Social Prospecting & ScoringIdentify Leads, Generate Demand and Target Influencers on the Social Web

Social Prospecting & ScoringA Disruptive Process to Identify Leads, Generate Demand and

Target InfluencersAugust 2012

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Introduction

Social Prospecting & Scoring

What to Score

3 Steps to Begin Scoring & Nurturing

Conclusion

About Awareness, Inc.

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Scoring Matrixes 6

Social Scoring In Action 7

Social Prospecting & ScoringIdentify Leads, Generate Demand and Target Influencers on the Social Web

Social Prospecting & ScoringIdentify Leads, Generate Demand and Target Influencers on the Social Web

INTRODUCTIONSocial marketing is about understanding the customers you have, and discovering the customers you don’t. Marketers are challenged with identifying ROI because social marketing management software has traditionally focused on metrics such as ‘likes’, fans and comments without tying them to bottom line results. Marketers are thirsty for the ability to measure ROI and, up until today, they have not had an easy way to do it.

With over 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook each month, YouTube receiving more than 2 billion viewers per day, and Twitter handling 1.6 billion search queries per month, more than Bing and Yahoo combined, the potential for social marketing automation to accelerate user engagement and customer acquisition is profound.

In order for brands to effectively track an ROI from social marketing they need to be able to identify, store and rank prospects across all the major social networks based on scoring criteria they define. This set of capabilities includes 3 pieces that are critical to success: Social Prospecting, Social Profiling, and Social Scoring.

Using the methodology defined in this white paper, marketers will no longer rely on ‘one-size-fits-all’ third party scoring rules to identify the best prospects for nurturing activities or influencers to target. This unique ability to customize and act upon social data fills a deep gap in CRM, Marketing Automation or Email Marketing platforms such as Salesforce.com, Marketo, Eloqua, and SilverPop.

Mining through millions of data points across all social networks is next to impossible for existing marketing automation and CRM providers. Social Marketing Automation bridges the gap for these marketing applications by empowering marketers to grow the effectiveness of their systems while avoiding all the social noise.

This white paper defines the methodology for social prospecting and social scoring, making it easy for brands to implement these strategies in their businesses immediately.

Social Prospecting & ScoringIdentify Leads, Generate Demand and Target Influencers on the Social Web

Social Prospecting & Scoring

Those of you familiar with marketing automation systems likely understand the concept of nurturing and scoring. Lead nurturing programs aim to help guide prospects down a specific path based on specific behaviors they have demonstrated. Lead scoring is a method of assigning points to each prospect based on specific criteria you set—those attributes you’ve identified as being most often associated with serious prospective customers. The higher the score, the more likely they’re the right target prospect that is actively engaged in the buying process. Nurturing and scoring allows marketers to bucket groups of prospects together and serve marketing messages to them at the right time of their buying process. Typically, this is a business-to-business marketing concept but can be easily transferred to a business-to-consumer model as well. The scores assigned to individuals are the basis for the campaigns you run against them.

The most accurate lead scoring models comprise both explicit and implied information.• Explicit information is provided by or about the prospect, for example - company size, industry segment, job title or geographic location.• Implied information is derived from monitoring prospect behavior and activity; examples of these include Web-site visits, whitepaper downloads, comments, ‘Likes’, or e-mail opens and clicks.

This approach is perfect for social media where the system is based on behaviors and conversations that can easily be scored. That said, there are two reasons why every company has not implemented this approach yet. First, traditional lead nurturing and scoring systems are based on a very basic premise: that you know who the person is before they enter the program. That can be a huge challenge in social media where matching profiles across networks is difficult. To be truly effective you need to know that Prospect A on Facebook is the same person as @ProspectA on Twitter, and so on for each network. The basis of the approach is to have a database and system in place that allows you to track activities of potential buyers before they enter your system. In fact, they may not even know your brand as you begin pay attention to them.

The second reason why most companies are not currently implementing this process today is because of the general philosophy of social marketing. Currently most businesses divide the entirety of social users into two groups: people who have engaged with your content, and people who have not. They are listening for conversations for the purposes of finding topics that people are talking about. They then use topic discovery to get people to engage with content, and only then are the users considered a homogeneous group of ‘social audience.’ Software and internal processes reflect this social marketing philosophy. Social scoring requires a new philosophy of social marketing, where listening involves prospecting for people that are talking about topics and engaged users are segmented and targeted into sub-groups.

