-1 filing to go public.

Content marketing so far has taken form in Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. These have mostly been used by brand advertisers, but how does Twitter reach the SMB long tail? Of its content marketing initiatives, a partnership with Mail Chimp starts to answer this.

This arrangement takes form in a “lead gen card”. This allows companies working in email marketing (and potentially other formats) to provide a call to action that automatically authenticates and populates users’ information when they’re signed in to Twitter (think Facebook Connect for lead gen).

“If you think about lead gen, there is friction from the marketing message to generating demand and the actual collection of the lead information,” he said. You need impressions, engagement, then a click, then good website, then ultimately users fill out a form. This is lots of friction and it’s going to be even worse in mobile.”

Lead gen cards will come SMB-friendly including the ability to export leads to a CSV file and also lots of coaching about ways to set it up and use it frictionlessly. Overall, this drives towards having more tangible offline actions that can be driven (and tracked) from Twitter activity.

“On Twitter, outcomes are important,” said Laraway. “It’s a cost per engagement model, such as Promoted Tweets or Promoted Account [where] you pay when someone follows you. For SMBs, we need more accountable formats: How do you connect Twitter outcomes with off-twitter outcomes. That’s the idea of where we need to head.”