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Effective lead scoring means sales teams receive higher-quality leads and can focus on those with the greatest potential to convert. Implementing a great lead scoring model can put you on the fast track for increased productivity from your sales team, higher conversion rates, and a larger bottom line — all because you’ll start prioritizing in a strategic way.
What’s the key to an effective lead scoring model? Scoring the right attributes and measuring effectiveness constantly. But I bet you didn’t know that your video marketing could be a key contributor to successful lead scoring, too. I’ll explain it all here. Let’s dive in.
You’re probably familiar with the two main components of lead scoring: explicit attributes, or target market resemblance, and implicit attributes, or engagement with company assets. At the heart of it, when looking at implicit attributes, you’re determining how often a lead has interacted with your brand’s assets, and making a judgement call on how interested they are as a result. The more content they’ve consumed on your site, the more interested you can assume they are.
For the purposes of this post, we’ll look mainly at implicit criteria, of which there are many! The attributes you choose for evaluating your lead’s interest (and thereby priority for the sales team) will depend on your company, the assets and content you produce, the buyer persona (explicit criteria) you’re scoring, and — probably most importantly — what’s been an indication of good quality, converting leads historically (yep, you might have to dig in to the numbers here). Below are a few commonly used attributes:
email click-throughs
subscriptions
visits to website
visits to particular pages on your site
keywords typed into a search field (yours or an external one)
type and number of white paper or ebook downloads
webinar attendance
video views: number, completion, frequency, and type
many, many, more!
The attributes you choose will then be assigned a weighted score based on that attribute’s ‘importance’ in contributing to a leads’ quality — a.k.a. likelihood to convert.
Sure, there’s a never-ending list of implicit lead scoring attributes to consider adding to your model, but not many of them provide as much depth as video. You might be able to see if a lead has opened an email or downloaded an ebook, but can you tell how much of that content they’ve consumed...if any? With a video marketing platform integrated with your MAP or CRM, you can see not only which leads have viewed a particular video, but also how much of the video they’ve watched. In short, you get a second-by-second look at their interest in you and your content.
Just think about it this way: should a lead who watched your entire 2-minute product video receive the same score as one who bounced after 10 seconds? Probably not. And the same goes for any other partially-consumed piece of content. However, as it stands today, video is the only content medium that allows you this kind of in-depth look at your leads’ behavior, allowing you to infer their level of interest in your content, your company, and your product/service.
In practice, there are really three main ways you can use a lead’s interaction with video to determine their lead quality: (1) topic-based video lead scoring; (2) percentage-based video lead scoring; and (3) volume-based lead scoring.
Since I know you’re mapping your videos to the buying journey (right?), determining which videos your leads have watched will help you to understand what stage they’re at in their buying cycle. Let’s say they’ve only watched one top-of-funnel animated explainer video, for example. While their score should still see an increase, they should not be scored as high as someone who’s viewing your customer testimonial and webinar videos - content that likely indicates they’re closer to converting. Take a look at the example below to see this in action.
In this example, Lead 2 would take precedence over Lead 1 today given their higher score and implied greater likelihood of conversion.
As I explained above, a lead that views an entire video is likely of higher quality — and should therefore receive a greater score — than someone who didn’t make it all the way through. You can account for video completion in your lead scoring like this:
To continue our example from (1), Lead 1 and 2 might be scored like this:
This method of scoring allows you to see how interested a lead is in your company or product overall. Someone who’s spent a ton of time consuming your content is a better quality lead and likely closer to purchase. Here’s an example of volume-based lead scoring:
Lead 1 and 2 may look like this:
Remember that the quality of your leads will only be as good as your lead scoring model. Even if you have a phenomenal lead scoring plan and implement it without a problem, if it’s not scoring the right or ‘best’ attributes, it’s not going to be making the productivity, conversion, and monetary impact you were hoping for.
Periodically take a step back and evaluate the success of your lead scoring model. Look at Sales Accepted Leads, the number of opportunities accepted by your sales team as worthy of pursuit, or monitor metrics like the MQL-to-closed-deal conversion rate, lead velocity, and of course, the bottom line.
But if you take away anything, remember that your video assets and viewership data can have a huge impact on how you determine which leads you should prioritize.
Michael Litt is the CEO and co-founder of Vidyard, a video marketing platform helping marketers measure the impact of their video content. Thought leader, surfer, and serial entrepreneur, Michael is passionate about content marketing and changing the way we engage and purchase with video. Chat with Michael on Twitter @MichaelLitt or LindIken to learn more.
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