Once you set up your advertising campaigns, it is a fundamental step of a successful campaign to triage any leads that come through. Certain campaigns will generate a lot of noise and responses, and to get a good return on your investment. You need to organize these leads, and get the best results for your campaign.
HubSpot Lead Scoring is one of the tools that you can use to sort these leads and focus your time, manpower and resources on ones that will be most beneficial to your business.
What is Lead Scoring?
The HubSpot Lead Scoring tool is a necessary component of any campaign – marketing or advertising. The tool attaches to your advertising campaigns and uses a variety of metrics (provided by you) to determine the strength of conversions, prior to assigning them to a member of your sales team. The tool allows you to be rigorous with your scoring – by adding up to 100 properties that will add or subtract from a contact’s overall score.
How Lead Scoring Works
On a high level, there are a variety of aspects that will affect how relevant a campaign lead is to your product offering. These will range from basic things such as whether your companies match each other, to more in-depth metrics such as the level of engagement the contact has had with your business.
However, within these factors, you will have to dive deeper than just the surface level to get a better understanding of how engaged the leads are with your brand.
Company Demographic
The first identifying factor to save you time during lead scoring is simply whether the company that has contacted you is within your demographic. For example: if your target demographic is within the hospitality industry, the forms on your website or landing page should have question fields that will allow you to track this in your lead scoring.
You can also set a parameter for the areas in which your company targets. For example, if a company is in a country that you do not service, you can use this to subtract points from that submission.
The Contact
The contact is one of the most important factors to look at to see how serious a company is about collaborating with your business. This will tell you whether you have the decision-maker on board from the get-go, or an intern is simply collecting data from the content you provide.
For this you can set a parameter to add points to a C-Suite contact, or subtract points from an “associate”. This will also work in conjunction with other metrics – so if an associate or intern scores highly on other areas, the company could be a viable lead and will need an initial meeting to bring the decision maker on board.
Online Interaction and Engagement
When it comes to the contact’s prior engagement with your website and content, it is important to look for more than the simple conversion. Just because someone has signed up for your newsletter or email alerts, does not mean that they are a viable lead. This is the same when it comes to leads from social media. You need to log the impressions from your social media posts, should the leads come from there, so that all data is in the same place.
You need to look deeper to see how many times someone has interacted with your content. This can range from how many times an email has been opened, to how many times they have clicked through one of your social media posts to your website/landing page.
All of these properties, and more, will determine which companies score highly in your lead score versus not scoring as well.
How to Lead Score
To begin, you need to look at your historical data. Compile all of your contacts from your sales pipeline and pick out properties from your current customers that you want to see in your future ones. You also should pick out properties from contacts that did not become customers. These could be things such as low status in the company, not enough revenue, or no clear partnership in mind. Choose which properties from each that you would value most in your campaign leads, and which you would like to avoid.
In HubSpot, within your contacts tab, you can add properties that will then give all of your contacts their lead score.
Positive criteria will add points, negative will subtract. It is vital that you check your criteria before running any of your contacts through the system – as you may then miss out on strong leads.
HubSpot connects to your campaign host, and every conversion is tracked and added to a list. Each contact that comes through the HubSpot Lead Scoring tool is given a score. This can be determined by you, but a best practice is to have the initial score set to 100.
As mentioned above, you can add up to 100 properties that will subsequently add or subtract from their score. These can be simple metrics from the contact’s job title, and their influence on the company, to their online behavior when interacting with your website and associated pages.
Why Lead Scoring Is Important
Overall, lead scoring is a viable way to save man-hours when it comes to filtering out bad/weak leads. Avoid spending time communicating with a lead that is unlikely to convert, and focus on the most viable contacts.
After being sorted using the points, you can organize the contacts with different responses, to ensure that everyone gets some sort of a reply that is relevant to them.
Contact lists can be organized into a scale from cold leads (people that 100% do not fit with your company and aren’t worth speaking with) to hot leads (where you should have your sales team take this on as a project as soon as possible).
Visualizing the Scale
By automating the way your leads enter your sales pipeline, you can then automate your team’s response. This will allow you to focus your time on the most important potential customers, while still growing your relationship with the weaker leads.
At Nituno, we are a HubSpot Partner and have certified HubSpot experts that can work seamlessly with your sales teams to set up both outbound and paid campaigns, as well as support you with setting up your HubSpot Lead Scoring to ensure you’re focusing your efforts on the most valuable leads for your company. Get in touch with us today.
