Want to improve lead quality? Focus on knowing when a customer includes you in their consideration set.
It is one thing to get someone to notice you, it is quite another to get them to think of you when getting ready to make a purchase. B2B marketing works to tie these aspects of a customer purchase cycle together through a strong call to action. In the end, the holy grail when targeting the campaign is reaching the customers that are truly at the beginning of the purchase cycle. The relevancy of a campaign isn’t just that you provide valuable content to someone that is the subject matter expert (SME) in their company, it is that it is relevant when the SME is ready to become engaged.
Right message, right person, RIGHT TIME. Timing is everything.
Judging when a customer is ready to engage is not as allusive as you might think. The key is to recognize behavioral aspects within you customer and contact base. Opportunity segmentation has typically focused on financial transactions due to its availability and consistency. It is effective when determining customer value and staying on top of purchase cycles. Although, this fails to account for the “who” that acts with in high opportunity customers as key influencers and decision makers. In addition, it fails to account for prospects you’ve brought in and engaged.
The other piece of opportunity identification through behavior analysis is recognizing how contacts are interacting with content on your website, responding to campaigns, support inquiries, and, if available, social media venues. There are a several ways to leverage this type of information from the simple to more sophisticated predictive analysis. It will depend on your level of ability to identify behavioral aspects of contacts and linking behavior information across various marketing venues.
- RFE Analysis (Recency, Frequency, Engagement) – A modified version of RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) which focused orders, replace M with E (Engagement), you can begin to identify behavioral aspects for simple segment selection. E is the point when sales recognizes the opportunity and includes in a pipeline and confirmation that the customer includes you in the consideration set. E can also be another type of event that the outcome is a face-to-face meeting, for example trade show attendence or in-person seminar.
- Reference/Word-of-Mouth – There are two aspects of this. The first is that the contact will be a reference or unrequested acts on your behalf to influence others. However, the other side is that they are actively seeking out other customer perspectives by reading other’s opinions and asking for opions. Tying together campaign interactions with a transition to reference/word-of-mouth activity can provide insight that they are ready to engage.
- Predictive Analysis – The previous two approaches can be easily done through simple segmentation techniques. Taking them a step further, you can apply predictive analytics to solidify benchmarks and KPIs. Indexing of contacts’ behavior and mapping that to scorecards identifies pre-engagement contacts and customers. The values can be dynamically set so that as contacts and customer reach thresholds they move into campaigns that are targeted to move them into sales engagements and support the sales engagement.
Are you tracking the transition from awareness to consideration? What do you look at?
