Social Prospecting & Scoring: The Missing Link to Social Marketing ROI (Webinar Recap)

Social marketing, at its best, leverages data driven by dialog to achieve business objectives. For example, a running shoe company will monitor social media streams for relevant conversations, engage with those who are training for an upcoming race, and respond in an unobtrusive way when its appropriate. Then, by developing a relationship with these training marathon runners, the running shoe company can become the shoe store of choice when it comes time to buy new running shoes. However, the challenges are finding potential customers that may fall into this category and delivering the right message at the right time. How can a company use marketing intelligence driven from social to target the right customers? We recently hosted a webinar that introduced social scoring, a strategy that, when applied correctly, will help marketers identify and score prospects to generate sales through social.

Market intelligence is at the core of social scoring. We use market intelligence to learn about our about audience (both implicitly and explicitly stated information) which allows us to better target our prospects. The breadcrumbs that people leave on social platforms, including the actions they take and the content they create, provide deep insights that can contribute to sophisticated segmentation and targeting, created based on a prospect’s individual interactions.

How do you mine all this data to find tiny insights?

To comb through all social data would be a highly overwhelming exercise. To narrow the big data analysis down to a reasonable fashion, marketers can take three steps to find their ideal prospects, customers, influencers and others.

Marketers should use:

1. Social Prospecting – Targeted listening across the web, focused on specific relevant or intent-based keywords.

2. Social Profile Collection – Aggregation of user information on various social networks (like posts) engagement on brand-owned social destinations, and user behavior, like participation on social platforms to create a rich prospect profile. Marketers should be listening for people, not posts.

3. Social Scoring – Create custom scoring based on key levers to your business. Apply a dynamic methodology to it.

Doing Social Scoring Right

To do social scoring right, you’ll need to make sense of the volume of data you’ve collected. Social scoring helps you put it all together and leverage your data.

To do it right:

1. Define a path to purchase – Understand the steps your customers take on their journey to purchase. What leads people to buy your products?
2. Build a behavioral score model – Apply weights to specific behaviors that indicate intent to purchase. Make this your own – the custom scores can be broad or specific. Marketers can create multiple buckets to reflect different segments (likely buyers, brand advocates, influencers, prospective customers, etc).
3. Combine this with traditional marketing data – Add this social data to what you’re already tracking around web site visits to create a full, holistic picture of your customers and prospects.
4. Remember it’s a dynamic process – Companies often go through a trial-and-error process where they find they’ve made their rules too stringent or too lenient. Scores should be time-based and change as often as daily.

We know this may represent a new framework for approaching social marketing. Here are the top questions asked in the webinar:

How do you access this data on private networks or when email addresses aren’t readily available?

It’s based on publicly collected and available data. Often, consumers opt-in to data collection when participating in an online campaign or contest. All private and personal preferences and settings are honored.

What level of resources is required to do this well? Can you do it alone?

To make this a reality, a lot of things need to work in concert. It’d be tricky to set this up without sophisticated tools. A software tool will automate a lot of this process, manage the monitoring and data collection as well as apply the scoring rules.

How do Social Prospecting and Social Scoring apply to business-to-business (B2B) companies?

B2B companies can, just like B2C, integrate prospect and scoring data with CRMs and Marketing Automation systems. B2B companies can monitor for words and phrases that signify purchase intent. Then, they can engage with these prospects on social, bubble up sales leads and, when appropriate, share them with sales people so they can directly reach out.

How is social scoring related to existing marketing automation systems? Should you add social scoring if you aren’t using regular lead scoring? Or if you don’t think it’s right?

Social automation is built on the premise that you know who they are. You may track them until they take an action. In social, we are talking about interactions that are happening above the funnel. People are engaging in conversation relative to your brand. The consumers might not even know your brand exists. Social scoring and traditional scoring are different because you aren’t 100% you know who they are. The goal of social scoring is to create engagement.

How can you use social scoring to tackle gaining executive buy-in of social marketing?

Executives want to know that social is producing results in line with their leading business objectives, whether it’s more awareness, sales, or thought leadership. Marketers can now bring in quantifiable data, new leads and reduced sales cycle. With this data, you can elevate the conversation and apply a different framework.

Marketers can now use social scoring to close the loop on social ROI. For even more insights on the strategy behind social scoring or to learn how to get started, check out our webinar, Social Scoring: The Missing Link to Social Marketing ROI.