Speaker 1 (00:01):
<Silence> Hello everyone and welcome to Omeda’s Success Story webinar series. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Bill Cieleszyck, I’m a client success manager at Omeda, and I’m joined today by Rhonda Hughes, VP of Marketing and Audience Development at AC Business Media. A couple housekeeping items before we start. This webinar will be recorded and will be viewable on demand. An email will be set out at to all registrants when the recording is available. If you have any questions, please open the question pane in the GoTo toolbar and type your question there. We will try to answer some questions at the end of the presentation if time permits. If we’re not able to answer all questions in today’s live broadcast, we will respond to any remaining questions via directly via email. Today we’re gonna look at how A C B M is leveraging lead scoring to boost engagement and monetization. So, Rhonda, why don’t you start off by telling us why lead scoring, why now, and how did you get started?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Sure. Well, hello everybody. I am so glad to be doing this, and the answer’s easy. Why not? It’s free and I need to repeat that. It’s free, it’s easy, and it’s long overdue. I think Omeda has had this capability for well over a year and it’s silly to keep it hidden in your closet like a present, you’re waiting for a special day to use. The day is here. So I think it’s just time we figure it out and use it. So let’s get started. It’s not overwhelming. I want everyone to know that right now, especially if you have the help of your client service client success manager bill is a big help. So what we decided to do is just to pick one brand to get started, don’t boil the ocean. It would be overwhelming. Get one brand and get it right before you move on.
(01:56):
Decide on a list of behaviors you wanna score, and every one of you are different. So there’s gonna be different behaviors you’re gonna want to put points towards or scores, right? So email, websites, subscribers, webinars, high value assets those are those really cool reports and downloadable items that a person gives all their data for, right? Surveys, events and awards. This is just to name a few. And your list of behaviors could be wildly different than my list of behaviors Decide on a scoring system, and it doesn’t have to be scientific. It usually starts with the behaviors I mentioned and then maybe, maybe some ranges of of frequency. Work with your client success manager, like I said, to help show you how to score the records and build the scoring ranges for easy reporting and analyzing. That’s a very important step. And then you run reports to see if the numbers make sense and you’re there.
(02:59):
So let me show you an example of what this looks like. It’s not very pretty, it’s just an Excel spreadsheet, a snippet of it, but this is our Bible <laugh> right now. This is what we’re looking at all the time. So again, this is a sample of a scoring chart. This is our current scoring chart for just one of our brands. Again, doesn’t have to be scientific. Don’t overthink it. You can see that I didn’t, the only thing that I did think about a lot was what was my lowest score gonna be? So my lowest scores you can see is opened an email within 30 days and just one email, and it’s just an open, it’s not a click. I gave that 20 points. Some of you might be thinking, wow, 20. That’s kind of high for just opening an email. I just left myself buffer there from like one to 19 of any other things I might wanna score in the future.
(03:56):
That’s the only reason why I started that high. Make sure you think about the points or the weight you wanna give premium engagement. And what I consider premium engagement is anytime it takes a person a little longer to engage with you. So they’re filling out a full form for a downloadable asset. They spend actual money going to an event, right? Airfare, hotel, they’re going to a face-to-face event, or they’re giving you the investment of time sitting through a webinar like you guys are doing. Thank you very much. The scores are not not carved in stone. They’re easy to change, and we’re gonna talk about that in a little bit. This is what kept me sane. I knew I couldn’t make a mistake, right? So I started somewhere. We made a few changes and this is where we ended up. The be the behaviors can change as well. So we can take ’em out, we can add ’em in, and that’s all easy and fine.
(04:57):
So what’s next? We got our scoring chart. What do we do with that? So we want to use that information to monitor audience engagement. We wanna try to better our segmentation in the way we talk to our audience. And of course, we wanna bring in more money. We wanna monetize our investments. So first monitoring audience engagement. So what did I immediately learn from the spy chart is I have a little more work to do with this scoring. I noticed that about, you know, close to 400,000 of my audience didn’t have a score applied to it. I did find out that half of that, like 200,000 is just anonymous traffic. But what that tells me is we have work to do, right? What can we do to make that anonymous known? So that’s an easy KPI for me to see, right? Looking at this pie chart.
(05:50):
But the other portion of it is literally, this is active audience, but maybe I to look at the frequency maybe, or, or the timeline. Maybe it needs to be more than just 30 days. I can keep the 30 days engagement in there, but maybe I need another layer. Maybe, you know, 31 to 90 days, and that will probably score a big majority of the other 200,000 that don’t have a point system yet. But I also learned that we have a small but mighty segment of VIPs of almost 2,400 people that have points up to well, and actually over 2000. So I wanna treat those VIPs very special. The cool thing about it is I literally can run this analysis and there they are. I don’t have to dig around. And approximately 30% of our, our audience have engaged within 30 days. Not too shabby.
(06:47):
15% are super users. What am I gonna do with them? We’ll talk about that in a little bit. And now I have a really, at a glance, easy way to develop new audience KPIs. So this is helpful for my audience development manager and myself looking at one graph, going, okay, we have some work to do. Let’s get started. So to better our segmentation, we did our analysis right now we’re gonna better our segmentation. So if you look at this chart, I broke it out into a very easy three steps, interested audience. So in my opinion, these are people just getting started with your brand. Maybe they deserve some type of welcome newsletter or email or something. You can let your marketing mind minds go wild here. But these are, I I, I’m assuming new newbies, right? They’re in, they’re, they’re opening an email, they’re going to your website but they could use a little more encouragement to keep them engaged.
