the social metrics

Are companies be lead scoring but not using the scoring for marketing targets or resource allocation? 

Ziff Davis published some research based on 100 B2B companies that shows there might be a disconnect between the marketing targets, the resources allocated to those targets and the lead scoring qualifications.

The data might take a few looks but it’s telling an interesting story when marketers are looking company size, geographical location or a prospect’s department. That story, in a nutshell, is that the lead-scoring level doesn’t match the resources allocated to that demographic or the marketing target.  

For example, in this chart, you see that 48% use a lead prospect’s department in lead scoring. However, only 26% consider the prospect’s department as an important marketing target.

This shows a potential disconnect between the lead scoring factor and the marketing target. That means that the lead scoring doesn’t necessarily have a direct relationship with the marketing target. 

But it really should. So these results don’t make much sense and might point to troubling trend. 

In addition, the resources aren’t matching the lead scoring efforts. Using the same example of the prospect’s department, you can see that “48% said they use a prospect’s department as a key lead scoring qualification, but just 34% focus their resources on this target type, and only 26% say it’s among their top 2 targets.”

If a qualification (like the prospect’s department or the company vertical) goes into lead scoring then you’d expect it to also have a part in the marketing efforts as well as resource allocation to capitalize on the leads that are more likely to lead to a sale. 

When it doesn’t, there’s a disconnect between the lead scoring models and the marketing efforts. More sophisticated marketing groups are highly linked to things like lead scoring, predictive analytics and analytics. Otherwise, marketing is less targeted and resources are potentially being wasted. 

For example, I recently completed a lead scoring exercise to help a sales division prioritize the incoming leads. They needed to prioritize because sales people found themselves struggling to maintain existing relationships while dealing with the increased marketing activities that were bringing in more leads. So, in any given week, their available time varied and they needed to know which leads to focus on first. The lead scoring is helping them prioritize the leads that are more likely to result in a sale and, therefore, be a better use of their time. Before the lead scoring, the sales teams were just subjectively guessing which leads would perform best. 

Surveys can be a great tool for feedback. Except when they look like this. I received this SalesForce survey this morning with this mountainous question ‘battery’. Unfortunately, this was just one of several question batteries — that also expanded if a ‘6’ or lower was selected for any of the answer options … potentially making for one very long, arduous survey. 

Surveys are a useful instrument - often complementing many of the analytics, new research methods and qualitative work. For example, we try to match our customer satisfaction survey data with social media analytics, sentiment analysis and our qualitative interviews with customers for a holistic look at customer feedback. 

However, the survey tool has been abused over the years and examples like this are the reason why some survey data is highly suspicious. Instead of trying to include question after question, rating scale after rating scale, survey designers should strive to make them as user-friendly as possible. 

That means much shorter lists. Easy to understand questions. Simple rating scales. And a user centric experience. 

Social Media and CRM’s and Surveys : Welcome to Converged Customer and Market Intelligence

A lot has happened this week in terms of social and metrics and surveys. Actually … ‘a lot’ has been going on for some time but a couple of key announcements this week really cemented this blog together. 

First, Webtrends and Hootsuite announced that they were teaming up. Good moves (like Jagger). Hootsuite has been expanding for a little while now, recently adding features like post scheduling, analytics (which weren’t great) and tools for teams to collaborate. With the Webtrends partnership, Hootsuite adds web analytics to its feature-set. 

Yesterday, Nielsen (market research behemoth) and Twitter announced that Twitter would now offer (really short) survey tools for brands. The announcement is hot on the heels of the Google survey offering that recently launched, giving brands a very cheap way to run a survey across the Google network and get some top-line data. 

And everyone’s favorite, privacy troubled social network, Facebook, recently partnered with Datalogix for advertising targeting and measurement data. 

Then there’s the recent Marketing Cloud announcement by SalesForce that combines the publishing tools and analytics behind BuddyMedia with the social media monitoring features and data from Radian6. All of that will eventually sync up with a businesses SalesForce deployment, bringing marketing data a lot closer to CRM (customer relationship management) and sales funnel data. 

These examples point to a huge convergence of social media, CRM’s, sales funnel data, market research and analytics. That is, a centralization of data and intelligence where marketers and managers can act on very targeted data. 

What that means is an unprecedented level of customer and market understanding. You’ve got sales revenue data, next to customer data, next to digital analytics data, next to marketing data. 

Social networks or social media dashboards collect a wealth of intelligence, sentiment and customer verbatim comments as we all become more social and more mobile. That makes them a great place to also collect survey data and link all of this information to CRM knowledge and sales results. And you can only imagine social networks becoming more of an intelligence source as tools like team collaboration, crowd-sourcing and location-services all become more socially-enabled. 

Ultimately, it’s a full-scale convergence of data and information about your customers and the market from different sources. It’s customer feedback. It’s suggestions and crowd-sourcing. It’s customer service. It’s market research data. And it’s the sales and revenue figures. 

All in one place. All converged bringing the benefit of cross-channel learning and opportunities for action.

Big Data is a glimpse at the start of this but it goes beyond just data. Tools like social media publishing and customer service interaction are also at the center of the convergence, taking advantage of the possibilities from using data in real-time. 

Now all we need to do is crack the nut on holistic marketing attribution.

A Trial In Asking Respondents About Marketing Influence

Marketing attribution is important. Like, really really important. Problem is - it can be really hard especially when you start considering all of the marketing that takes place outside of the digital spheres.

Questions like how much influence did my taxi cab advertisement have on a buying decision? Is the first touch more or less influential than the last marketing touch? And how do I get better at linking offline with online marketing?

All of these questions can be frustrating because it’s incredibly hard to track the multiple marketing influences a company has on any given individual. 

One idea we’re looking at implementing in the coming weeks is focused on talking to new customers and asking them what marketing touchpoints they remember in the lead up to them choosing us. 

We’re doing this for a couple of reasons. One is that we know when something received an email, or visited our website or engaged with us on social media. The digital place, while still complex, is much easier to track than offline activities. However we want to know what else comes to mind and maybe get some insight into what really influenced their buying decision. 

It’s only a pilot at this stage but it’s an experiment in matching the offline marketing to the online digital and social media analytics. We’ll also be running some statistical testing on top of all this but asking the new customers what they remember and what influenced them may give us some insight to add to our other data. 

It’s early on in the planning process but the more we can understand about marketing influence, the more we can design our reading materials and marketing activities to better suit our audience.

Fingers crossed!

Facebook To Roll Out Email- and Phone Number-Based Ad Targeting Next Week →

This is pretty huge for Facebook advertisers. When looking at advertising ROI data, there’s generally been a trend and acknowledgement through various studies that the more you can can target your ads, the better the ROI. The ads are basically more relevant to the audience and get a better return. 

When Facebook gives businesses the power to match a users profile with other data that the business owns — all of sudden there is a match up between social media and other marketing circles.

Think about Target. Their data collection tactics are pretty revolutionary - they collect data on consumers through their loyalty cards or any credit card used multiple times at the store or through data bought from a 3rd party. Correlating all this information means they can do things like predict when a person is pregnant (even before the parents knew) and send them ads about baby products.

Now, companies like Target will be able to do all that on a consumers Facebook profile too. 

Apparently, businesses won’t get access to additional data and Facebook won’t be able to see what the businesses upload. However, it does give businesses another option in social media advertising and encourages them to continue building their databases to connect social media with other marketing spheres. 

(click title to go to story)