The subject of lead management is strongly connected with the concept of lead scoring as briefly presented above. When generating leads on a mass scale, mixing cold marketing leads with warmer sales leads, it will become necessary to evaluate the leads that get into the funnel and assess their maturity. This is when the scoring model will need to be developed — it should attribute points for specific actions on the lead’s side. In content marketing, these points would be typically related to content consumption and a lead profile. An own methodology could be also complemented with classic methods, for example IBM’s BANT approach (budget-authority-need-timeline), which qualifies leads, or a newer one, proposed by HubSpot: GPCTBA/CI (Goals-Plans-Challenges Timeline-Budget-Authority-Consequences-Implications), which seems more relevant nowadays as it addresses the trend of prosumerism, where the consumers influence a product development process with their opinions and knowledge.
Lead generation seems to be the biggest motivator for organisations to take on marketing automation and embrace content campaigns. The reason for it is that leads are closely related to ROI. There is, however, much more a brand can achieve by deploying a marketing cloud. The benefits include:
1. Insights into the efficiency of a media-mix — a marketing cloud allows to attribute the success to respective channels used in an interaction with the audiences, ensures spending accountability and justifies shifts in marketing spendings per channel.
2. Shifting to the omnichannel perspective, availability of a single tool for data management and the deployment of campaigns and reporting — so far organisations and marketing departments remained fragmented and focused on separate media or technologies, such as POS, Ecommerce, digital, social media, ATL/BTL, etc. A marketing cloud helps to reunite the organisation and restore the belief in a co-creation between all involved and thus introduce a cross-channel thinking about the brand and with it — an orchestration of skills and activities.
3. A real time, mass-personalised approach - audience tracking allows for reacting immediately to the behaviour of leads and provides relevant messaging expected by respective personas.
4. An improved work efficiency achieved through the application of replicable, automatic workflows of interaction with the audiences. The rules of the automation once planned and programmed, will be executed automatically without any additional involvement of the marketer, regardless of the number of leads in the CRM. The marketers can, therefore, focus solely on strategic planning and analytical tasks; - the whole execution part is handled automatically by the cloud software which saves the brand’s time and money.
5. An introduction of new performance metrics — the deployment of a marketing cloud prompts a consideration of what the organisation is, what should it be measuring, and what kind of metrics represent success.
