Joe Leider

When you develop an automated nurture track, you should think about the specific goals of the track in question. You don’t want to send a series of emails to a prospect for no reason. But you also don’t want some of your prospects to be left behind with no communication whatsoever. You do want to have a plan for every person who fills out one of your forms based on who they are, what they need and where they are in their buying cycle.

Nurture tracks

Below are lists of general types of nurture tracks you should be using today to keep in touch with your prospects as they become ready to buy.

• Welcome: When a visitor to your website fills out a form, he has identified himself. He has said, yes, I am interested in your company, and I trust you enough with my email address for you to send me more content. Your first email will be the form’s auto-responder. If it’s not a contact me form, they don’t become a lead right away. But you want to stay in touch for as long as possible, not in an overbearing way, but just to let him know you’re there. So you send him through a welcome program, experimenting with different variations of content with the hope of fast tracking him into a faster nurture track with more calls to action.
• Inform: A prospect has been welcomed, she receives your emails once every two weeks and has finally expressed interested in a particular area of your content. Start sending her follow-up efforts focused on that content. That way she’ll get the information she needs to make her decision, and she’ll start trusting you as her preferred source of advice on that decision.
• Engage: A prospect has expressed interest, and now you want to nudge him towards a buying decision. Speed up the process by providing those pieces of content that relate to buying your product or service. Once he takes an action in this track, you may be ready to call him with a sales pitch.
• Wake: Some prospects will come to your site and then go inactive. For these prospects, try anything new to see if they take an action. You want to send periodic efforts to shake them up; wake them and push them into one of your other tracks.
• Follow up and assess: When someone becomes a customer, send them some follow up materials to judge their satisfaction or if they need any customer service help. Don’t just close the sale and forget about them.
• Refer: Make sure you have nurture campaigns built around your referral program as well. A happy customer is worth more than a single sale.

Types of content

The types of content you create can be tagged with the above criteria. Maybe one of your demos is meant to really engage a prospect, or a white paper to inform them about the specifics of one of your products. Below is a list of content types and where they likely fit into the above nurture tracks.

• White papers & articles: Usually informative, these pieces of content are text-heavy and non-biased. In building your brand as a thought leader and trusted advisor, a white paper or article shows prospects that you just want to educate them on your area of expertise.
• Videos: Also informative, a video is much like a white paper, but in a different medium. In fact, you can easily repurpose the content of a white paper to make it more interesting to different types of prospects.
• Demonstrations: A product demonstration is meant to engage your prospects. When they look at how your product works, they are more interested in buying what you may have. Include this sort of content in your engagement nurture tracks.
• Price guides: Again, when someone is looking to buy, they want to know pricing and offer structure. Do you offer a free trial or money-back guarantee? If a prospect looks for this, it’s time to score them well and send them to sales.
• Case studies & surveys: A case study or survey will fall between informing and engaging your prospects. Both case studies and surveys show how other companies in the prospect’s niche have succeeded using your product. They can each help make the case to purchasers that you offer value for the price you’re charging.
• Events (webinars or live): Any prospect attending an online or live event is engaged. This content can be repurposed demos, a presentation of survey results on a particular industry or general information on your company’s relationship to your prospects’ niche.

Conclusion

When you nurture prospects or send them different pieces of content, you’re leading them down a certain path that will hopefully end in a successful sales call. But don’t come on too strong. If someone downloads a whitepaper on your site, start slow with a welcome track. If they express more interest, push them into an informative or engaging track that will speed their way to different decisions along your buying cycle.

You want your prospects to take actions that raise a flag to sales that they are a hot lead, looking to buy. You can even design your tracks and assets to raise that flag with some information on how to respond. If someone is looking at price guides, call them with an offer for a free trial. If they view a demonstration on how your product helps a particular industry, call with a case study in mind to reinforce where you can help. In this way you can educate your leads to about the right decision before selling to them.

Marketing automation platforms encourage one way to score leads. They use implicit and explicit scores, where implicit score represents activities taken by your leads and explicit relies on the exact values in fields like title, company and demographics. But is this the best way to score leads? With all the capabilities inherent in marketing automation, why are we tied to only tracking two scoring dimensions?

Today we develop lead scoring strategies by thinking the way our sales people think, assuming certain factors mean more than others and going with those for implicit/explicit scores. We only pass leads where both scores are high enough to warrant a sales call.

But there are more dimensions on which to score leads, and we need to get past some of our assumptions. Most importantly, by splitting out different parts of your scoring, you’ll be able to better track and report on your programs. How can you do this?

