Lead Scoring or qualification of leads: What is and how it can help your company?

Techniques for capturing leads that you've used in your inbound marketing strategy has borne fruit and have a database with a lot of leads that were generated through different campaigns. All those potential customers interested in your products or services, but do you know if they are ready to buy?
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It is obvious that not all your new contacts are the same and that some will be very convinced to move to the next level, but others need a little push to make this decision. Want to know the best way to launch campaigns effective on your contacts? Today we will talk to you about lead scoring, a technique widely used in inbound marketing and pay special attention to that for their good results.

The importance of segmentation

If you're going to launch marketing campaigns are most effective as possible you should try to give in the bull's eye. Not all of your potential customers are interested by all your products, so you have to be very clear the purpose of each of them.
Segmentation lets you save effort and resources and to get much more effective to each contact, throwing a message that truly interest them. Sounds good, no? This process is essential to achieve the best results, so you must not leave it aside.
There are many different ways of segmenting your database, but if you have a large list of contacts it is important to save effort and resources. For this reason you should assess the implementation of a system of lead scoring, a process of segmentation and automatic qualification that will help you to qualify leads that you've managed to optimize marketing campaigns that you cast on them.
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Lead scoring

We start at the beginning. Your company has decided to put in place a strategy for attracting leads which has proved very successful, and now have a large database of potential customers who are interested in your products or services. Would know to say which are prepared to purchase? and what are of greater quality?
Qualify your leads is critical to understand at what point of sale is each one, because not all are prepared to take the step of the purchase.
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Imagine the situation: some of your contacts are interested in a particular product, but you may need a push to decide. Others, however, are much more behind in the process, and need to know all the benefits of what you offer them to be convinced. In addition, not all captured leads have the same interest for your business or correspond with the buyer person that you've defined.
If you have a very large database, this process cannot be manually, as this will cause you not only lose much time, but that the result may not be suitable. That is why we use specific programs for qualification of leads on inbound marketing to get the best result in the shortest possible time and start creating effective lead nurturing strategies
To complete this information, we have created a video in which you can understand the entire process of lead scoring so that you can apply to your specific case:

Why qualify leads?

With a database that is not ranked, your marketing efforts will be very scattered and could not achieve the desired effect.
You must have a good strategy of segmentation of your contacts, which you will have the opportunity to facilitate the work of both the marketing department and the sales departmentto be able to launch more effective messages. Thus, you can think in concrete actions for a particular group, facilitate the work of other departments and cultivate every potential customer to get the sale.
How lead scoring
This technique allows us to move a database of contacts without order or classify an array that will allow us to attribute a number of features to each lead. This matrix has two different variables: the socio-demographic and the degree of contact with the brand, also known as engagement commitment.
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Image source: Demandgen

Socio-demographic variable

When it comes to set in motion a process of not only leads collection we think in concrete actions, but also in which data of potential clients want to collect. This process is going to be very important when segmenting the contacts, so a good strategy of inbound marketing should think throughout the process, from acquisition of stakeholders to creating strategies.
Take a look back to your database. I sure there are socio-demographic differences between all of your contacts, which are defined by their responses to the form of recruitment. Are contacts going to value more? For those who share the greatest number of features with our buyer person.
Lead scoring will allow us to ascribe automatically a certain score which will be higher according to a greater similarity of each contact with our ideal customer. This score will depend on the value that each company attributed to each feature and will allow us to sort leads by the factors that we consider most important.

Variable engagement

How is your commitment to these contacts generated with your brand? Very simple: this variable measures the number of times that the captured lead interacts with the company.Interactions that are measured in this variable depend on inbound every company's marketing strategy, and include actions such as visits to the website, clicks on specific links, open rate of emails, interaction in social networks or visits to important sections of the company page.
This is a marketing automation software that allows us to post these data and be able to classify contacts in the matrix depending on the actions that it has gone. Some examples of this type of software are Hubspot, Marketo or Eloqua, which allow us to provide a comprehensive approach to all inbound marketing strategy.
It must be borne in mind that while the socio-demographic variable does not change or vary only in specific cases, the variable of engagement will change depending on the relationship of each contact with our brand at different times and after applying different techniques.

Examples of lead scoring

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Imagine, for example, that one of the analyzed contacts person is approaching our buyer, i.e. their socio-demographic characteristics to match that we have identified in our target audience. It is a lead to which we must pay close attention, but before we know its level of engagement with us. Unfortunately, this prospect has not interacted with us as much as we wanted, so we need to create concrete strategies for the contacts that are in this situation.
As you can imagine, resources that we used in the cultivation of each lead is reduced much more engagement need to identify a particular contact. Thus, our goal is to get the database go performing different actions to improve its engagement with our brand and to gradually bring them to our commercial offer.
The qualification of our leads allows us to identify customer segments based on the qualities that we believe important to purchase, and we will go to each group in a specific way.

What happens then?

When we have information about our contacts rated, we can begin to apply much more orderly marketing techniques and enabling us to give the target. It is the time to start cultivating each of these leads so that they arrive as soon as possible to the time of purchase. Now that we know in what situation is each of those contacts will be able to create specific campaigns for lead nurturing that each lead to go interacting with us until you reach the ultimate goal
Lead scoring not only allows you to make an initial situation of our database diagnosis, but facilitates the tracking of the status of each lead and see the effectiveness of farming techniques that we are using. With each strategy we put in place we will see how our data base is changing shape, increasing the number of clients who come to buy.
Published for educational purposes