For any business, establishing an inbound marketing strategy essentially results from the need to attract as many leads as possible into the sales funnel. Mainly through the distribution of relevant and, above all, attractive content. Once this objective is achieved, it is all the more necessary to distinguish between leads already ready to purchase your product and those still in the solution research and comparison phase . Hence the favorable intervention of lead scoring.
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Lead scoring is generally defined as a marketing process, allowing each lead of a company to be given a quantitative value: that is to say a point or at least a score. In other words, a lead scoring system, but how is that possible? This is done on the basis of different attribution criteria, such as the prospect's professional data and especially their online behavior towards the company. It's a whole system helping marketers and salespeople in the management of prospects , particularly being able to respond to their needs in a relevant way in order to turn them into qualified leads.
Several lead scoring marketing strategies are implemented by online sales companies, but the most famous is this one, which is based on information from already existing customers to establish this lead scoring system. The principle would be to identify the common characteristics of these then isolate them from new leads. This will allow you to clearly determine which attribute to prioritize in your inbound marketing conversion process.
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As previously stated, lead scoring is carried out on the basis of certain criteria specific to the main “buyer persona” profile established by the company. These criteria essentially revolve around the information you collect from leads. We include in particular:
For a score between 0 and 100, each of these criteria must guarantee an irrefutable probability of purchase on the part of the prospect.
When we talk about socio-demographic data, we mainly refer to a person's age, gender, region, profession, marital status. In our case, this is information about your leads that you collect through the various forms on your website. If this information allows you to determine your target and personalize your marketing campaign for sales, it should above all serve you in the segmentation of your CRM database.
Assuming that each of your products is geared towards a specific demographic segment, it is all the more important that you rule out any prospect who does not meet this target profile with a negative score. If, on the other hand, the information collected on a lead matches, rate it with positive points. You can even award extra points to prospects who fill out optional form fields.
If your sales activity is categorized as b2b marketing, your target is undoubtedly a company like yours. Firmographic data can then be considered as the equivalent of socio-demographic data in b2c marketing. In order to qualify your target as a potential customer or not and to help you in your lead scoring process, you can include questions in your forms to collect as much information as possible. Whether in terms of size, type of activity, turnover, location... Enough to allow you to award points to leads who correspond to your target and exclude those who do not. not.
It has been proven more than once that the attitude of a prospect on a site is very significant in terms of his purchasing decision. It would therefore be ideal to study the behavioral history of former prospects who became customers, that is to say how they behaved when faced with the different content on the site. For example, the offers that may have interested them, those they downloaded, the type and number of pages they visited or even the type of form filled out. All of this could help you in lead scoring. It would indeed be wise to award more points to prospects visiting high-yield pages and forms (price page, demo request, etc.). The same as for leads who visit your website 15 times while others 5 times in the same time.
However, for a lead who ceases all activity on your platform for a certain period of time, you should possibly consider deducting points from them. This behavior could be defined as a sudden disinterest of the prospect in your company.
Just like your content, email is a crucial point of your inbound marketing strategy; the interest your leads have in it is significant. However, simply subscribing to your newsletter is also not conclusive on the part of the lead in terms of purchase. It is above all through the email opening and click rate that one’s intentions become clear. Knowing who opens and reads the contents of each email and then clicks on the offer links should make it easier for all of your salespeople to choose qualified leads. They certainly won't have to waste time on false lead nurturing leads. This commitment is therefore a valid pretext for assigning prospects a positive rating score.
If a lead has the habit of liking and then sharing your tweet and Facebook post content, it means that they are really interested in your brand on social networks. This is obviously a huge commitment to your business. Quantitative metrics (number of positive reactions from the prospect, shares, comments, etc.) above all represent good indicators for lead scoring. The score would be relatively higher for a qualified prospect who also has a strong influence on social networks. He could even later become an ambassador for your brand.
