To start off, I like to remind you of what one of my directors always says and it is very true: let's do the basics first. The other actions are important, but incremental. This means that I ask you, the reader, the following questions: are you using your content marketing strategy correctly?
How are your conversions? Are the leads generated australia contact data the target? Is the sales team taking advantage of the leads generated by marketing? If you are not sure about these answers, wait a minute, this is not the time to talk about Lead Scoring. Believe me!
We have already discussed some of the first steps that can be taken to start talking about generating leads and results through your website and blog , and we have also discussed the Inbound project itself.
After all, you cannot hand over the responsibility of the project to a digital planning agency and wait for the miracle of multiplying leads, unless the company and the agency are aligned with some points that we highlighted in another post: "5 points that prepare your company for Inbound Marketing" .
Understanding your strategy and your results, now is the time to talk about...
What is Lead Scoring about?
Lead Scoring is a marketing and sales technique that allows you to automatically classify leads generated by the Inbound strategy according to pre-defined qualification criteria.
It is an excellent indicator of maturity, because through the experiences and profile of these leads we can identify whether or not they are ready for a commercial approach and what type of content should be used in the conversation with each lead.
Be careful, Outbound sales practices generally work less well with leads generated by Inbound. Companies can score leads using a score, always based on the intersection of information between experience and profile.
While some companies outside Brazil call this graph "Implicit Scoring x BANT” (budget, authority, need, and time) , we work with the formula "Experience x Profile", and of course, after some analysis with the client, we understand which of the axes should have more or less weight or priority in the score. Remember that knowing how the personalization and automation of qualified lead lists works is very important for the SELLING stage of the funnel.
23-07-score_How_Lead_Scoring_works_in_your_Inbound_Marketing_Strategy
Don't be scared, especially if you're in the marketing field! It's much easier than it seems. If you already have a well-defined strategy and consistent results, as we mentioned at the beginning of the text, it's much easier to understand how to balance the numbers according to the persona and the leads that come to you.
The graph above shows how the two weights of Experience and Profile influence the score and how it reflects on the "temperature of the lead".
Note that there's no point in the contact having a complete experience on your pages, clicking on different posts, browsing the product page and filling out some forms if they don't have the right profile.
And the opposite also happens: the contact is a director or president, a decision-maker and filled out the data correctly, acquiring a good score, but their level of interest in your blog and website is low. In this case, it's time to realign strategies and think about a well-crafted content campaign to capture their interest... but that's a conversation for another post.
It is worth mentioning that today there are technologies that automate the entire Lead Scoring process. Software such as Hubspot and RD Station make the marketing team's life much easier, generating economies of scale and allowing a complete analysis of everything that works. Just remember that software without strategy, analysis and intelligence does not generate results.