How an Explainer Video Can Help You with Lead Scoring

When it comes to following-up with leads, timing can be everything. Take, for example, a recent Harvard study in which researchers reviewed data from 1.25 million sales leads (received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies). Here’s what they found:

• Potential customers who were contacted within an hour of making a query were nearly 7 times as likely to become a qualified lead than those contacted just an hour later.
  
• Potential customers who were contacted within an hour of making a query were more than 60 times more likely to become a qualified lead than those contacted 24 hours later.

The main takeaway from this study is that, of course, it’s better to follow-up with a potential customer sooner rather than later. But another key insight here—lurking beneath the surface— is that while quantifiable behavior (in this case filling out a query form) may help us position potential customers in our sales funnel, we must accept (and correct for the fact) that their position there is not fixed. It’s fluid. Meaning that the binary designation (yes/no query) isn’t a reliable indicator on its own as clearly it’s also a byproduct of content. In other words: timing—not just speed, but correctly timing when and how to approach a potential customer—really is incredibly important.

In other words: timing—not just speed, but correctly timing when and how to approach a potential customer—really is incredibly important.

As such, the more detailed the information you’ve curated about a potential customer is, the more likely you will be to respond to them at the right time with the right approach. This, essentially, is the basis of lead scoring; the practice of collecting information about potential customers (usually based on how their time is spent on your website) to determine their intent to purchase so that you can react accordingly. And it’s an approach that’s time and time again been proven to work (like it does here in this Marketing Sherpa case study; increasing conversions by 79%). But the key to making it work, and making it work as strongly as possible, is collecting valuable data. Which is another reason why an explainer video can help improve your sales efforts. Because the data collected from a potential customer’s viewing habits can help enhance your lead scoring formula.

Engagement (and the Data Provided by an Explainer Video)

The difficulty with the situation above is that receipt of a query—although a significant indicator—is not a very detailed one. It doesn’t tell us how interested somebody is (nor, in most cases, what specifically interests them most). Enter the explainer video, which can provide us with more a more personal and pertinent insight into the interests of the viewer. And it does so in a quantifiable way that can be used for the purposes of lead scoring. Because it allows us to analyze the following data points:

Clicks/Plays

This is the most straightforward metric (and a valuable one to be sure) but, as with the query example above, it results in binary yes or no. And as we all know from being on the other side of the equation—from watching videos ourselves—not all views are created equally. This is not to say you shouldn’t reach out to everyone who watches your explainer (whether or not to do so should be a function of how you score leads and your approach to targeting prospects of different scores), but it simply to note that an explainer video gives us a unique opportunity to analyze additional data. Such as…

Length of Viewing:

It stands to reason that the longer somebody watches your explainer video, the more interested they likely are in your product or service. The tricky part is how to quantify this into something your sales and marketing team can use for scoring leads. You could come up with some measurement technique (i.e. where the percentage of video watched correlates directly to a specific score), but implementing that into your algorithm may be difficult to set up or too ambitious a strategy to begin with. So instead, a more popular technique is to assign points based on different thresholds.

For example: if a potential customer clicks on your video, you might assign 10 points. If they watch half of the video, you may assign 12 points. Or if they watch the entire video, you may assign 15 points. These allocations are entirely up to you, but the point is just that this relatively simple technique can give you more detailed insight into where your potential customer fits into the funnel at that exact moment in time so that you can approach with an appropriate strategy.

Viewership of Additional Videos:

Since our goal is to identify potential customers with the highest probability of conversion, you should also look at (and factor in) if the visitor has watched other videos on your site. Specifically, you should be looking at the timing of their viewings. Meaning that if someone watches a video about your company and then, six months later, watches a video about your newest product…that person is probably not as likely to convert as someone who watches a video about your company and then, six minutes later, watches a video about your newest product. As we noted above, timing is everything. So knowing when these things are being watched (and how they are being viewed) can be extremely valuable to your scoring process.

As we noted above, timing is everything. So knowing when these things are being watched (and how they are being viewed) can be extremely valuable to your scoring process.

What’s Next?

A final data point that’s worthy of consideration is looking at what the potential customer does after viewing your explainer video. Does he or she then leave your webpage? Do they immediately go and looking up pricing options? Do they contact you directly? Reviewing how a potential customer behaves after they have been engaged can provide great insight into where their head is at and how you may want to approach them if/when you reach out to them.

The Big Picture

Ultimately, the lesson is this: an explainer video is an investment, so you should make sure to get the most of out that investment. Not just in terms of pure lead generation, but also—through a lead scoring system that works for you—to use as a tool can help determine how you should follow-up with and approach prospective clients. In other words: in our data-driven digital age, an explainer video’s versatility makes it a more valuable asset than ever before.

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