Lead Scoring

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Developing a lead scoring model

Lead scoring tells you the value of the leads you are generating based on the criteria you’ve decided with your sales team. These criteria are what I’ve referred to earlier as the contact property data. The information you are trying to gather about your contacts, about your website traffic visitors, about your leads that qualify them to be a potential customer.

Example

Here’s an example of a lead scoring model you could follow. You have two axis: fits ideal criteria, and engagement level. Remember when we identified unengaged and ineligible people on your email list? There is no use in having all of the ideal criteria and yet none of the engagement. Equally, there’s no point in having all of the engagement and yet none of the criteria. It just doesn’t work. What you want is a top right hand square, someone who completely fills your ideal criteria and who is highly engaged.

That’s not to mean that someone who is less engaged but fits the criteria or has missing some of the criteria, but is very engaged, cannot also have high potential. But you need to prioritize what you’re asking your sales team to focus on, so lead scoring model will help them to do that.

Buyer personas

We’ll look at our three personas again, Chris, Maria, and Frank. Remember, the example we were looking at is an airport hotel and how would they be marketing? We’re going to give Chris a score of six because he didn’t really fit what they were looking for. We’re giving Maria a high score because she ticked almost all of the boxes, maybe lacked a little bit engagement. And Frank is given a score of 12 because, whilst he ticked some of the boxes in engagement and ideal criteria, he isn’t quite there in terms of priorities because it’s not sure whether he will or will not make a sale.

Attribution reports

You can use attribution reports to understand where your buyer persona was touching your website before they led up to a sale. This can mean a list of the pages they visited or blog posts they read, or other pages that you have available on your website before they converted. You need to identify what the conversion is before you visit the support. Is this conversion “became a lead”? Is the conversion “became a marketing qualified lead”? Or is the conversion “became a customer”?

Once you understand the goal of the report, then you can create that report, pull in the data from all your pages and see where are your personas going and what they are doing in order to make a sale.

Social media

You can use social media to improve your lead scoring. API data is available from services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites which is publicly available information that you can scrape in order to inform yourself more about your persona. Social media is extremely useful for this because people voluntarily provide information about themselves. It may not all necessarily be true, but will give you good indications due to sample size of what you might be looking for.

Consider how you will extract data from social media and other APIs to match with the data you’ve already got from your leads directly and see if it helps you improve your lead score.

Sharing the buyer persona

You need to share your buyer persona with your sales team. This means sharing the details of who they are, what they do, and where they go on the internet that create a high scored lead. You can use a template and share it with your sales team. Populate it with all the information you know so far, so that they always have the contacts current, who they’re exactly selling to.

Contextual marketing

Contextual marketing is extremely powerful and adding that context to sales team conversations means a generic conversation suddenly turns into a specific conversation around a person with challenges and problems that you can solve for them. Remember that when you’re updating or adjusting the buyer persona to consider it the sales team in these conversations. Equally, they might be the ones that come to you and say. “We need to update this buyer persona, the people who are buying from us have changed.”

You need to keep iterating it every six months to one year in order to make sure the target is an exact as it can possibly be. If you keep marketing to something that’s far too generic and broad, you will not see the results as you will get from targeting a particular person. It’s important to stay agile, use multiple data points, and frequently refresh them.