(07:55):
Your core audience, they are loyal. Tell them what they want or what they need to engage with. I’m gonna give a little plug to Omeda here. This core audience would be the perfect, perfect segmentation to use their content recommendation platform, their new capability. You want to keep them engaged. They just read an article, show them what else they would, might want to read that would serve their interest. And then again, the super users, these are my like 2,400 people. Invite them to focus groups, special event offers, readership surveys, profile these folks for sales calls.
(08:37):
So onto the monetizing for monetizing your investments. So really, there’s many ways of doing this. This is just three ideas up the top of my head. Look at these scores when you’re giving giving out leads, comparing, compare them to your score chart, charge, maybe a premium CPM for the higher scored records and treat them like royalty. These people are super engaged, they’re active, and now you’re sharing them with your partners. They should pay the price, just in my opinion. For sales calls, design, nice profile sheets, showing your super users, demographics, behavior, and contextual data. It really kind of is a nice trend to say, Hey, these are the types of titles and businesses that are really engaging with this type of content. That can also help the editorial team too. Think about putting your higher scored audiences on a limited email frequency. I know that’s tough and we’re not even quite there yet, but again, you wanna treat these people with kid gloves. You wanna keep them happy, give them what they want. And I believe that is it from me, from my slideshow. Bill, any questions out there? Awesome.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, thank you Rhonda. Let’s see. Pull up the questions here. We do have some time. Okay, question. How do you determine whether or not you set up the scoring parameters correctly?
Speaker 2 (10:14):
That’s a very good question, and I did address it just a little bit in the deck, but the first thing you really wanna do is, well, first you have to start somewhere. So put your ranges out there, pick your behaviors, but analyze it, run the reports. So we ran a range report, a scoring range report, and I did, right out of the gate, I saw some holes that needed to be filled. And I, I kept at it a couple more times, and I, I got to where we are now, but you saw the pie chart folks, it’s not perfect. <Laugh>, <laugh>, we do need to layer in ano another level of scoring. And again, it, I I say everything’s easy. It does take a little bit of man work, you know, with my ADM, she’s going in and she’s, she’s gonna be the one putting in that next layer. Bill’s gonna help us analyze it, but honestly, it doesn’t take that much time, and it really is to it, it’s easy to see. It will jump out at you. So again, you know, you got it right. When I would say, and I’m throwing this out there, maybe three quarters of your active audience has some type of point assigned to it. I think you’re pretty close to getting it right.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Very nice. So yeah, there’s, there’s no there’s no silver bullet. You’re probably not gonna hit it first time. Just get something and, and, and work from there. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Okay, let’s see. Another question. Can you give an example of how you would start using lead scoring to make decisions? That’s a good question.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Sure. Well, everyone, everyone that at the round table kind of asked me that question at OX6, it’s like, now what’s next? Where do you start? A really kind of simple starting place is to have a open line of communication with one or a couple of your sales reps saying, Hey, the next time you do a dedicated email to somebody, or you do content syndication, some type of lead gen program, share with me the list of those leads that you’re about to send over to your advertiser. I just wanna match ’em up against our scoring system here in Omeda and take a peek at it. I mean, literally, if you see that over half those leads are your premium people, your high scores, you might think about a more stair step approach maybe to your how you are charging for your leads, right? If they fall into this category, we charge $200. If we, they, if they’re kind of lower end scores, they, we charge $50 a lead that’s gonna be a business practice. You’ll have to probably put up the flag pole. But I do think that is a good starting place for sure.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great idea. Kind of doing some analysis upfront. You don’t, you don’t set up lead scoring and then say, we’re gonna have all of this tiered pricing and everything upfront. You want to gather some intelligence, you want, you wanna take that proof to the the sales managers. Yeah, that’s, that’s fantastic.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Okay. Let’s see how we’re doing on time. Okay. Yeah, it looks like we have time for one more question. Let’s see. What types of things did you consider when prioritizing or ranking behaviors in order to assign the proper scores?
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Again, I did touch on that a little bit, but I have to tell you, that’s gonna be different for every, every media company. There are media companies out there that are consumer based. You know, you have high subscription models or you have premium print products that you’re charging for not just giving to people to, you know, either you charge with money or you charge for data, right? Right. It’s one or the other. You might consider a high value product being a print product or subscription model that you might give more scoring points to than what I might so, and you might not have events, and we do. So I put events high because people are actually spending money to go. So depends on what your portfolio looks like. Literally list out you, by the way, you have more products than what you think you have too.
(14:41):
<Laugh>, everybody does. You don’t just have magazines and newsletters, I guarantee it. So you do have special spec guides, and you could have electronic directories, you could have tons of seminars and webinars and other things. People are actually coming to your website to look at and see. You might rank different sections of your website differently, right? There could be a portion of your website that is maybe not just articles, maybe they’re videos. I, I’m just making this up off the top of my head as an example of that really is up to, to each in individual company on how you want to rank your behaviors. But my advice is to, is to literally sit down with your brand leads and list out what you consider to be your products. You’ll be a little surprised to find a list longer than what you might think, three or four. So it’s a good starting point. Anyway.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s fantastic. Start with that, that inventory. And then you might find a, you, you might come across some things that you know, you have to set up your, your database a little bit differently to make sure you’re tracking some of those products. You might not even realize that they, that they were there. Yeah. That’s, that’s fantastic.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Good point.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Let’s see, okay, yeah, it looks like we’re, we’re coming up on time, so we’ll compile the remaining questions and respond to those questions via email. Thank you Rhonda, so much for presenting. This was fantastic. Great insight. And I, I, I think there’s a lot of takeaways for a a for our viewers today. Great. again, an an email will be sent out within the next few days with the link to the archive webinar, and you can view all of our webinar archives as well as see as a list of upcoming webinars and register for those webinars in the resources section of our website at omi.com/resources/webinars. Hope everyone has a great rest of your day. Thank you. Thank.
