Geek out with Chris: Part 2

Last time, I kicked off this blog series by looking at a few marketing “truths” I’ve had to unlearn.

This time around, I’ll pick up where I left off by sharing some cool ways we use the content engagement data captured by LookBookHQ content experiences within our marketing automation platform to juice up our campaigns, supercharge our lead scoring model and expedite our most sales-ready buyers to sales.

If you’ve used our platform before (and if you haven’t, might I cheekily suggest a demo?), you’ll know that you can define a few key settings on each content asset. In particular, two that I’ve found to be very powerful are the ‘Engagement Score’ threshold and the ‘Asset Type’ for each asset. The first is basically saying, after someone has viewed this asset for x amount of time, count the prospect as having been engaged with that asset. The cumulative score of a prospect’s session can then be passed over to your marketing automation platform. The latter (Asset Type) will be passed over to your MAP on a per-asset basis. More on that later.

If you’re using Oracle Eloqua, you have a great tool to make decisions based on engagement; the Cloud Decision app. In the Eloqua Campaign Canvas, the Cloud Decision app allows engaged prospects to be routed separately from those who didn’t engage.

If you’re on Marketo, you can replicate this kind of behavior by listening for data value changes in the custom fields LookBookHQ uses to pass over engagement data to Marketo.

From here, you can do anything with these people in your MAP. A great place to start is by giving them a unique campaign member status (so they can be tracked separately as fast-moving buyers), setting up sales email alerts and triggering reminder tasks for sales teams. What’s great about this is even if a person isn’t yet an MQL, the sales team knows they’re moving through content quickly and actually spending time with it. This is so important and often goes under-appreciated. Don’t forget, a click isn’t the same as actually engaging with content. It’s really just a proxy for engagement; now you have the real thing!

Supercharged Lead Scoring
Traditional lead scoring suffers from the same conceit that a click is the same thing as engagement. Assuming that someone actually read something when they merely clicked isn’t good enough. Let’s look at another way that LookBookHQ passes engagement data over to Marketo which can be used to solve this problem. When a prospect spends sufficient time with an asset, they get a LookBookHQ engagement score for that asset, and LookBookHQ stamps an extra entry into that lead’s activity log in Marketo, specifying that they’ve “Met Threshold” on that asset. Remember that “Asset Type” you defined earlier? That shows up here too.

What I love about this is you can now give people a strong positive score when they actually engage with your asset. This is how our marketing team scores people. You’ll see in the Smart Campaign below within our own scoring model that we’re listening for people visiting any asset in our own instance of LookBookHQ and that the threshold was met for that asset. When someone qualifies, we give them a strong positive score.

Even better, you can give an even higher number of points when the asset type is of a higher value. For example, here is how we score on high value assets:

In this case, we’re looking for people who not only landed on an asset, and engaged with that asset, but also that the asset type is what we would consider higher value in terms of sales readiness (Video, Case Study, e-Book, etc…).

By going through these exercises we added extra dimensions to our lead scoring model that wouldn’t normally be there. This means more MQLs, faster MQLs and higher quality MQLs.

In my next post, I’ll touch on how we communicate with our business development and sales team and give them actionable insight into when and how prospects are engaging with content. We’ll look at how we identify our most sales-ready buyers based on whether or not they binge on our content, and how sales uses this intel to prioritize who to contact first and how to personalize their follow-ups.

Stay tuned, marketing geeks!