To top it all off, watch out for leads classified as “spam”. Makes you wonder how this is possible. There are indeed these prospects to whom you will systematically have to give a negative score. Those whose responses to forms do not fit with the established convention are the typical example. Prospect's first and last names without capital letters, the same for company names or other fields containing a succession of at least 4 letters according to the AZERTY provision.
The newly informed email addresses are also to be compared to those of your customers. For example, if your Inbound strategy targets a company as a prospect, it is obvious to expect a professional address like ex ***** @ ******** Se.com . When you are faced with Gmail and Yahoo addresses, it will suffice to reduce the number of score points compared to that of others.
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Given that you collect a fairly large amount of information, the question remains how to assess its relevance to your inbound marketing. The best thing would probably be to refer to your sales team, to discuss with your customers or to rely on analytics reports. For sure, the solution would ideally be to combine these three possibilities. You will thus have all the necessary data to better capture the philosophy of each lead, from the content to the offers that they consider attractive.
Depending on your inbound marketing tactic, your sales agents, namely your sales team, are those who are directly in contact with prospects, whether they become customers or not. They are therefore the best able to see the results of your inbound marketing. Thus, they can precisely inform you about the type of marketing content to put in place to facilitate your lead scoring.
In addition to the type of content or the type of offers likely to interest prospects, salespeople are able to inform you about the number of points to attribute to each type of content.
Despite the fact that your sales agents know enough about the type of content favorable for converting prospects, customer opinions would also be welcome. Since they have experienced this during the sales cycle, their point of view is all the more useful. You may see a difference with the information from your sales agents.
To support the information obtained so far from customers and salespeople, you can rely on attribution reports from marketing analytics. These, thanks to marketing tools like Hubspot CRM software, allow you to concretely know which actions generate the most conversions during the sales cycle. It should be remembered that the content distributed, even relevant, is not the only element to take into account in your lead scoring process. These reports can provide you with more than just the type of relevant content, such as the most viewed pages.
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There are several marketing methods dedicated to calculating prospect scores, but if you are just getting started with lead scoring, you might as well rely on the simplest one. This is essentially carried out step by step depending on other elements, we invite you to proceed as follows.
Having its place above all in the reference in lead marketing, this rate represents the quotient of the total number of new customers by the total number of prospects generated.
As already mentioned, you will need to rate your prospects in relation to the attributes that you consider subjective to the expected commercial result. It is therefore appropriate for you to choose these elements based on the information you may have received from your salespeople, your customers or the results of marketing analytics.
Especially since it influences your inbound marketing actions, it is absolutely essential to calculate the individual conclusion rate of the attributes selected and identified in each lead. Start by evaluating the number of prospects who become qualified leads and then customers based on the elements highlighted.
The goal is to find the attributes whose individual conclusion rate is significantly higher than your overall conclusion rate and then award them points. Certainly, the values will be chosen on the fly, but make sure that there is some consistency. Let's take the example of an attribute worth a conclusion rate of 40% compared to your overall rate of 15%, you can rate each lead demonstrating this attribute by 25 points.
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Apart from the basic marketing method of lead scoring previously highlighted, there are others which are based on very in-depth exploitation of data. Among others, logistic regression and predictive scoring.
Since marketing data mining methods are more delicate, these require you to get to grips with Excel workbooks. Logistic regression indeed involves the creation of a formula (solution) aimed at precisely determining the possibility of any conversion of lead into customer. Taking into account all possible attribution elements, this method has the advantage of presenting real conclusion rates in a much more intuitive manner.
The advantages of implementing a lead scoring system can no longer be refuted, even if there is still a slight problem. Until now, we have built a lead scoring system using a manual approach. Which in the long run becomes very burdensome for marketing management because it remains a one-off and regular task.
The simple solution would then be to entrust this task to a well-advanced CRM software, such as Hubspot. It is in this logic that forecast lead scoring comes into play. A completely automated system that saves you time and efficiency. Hubspot is therefore CRM software that performs all lead scoring management functions on its own. Allowing your sales agents to focus only on leads likely to become customers.
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