Get your FREE 30-day trial.
Please complete all fields.
If you’re like 73% of B2B content marketers, you’re producing even more content than you did a year ago. It’s easy to see why. Compared with outbound marketing tactics such as display advertising, inbound marketing generally produces significantly higher quality leads at far lower cost. According to Hubspot, organic inbound leads have a close rate almost 14 times higher than outbound marketing leads.
And what ultimately drives organic leads these days? Content, of course.
But before we go patting ourselves on the back, let’s do something about the massive disconnect between content marketing and our sales teams. Most of us do a very poor job of helping our sales teams understand how to respond to leads generated directly from content sources.
If you’ve ever had the experience of downloading an educational eBook, only to be called immediately by a sales rep, you know exactly what I’m talking about (“Can you at least nurture me for a little while? I never jump into a sales conversation after the first download.”) At the other end of the spectrum are companies that aren’t doing anything at all with the leads they get from content.
It’s easy to see why both scenarios happen. All those e-books, videos, blog posts and webinars may have unique value in your content plan, but they don’t have equal value in the sales cycle. And if sales reps can’t easily tell the difference, they can’t be expected to suss out which leads are likely to turn into revenue.
One way to solve both problems is to implement effective lead scoring on content engagement. Lead scoring—typically handled through a marketing automation platform such as Pardot, Eloqua or Marketo—helps sales find and prioritize hot leads in your database. This enables sales teams to spot higher-quality leads earlier in the sales cycle. In short, lead scoring facilitates lead prioritization, which helps sales reps prioritize which leads get the most attention. That is what really drives sales.
If you work at a progressive tech company, you could be forgiven for thinking that everyone is already doing this. Despite all we read about the booming marketing automation category, just 20% of high-end companies have adopted marketing automation platforms, and many surveys indicate that only around half of these companies have any sort of lead scoring in place. Very little of what scoring does exist is geared toward differentiating content value.
So if content marketing is doing for us what we think it is, then we’d be insane not to extend our scoring to it. Here are three distinct approaches, depending on which how much data you already have in place.
If you’re already tracking leads throughout their entire life cycle, then count yourself as lucky— the data you need to implement effective content scoring is hiding in plain sight.
Focus on the content types—and if possible, topics and themes—that have driven opportunities and sales in the last year. Then look at revenue for all those lead sources. If you’re one of the lucky few marketers that have good insight into “campaign influence” metrics, you can also look at which types of content have influenced sales, even if they haven’t been directly responsible for them.
The results will dictate your scoring. For example, imagine that you have a scoring range of 1-10 for content engagement. If leads from webinar engagement have influenced the most sales, then award leads registering for webinars a 10. If blog subscriptions have driven 1/10th of the sales that webinars have, then award just 1 point for blog subscriptions, and so forth.
So you’ve got some data, but not enough of it—you can still devise a reasonably accurate scoring scheme. In this scenario, start by simply determining which content types are most popular. You can likely use your social metrics from sites like Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as analytics and open/file download rates from your email marketing platform.
Next, go talk to your sales team—or, if the team is very large, survey them. If they have insight into lead sources, but no actual conversion data, ask them which types of content seem to drive more serious buyers. Also ask which types of content they use to nurture prospects, and which kinds of content your prospects might have mentioned along the way.
This anecdotal information, together with the hard metrics you do have, can help you determine how to score content engagement by type and value.
Scenario 3—You’re Just Getting Started
So you’re just launching your content marketing operations, and you don’t have any historical or anecdotal data? No problem. You can still start scoring based on traditional assumptions about content types correspond to your product buying cycle.
First, assign all non-gated content just one point—or whatever the lowest score on your scale is. Second, categorize your gated content into buying stages. For many B2B companies, this can at least start with three simple buckets:
As a basic rule, content that is not product-specific (“Awareness”) will generate the most leads, but is not as indicative of serious buyers as content that is more solution-specific. On a scale of 1-10, you might assign this content a “2.” In general, the more product-specific your content is, the higher the score should be.
Whichever method you choose, revisit these scores periodically and see whether the scores you’ve assigned match the sales outcomes you’re seeing. Then adjust your lead scoring formulas accordingly. What you’ll find will no doubt prompt a valuable assessment of your overall content strategy as well.
William Tyree is the CMO of RingDNA. The company improves enterprise sales and marketing performance by transforming every phone call into a revenue optimization opportunity. Learn more at RingDNA.com and @ringdna.
To learn about 10 Dreamforce announcements that will shape sales in 2015, visit salesforce.com, or download the free e-book.
