Objective number one for marketers has to be bringing leads into the business. Described by Binet and Field as “the short of it”, lead generation is ultimately the objective of brand building (“the long of it”) with the only difference being timescale. But once you’ve got them, you need to know where they came from. How can you do this in a way that balances accuracy with speed?
Pick your model
Just like any part of marketing, there are multiple models available to you. The most common are First Touch, Last Touch, and Multi-Touch.
First Touch
Exactly what it sounds like; the first time this person interacted with any of your content. This is what Spotler use for MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads). Once a potential customer knows about you, the rest is down to your content and your Sales team to build on that contact and convert them into a customer.
Last Touch
Another case of “does what it says on the tin”; the last thing the person engaged with before the sale. Google Ads and Facebook use this model by default. If your priority is making your content helpful, then people who match your ideal customer profile will pop up on your site when they’re nowhere near ready to buy. Better to pay attention to what tips them over into buying.
Multi-Touch
Now we’re getting complex! Every interaction from first to last gets some kind of score to reflect its contribution to the end result. There are multiple kinds of multi-touch attribution models, depending on which industry you’re in.
Time for Action(s)
Which model you use is less important than following through and actually doing it. The first step is to define the steps in your funnel. The classic Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action (AIDA) is a good beginning but needs tailoring to your exact circumstances.
Once you know the stages, you need to track the activity of your leads. This is GatorLeads does this with a small chunk of code that is embedded into your website.
Keeping Score
With the code deployed, you can decide which pages are important for your particular buying journey. If you have “Book a Demo” or “Pricing” pages, these should be scored highest. Blogs, videos and product pages will usually be scored lower to higher respectively. That said, you should score every page on your website. While Spotler use First Touch attribution for MQLs, when it comes to SQLs one of the ways a lead can qualify is by earning a high enough points score in a week or a month. For example, if someone is reading 2 of our blogs every day for a week, that suggests they are researching us deeply, rather than trying to solve an immediate query.
The Missing Link
What ties MQLs and SQLs together neatly are UTMs. These are add-ons to URLs which make a link unique, while appearing the same to an outsider.
This means that we can look at Josephine Bloggs, Marketing Director at ABC Ltd., and say that she earned 20 points in our lead scoring system from 1 blog and 1 webinar booking, and she found the blog from a post on our Twitter account.
Looking at all of our leads across a week/month/quarter/year, we can see that blogs on Twitter drive more MQLs than blogs which we email out. We might also see that we get more visits to our Free Trial page (an MQL-worth of points by itself) from our email list.
Let the Machine do the Work
For real speed and ease, integrate GatorLeads with your CRM rather than manually reviewing your leads and the points they have scored. Once your sales team can see where leads have come from, you’ll find it much easier to get their buy-in for that new campaign you want to roll out!
If this sounds like the solution to all your worldly woes, set up a demo with our own Sales team here (and yes, they’ll know you read this blog).
