Juan Eloqua’s Grande Guide to Lead Scoring

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Eloqua has released the first in a series of B2B marketing guides labeled the Grande Guides. This first one is on Lead Scoring. To have a bit of fun, they've also created Juan Eloqua – who's quite a Bold and Smoky guy whose specialty is growing fine coffee and, of course, revenues. If you haven't met Juan, you should.

The Grande Guide to Lead Scoring is a nice educational piece. There's plenty of explanation about what it is, why you need it and tips for creating a lead scoring model of your own.

So I won't cover it here – go get your own copy.

What I want to discuss in this post is one of the predictions Eloqua makes at the end about the future of Lead Scoring. The second item on the list is content scoring:

"Content-based scoring. Companies that regularly refine their scoring models begin to notice patterns in lead quality that can be directly tied to the content that is accessed during the buying process. Advanced organizations are experimenting with scoring models based on content type – like whitepapers, product information and customer testimonials – instead of the download activity itself."

I'd like to add a few ideas to their definition of content scoring. Learning more about content type is great. It can guide you to the types of content you produce, but that's not nearly enough to help your content impact the buying process overall.

I suggest that we start looking at content groups or tracks – whatever you'd like to call them.

There are a couple of ways to think about content groups:

  • The content you use across the duration of a nurturing program. If your content is designed to answer prospects' questions at each stage of the buying process, which content assets are getting the most attention? Take a look at what the content addresses. Find out from sales if this is a sticking point, slowing momentum. Perhaps you'll need to create more of it. Also look at which content is getting the least attention. Is it in the wrong place in the track? Or is it answering a question your prospects don't have?
  • All the content you have that addresses one problem-to-solution scenario, whether in your nurturing track or on your website, blog, etc. Are prospects seeking out related content in other locations? There should be a way to tag content so that marketers can say – show me the response to all the content that covers problem X. We should also be able to determine individual interest levels based on topic, not just types of content read.

Knowing that a prospect downloaded 5 white papers and 3 customer stories and 2 data sheets is one thing. Knowing that all of those resources are related to solving problem X can impact when you reach out as well as the quality of the conversations you'll be able to have with the prospect.

With buyers expectations growing much faster than our abilities to engage them with added value, we need insights that help us to have better conversations, build our credibility and convince them that our company is the best choice to help them solve their problems.

The interest part of lead scoring needs to be based on a solid content strategy.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Ardath Albee

Ardath Albee is a B2B Marketing Strategist and the CEO of her firm, Marketing Interactions, Inc. She helps B2B companies with complex sales create and use persona-driven content marketing strategies to turn prospects into buyers and convince customers to stay. Ardath is the author of Digital Relevance: Developing Marketing Content and Strategies that Drive Results and eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. She's also an in-demand industry speaker.

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