Traditional lead nurturing and

scoring systems are based on a very basic premise: that you know who the person is before they enter the

program.

Social Prospecting & ScoringIdentify Leads, Generate Demand and Target Influencers on the Social Web

Social networks are data rich environments that afford marketers the opportunity to segment and target audiences in unique ways. Any time marketers seek to cluster users, social scoring can be used. For example, you may want to know which social users have done research on your competitors, so you could create a Competitive Interaction Score. You may want to know which users are influential for your specific industry, so you would create an Influencer score. You may want to know which users are most ready to buy your product, so you may create a Social Buying Score.

Your first social scoring and nurturing campaign begins with three steps. Portions of these steps will have to be repeated for subsequent scoring and nurturing campaigns, but some can be skipped. For example, you may or may not have to invest in new infrastructure for a scoring and nurturing campaign; it depends on new data collection or integration needs.

1. Identify relevant data and behaviorsDetermine the implicit and explicit social information that is relevant to your scoring goal. To accomplish this, make sure you are capturing relevant details from new sales – Twitter account, Facebook account, blog address, etc. Gather this all together and do some reconnaissance. Detail out the buyer’s activity over the last few months (where available) and attempt to match up similarities. This will likely be manual at first.

2. Invest in infrastructureInvestigate and understand your market by implementing tools to help coordinate your efforts. You should look at tools in four categories – monitoring, Social Marketing Management, CRM, and Marketing Automation. It’s critical that data is shared between these systems so you have a solid idea of how a buyer progresses through the entire process. One important consideration for infrastructure is the concept of the Social Profile, which is the sum total of a social user’s social data and activity. This includes a merging of all of an individual’s social profiles from all known social networks.

Your technology must collect Social Profiles whenever a user engages with your content (i.e. when they leave a comment on your Facebook Wall), but just as importantly, it must collect a Social Profile based on conversations that contain specific keywords. For example, if you choose to monitor for the keyword ‘house painter,’ anyone who tweets ‘house painter’ will automatically be entered into your Social Profile database. You can expect 60-90% of your scored profiles will be monitored users rather than engaged users. When Social Profiles enter a scoring system, they essentially become leads.

3. Develop your Scoring Methodology and CategorizationBuilding out your scoring methodology is based on the data you uncover in the first two steps. This is going to be a fluid process that will evolve over time. After getting the appropriate tools in place, start by giving points for the behaviors (or events) that an individual takes, like joining a specific group on Facebook or replying directly to one of your tweets. Your scoring methodology will result in a scoring matrix of data.

What to Score

3 Steps to Begin Scoring & Nurturing

Social Prospecting & ScoringIdentify Leads, Generate Demand and Target Influencers on the Social Web

Your scoring matrix defines which actions and data trigger a score change, and the value of the score change is. Listed below is a sample scoring matrix used to identify an influencer based on actions and profile information.

Social Scoring will give you a well-segmented list of social users. The goal of such a list is to run targeted marketing campaigns. The campaign should already be determined before the scores are collected. For example, if you are scoring for influence, you should have a campaign ready that offers product previews or special briefings. If you are scoring for buying intent, you should have a sale or new product offers. Recipients of these offers will be determined by the ‘flip number,’ which is the minimum score that qualifies an action for a Social Profile/ lead. In a B2B company, this would be the score at which the lead gets sent (or flipped) to sales for follow-up. For a B2C company, this could be the score at which a prospect is presented with a specific offer. This threshold number will likely be modified over time as you learn more about what makes a lead truly sales or marketing ready.

Integration is a key component of your Social Scoring and Social Nurturing Campaigns. Depending on your marketing follow up and the kinds of data you have collected, you will want to integrate your Social Profiles and attached social scores into CRM systems, marketing automation systems, social media publishing software, or email management platforms. For example, you may run a Facebook campaign that collects users’ emails. This activity, along with other scored activity, will trigger social scoring. Once the flip number is reached, a Social Profile is passed to a CRM system, and from there on to an email management platform, which sends out a customized message.

