We know that as a businessman, obtaining successful sales is part of your main objectives. Lead scoring and lead nurturing are two important tools that can help you achieve that goal, especially if you incorporate the inbound marketing methodology into your sales processes.
The origin of lead scoring and lead nurturing
Since the birth of inbound marketing, whose purpose is to attract the attention of target audiences with useful and relevant content, it has become important to construct terms that explain the objectives and processes present within its methodology. Lead scoring and lead nurturing are part of that long list of concepts that inbound marketing, in its wake, has had to incorporate to successfully guide companies in their efforts to change their ways of selling and educating their audiences.
Inbound marketing specialists manage large databases that, if it had not been for process automation, managing them correctly would not have been possible. When a website, and intrinsically a company, achieve successful search engine positioning (SEO), its chances of growing its traffic every day increase. These are new visitors who, every day, read an article for the first time, click on a call to action, fill out a form with their contact information and automatically receive downloadable material to their email that will enrich their learning process. or investigative.
Can you imagine how many times a day Internet users can carry out this cycle? This is why lead scoring and lead nurturing represent two techniques that are carried out, with the help of marketing automation, to segment, guide and educate your contact base, in a constant, periodic and assertive manner.
In the inbound marketing methodology, lead scoring and lead nurturing come into play in the transition from the conversion stage to the closing stage, that is, the one that aims to convert sales opportunities or leads into potential clients and/or end clients. A lead is a person who, by providing their data through a form (found within a landing page) becomes part of a company’s database. In this sense, what is lead scoring and lead nurturing about? Below we invite you to learn about both concepts:
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring consists of an automated marketing technique that allows companies to assign a score to their sales opportunities. What is graded? the degree of interest they have towards content, the level of proximity of the leads with the buyer personas, their interaction with a brand on social networks, etc. In other words, it is about creating characteristics that seem appropriate to classify a database, with the aim of establishing better ways to generate trust when contacting them and guiding them toward a successful sales process.
As we mentioned in the first section, the importance of lead scoring increases when the number of leads generated is very high. It is well known that you cannot treat all leads in the same way since not all of them are interested in the same type of content, nor do they have the same degree of interest. That is why it becomes so important to assign a score that allows companies to have an idea of what the behavior of their sales opportunities has been and when they are ready to send them to the sales department.
Smarkerting uses lead scoring to know, depending on the rating given by a sales opportunity in each of these variables when a sales opportunity is ready to be passed on to the sales department. That is, it is an SQL. A Sales Qualified Lead is a lead that has met a series of patterns established in a digital strategy and has a high probability of becoming a customer. This type of ‘lead’ shows interest in a brand’s content, is educated and qualified until a conversion funnel is completed.
When companies do not carry out lead scoring in their database, they run the risk of marketing actions being too general and dispersed, without a sufficient level of adaptation to the real circumstances and needs of each user. Among the main advantages of lead scoring are:
- Properly segment your contacts.
- A positive return on investment (ROI) in terms of your inbound marketing strategies.
- Efficiency between the markets and sales departments.
- Planning of concrete actions aimed at specific user groups.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing or, as its translation into Spanish indicates, lead nutrition, is also a technique applied to marketing automation, focused on the preparation and maturation of contacts, through the periodic sending of emails that reinforce their interest in the brand and its content.
Lead nurturing leverages email marketing to guide the final purchase process of a sales opportunity, also making use of calls to action but this time directed towards virtual stores, shopping carts, credit card forms, etc. Unlike lead scoring, lead nurturing is not about classifying and ordering leads according to their predisposition to make a purchase, but rather accompanying them on their buyer’s journey through a series of automatic actions and interactions.
Of course, both lead scoring and lead nurturing are carried out using technological software that allows specific content to be delivered en masse, at a specific time and in a segmented manner. Inbound marketing usually uses the programmed and progressive sending of emails with information of value to users, such as: ebooks, whitepapers, guides, graphic design templates, invitations to online and offline product demos, personalized offers, that is, gifts that cultivate loyalty and interest of leads.
In any case, the actions planned in lead nurturing depend on the receptivity that users have through emails and social networks. Among the main advantages of lead nurturing are:
- Establish contact immediately.
- Detect when personalized customer service is appropriate.
- Clarify doubts and satisfy more specific needs.
- Establish coherent communication.
- Loyalty of potential clients.
- Educate your leads.
- Promote your products and/or services
In your inbound marketing strategies, you can apply both lead scoring and lead nurturing since they are not mutually exclusive techniques; on the contrary, both can provide you with complete information about the behavior of your leads. Remember that those companies that maintain constant communication with their sales opportunities, where their needs are responded to at all times, are the ones that finally manage to establish a relationship of trust. That trust will be the architect of a final and successful purchase.
