Two Sides of a Coin: Social vs. Traditional Marketing Automation: Part 3

In the first post of this series, I had started the hike by summarizing the key differences between Social and Traditional Marketing Automation. As the title of this series suggests, we believe that Social (SMA) and Traditional Marketing Automation (TMA) are complementary processes and while we see significant advantages in SMA, it is too premature for any company to completely abandon TMA in favor of SMA.

In my last post, I had discussed the details of how leads are identified through the two processes.

This post will go a few miles further down the trail and this time, we will look at the the differences in the way by which lead scoring is carried out between TMA and SMA.

At the risk of boring the more sophisticated reader, “Lead Scoring” is mostly used to sort leads by their relevance to your business. Lead scores are calculated based on business rules.

Typically, the scoring rules are defined by you (or your consultants) and are broadly broken into two sections:

1. Demographic Scoring: This relates to scoring based on information about the lead’s Job Title, Company, Geography etc. In most cases, this information is gathered when the lead is first captured (at an event, a form fill or when a list is acquired) but is rarely enriched beyond that. You can define rules so that leads that possess the desirable Demographic attributes are assigned a higher score than those who don’t.

SMA too utilizes Demographic attributes but with one difference. Due to the sheer volume and diversity of information (e.g. Current Role, Past Roles, Education, Interests etc) that a typical lead publicly shares about him/herself on channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter etc, there are many more demographic attributes that you can utilize to define scoring rules.

Of course, the number and types of attributes can be overwhelming for the average professional. Even if you are way above average, how do you decide which of the 20 pieces of information that the lead shares are more important than the rest? That is where Predictive Analytics can play a role.

Based on historical data (of won and lost deals as well as information about the historical leads and opportunities as they made their way through the sales funnel), it is theoretically possible for Predictive Analytical models to provide you a recommendation as to which attributes are most important for your company’s ability to successfully close deals. I will cover more about Predictive Analytics and lead scoring in a future post.

2. Behavioral Scoring: This type of scoring is based on ‘actions’ that are taken by a lead. Because TMA is limited in scope to the company’s own properties (emails that it sends out to the leads, its own website and landing pages etc.), behavioral scoring is of limited use.

For example, you may find that a lead has spent a certain amount of time on your website or has filled up a form and therefore gets a certain score. However, there is no way for you to use TMA to find out what the lead did with your competitor’s emails or on their website.

Again, SMA has significant advantages over TMA because it enables you to carry out Behavioral scoring based on the content posted as well as the actions taken by a lead on social channels.

Remember, the lead is not on your company’s website when tweeting or posting and hence there is a lot more unbiased and factually correct information that you can get by monitoring those tweets or posts. You can also assign scores based on not just the content within the interactions but also the sentiment associated with it. This allows you to get a more complete idea of the Behavioral aspects of a lead.

The Total Lead Score is nothing but the Demographic and Behavioral scores added together. Based on what I have described above, I hope it makes sense for you to look at combining the Social Lead Score (from SMA) with the Lead Score (from TMA) in order to get a much more comprehensive view of which leads are more relevant and which ones require more immediate action.

I recently had a prospect suggest that it was ‘unfair’ to penalize leads who are not present on social channels – the assumption being that such leads would have 0 Social Lead Scores and so they would therefore be ‘unfairly penalized’. Do you agree with this line of thinking? I would love to hear your thoughts.