Scoring Matrixes

Social Prospecting & ScoringIdentify Leads, Generate Demand and Target Influencers on the Social Web

We can take a hypothetical situation to view Social Scoring and Nurturing from beginning to end. A running shoe company understands the timing and online activity their customers typically go through to prepare for a marathon. A scoring system for a running shoe company may look like this:

Month 1: ‘Bill the marathon runner’ announces to his friends on his blog, Facebook page, and Twitter account that he is running a marathon in 10 months and will begin training immediately.

ACTION: Capture Bill’s public profile information in our monitoring and CRM systems. In our system, he gets +5 points for announcing he will be running. We begin to actively monitor his streams and activity across the web. In addition, we begin to engage with him.

Month 5: Through our prompting Bill joins our ‘Marathon Training’ group on Facebook. He is actively engaged and begins creating relationships with others who will also be running in the Marathon.

ACTION: Bill gets an additional +10 points and we continue regular out reach.

Month 6: Again, through our prompting, Bill signs up for our weekly newsletter “Marathon Training Tips.”

ACTION: Bill is now a part of our database. He gets an additional +10 points. This non-social event (newsletter sign up) can be scored because of integration with an email platform.

Month 7: Bill hit a minimum lead score and receives an email inviting him to purchase shoes and equipment at a 10% discount to help him on the big day. He subsequently makes a purchase and social ROI is generated.

Social Scoring in Action

Social Prospecting & ScoringIdentify Leads, Generate Demand and Target Influencers on the Social Web

Conclusion

Additional Resources6 Mind-Blowing Social Media Stats... And What They Mean for MarketersA key benefit of social marketing is the ability to measure everything that goes on, and you don’t have to dig very deep to find some truly astounding stats on the industry. But it’s not just that these stats are interesting; they also provide valuable information that can help shape your marketing strategy.

Social Success Stories: Marketing Lessons from Industry LeadersSuccessful social companies may embrace a variety of practices, philosophies and techniques for using social media effectively. We’ve broken down the performance of some of the top social brands, including Converse, Whole Foods, NBA, ESPN, Farmers Insurance, and American Express, so you can emulate their success.

Five Killer Strategies to Dominate Social Media’s Big 3: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube Even with the increasing number of social networks, most experts still recognize that successful social marketing revolves around the Big 3: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

How to Audit Your Social Marketing EffortsLearn how to evaluate the effectiveness of your current social marketing strategy. Identify new ways to improve the return on your social marketing investment.

Social Engagement: How to Crack the Code of Social InteractionEngagement is the enduring effect of content to motivate an audience to do something; motivate your audience with data proven best practices.

Actionable Social AnalyticsA detailed guide on how to approach your social analytics process.

The Social Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social MarketingFor a detailed discussion on how to effectively measure your social marketing initiatives, download our free e-book.

The State of Social Media Marketing: Top Areas For Social Marketing Investment and Biggest Social Marketing Challenges in 2012Learn how leaders allocate resources, discover the top social platforms and social media management tools they use, social marketing investment priorities, and the practices com¬panies will adopt in 2012.

Social prospecting and scoring is a powerful concept that enables marketers to target leads, potential buyers as well as define rules-based criteria to define influencers within your own audience. The result is the ability to use the social web as a living, breathing, growing marketing database putting internal email lists to shame. Begin by defining the behaviors that indicate a liklihood to buy (or that indicate influence) and invest at looking at solutions to assist in automating the process.

Social Prospecting & ScoringIdentify Leads, Generate Demand and Target Influencers on the Social Web

Awareness Inc’s mission is to enable social marketers to efficiently and effectively generate ROI from social marketing activities. Awareness is the leading provider of OnDemand Social Marketing Automation Software designed specifically to address all key aspects of social media marketing – from demand generation to customer acquisition and social customer engagement. The Awareness Social Marketing Hub, the company’s flagship social marketing software, is the only solution available that ties Social Prospecting, Social Scoring and Social Profile Database into one solution resulting in a detailed social marketing ROI. Awareness works with some of the world’s leading brands and marketing agencies including MLB, Comcast, Likeable Media, Raidious, American Cancer Society, Tiger Woods Foundation, The Carlsberg Group, Mindjumpers, Nuance, DemandWare, Trend Micro, and Computer Associates. Backed by NorthBridge Venture Partners, Awareness is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts.

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