1) Brainstorm

Conceptualize the different factors that make a lead good for follow up. Your sales people know the most about this, so start asking them questions. How would they describe their best leads? What activities do they take? What characteristics do they share? Can you incorporate those thoughts into your lead scoring program? Below are some examples of factors to consider (most of them are already a part of your current scoring systems):

• Decision maker: Does the lead have buying authority? Will they be the one who makes the final decision?
• Job title: What is the person’s job title? Does it help you differentiate people who you think would be good leads?
• Industry segment: Are there certain industry segments that your company sells more to?
• Individual visits (overall or by content type): As an individual, did the contact visit a lot of web pages? Can various web pages be classified together in a way that makes sense for lead nurturing or sales follow-up?
• Individual downloads (overall or by content type): Did the lead download different white papers making her a more likely sale?
• Events attended: Does the lead show a lot of interest in your company’s webinars or live events?
• Company-wide activity: Sometimes a decision maker may not do their own research on what they want to buy from your company, but others may. Tracking overall activities by company (or account) may help to identify good leads.
• Company-wide spend: How much does a company already spend with you? If they spend a lot, but submit a form, there may be a good opportunity to up-sell.
• Top companies (by domain, company name, etc): You may have a list of top companies you definitely want to close. Membership in this group of targets could be a great way to score your leads.
• Form submissions: Some forms may be better than others. Score “Contact me” forms higher as they show real interest in speaking to a sales person.

2) Choose which factors seem to make the most sense for your business and score on each separately

Wait a minute, you might say. Why would I break down my explicit and implicit scores into their contingent parts? Because you want to isolate different variables and see what works.

From the above, perhaps you choose decision maker, industry segment, individual activity, company-wide activity and top companies. To score on all these, make a matrix …

Factor	Rating = 1	Rating = 2	Rating = 3
Decision maker	High-level decision maker	Low-to-mid-level decision maker	Not a decision maker
Industry segment	We specialize in these industries	Related to industries where we really focus	Peripheral to the areas where we specialize
Individual activity	Individual shows lots of activity on our site	Individual shows some activity	Individual shows little to no activity
Company-wide activity	Company shows lots of activity on our site	Company shows some activity	Company shows little to no activity
Top companies	Lead’s domain matches our top 50 targets	Lead’s domain matches targets 51-200	Lead’s domain doesn’t match any top targets

Your leads will be scored 1, 2 or 3 for the five factors above. But how will sales know which prospects they should call? At the beginning they won’t because you need to test which of the factors above really makes a difference to your conversion rates. You want them to call all leads, or perhaps all leads who submit a “contact sales” form and a random 25% from the rest.

3) Report on the results of your scoring

Once you decide on the factors above and implement your scoring program, report on conversion rates by factor, by rating. Here you’re looking for correlations – does a higher decision-maker rating result in a higher conversion rate? What about industry segment? Below is a sample chart on what your results could look like.

Conversion rates by factor by rating

Factor	Rating = 1	Rating = 2	Rating = 3
Decision maker	30%	10%	8%
Industry segment	15%	12%	15%
Individual activity	40%	20%	5%
Company-wide activity	20%	15%	12%
Top companies	10%	15%	10%

In this example, the factors for decision maker, individual activity and company-wide activity point to better leads. If you have enough revenue and cost information, try figuring out your ROI per factor per rating. You may find that all your leads have a positive ROI, in which case you’ll want to send all to sales. But flag better ones for quicker follow up.

4) Use results to improve your ROI

With this matrix of results, you can isolate various conceptualizations you’ve made and see if they work in the real world. If they do, configure your marketing automation system to only send to sales based on those scores. But if they don’t make sense, replace them with other ideas to continually refine and improve your lead scoring program.

Conclusion

Just because different platforms use template lead scoring programs showing implicit and explicit as your only dimensions, don’t feel like you’re stuck. You can use as many or as few dimensions as you like to score your leads. You may come up with 10 areas you think make a difference, but find in reporting that only 3 actually correlated to statistically significant results.

Overall, make sure you score leads based on what makes them a good lead rather than on what others tell you is a good scoring system. Brainstorm various ideas, test them, get results and use what really works. Your company will reap the benefits.

When you survey prospects and subscribers, you try to profile them, hoping to focus a message around what they want from your product. Profiling can also clarify your offering to advertisers. The more description you can give about your subscribers’ buying behavior, and the better you can slice this out by profile, the more worthwhile it becomes to advertise in your magazine.

In segmenting your subscribers during a survey, where do you start? It helps to think in terms of the profile data on which you could act (or on which your advertisers could act). Basic demographic data like sex, marital status, age and income can be useful for large-scale branding initiatives that cover all households in a certain geography. But if you’re a specialty publisher, you need to be more specific with targeted demographics like job title or industry sector. In fact, there is a whole array of data you can acquire through effective market research, which are not limited to demographics.

• Customer segments: Do subscribers in different stages of your customer life cycle value the attributes of your publication differently? If yes, develop different content for approaching customers who are prospects, free trials, have subscribed for 6 months, or for 5 years.
• Behavioral: This data applies to some action your subscribers have taken. This includes segmenting responses by web pages viewed, original source, or whether they have showed interest in other publications. In addition, segmentation applies to buyer behavior that helps advertisers. For example, are certain types of subscriber more likely to look at advertising, or be more inclined to purchase certain products? Does this change by season, demographic, magazine, or by some other dimension?
• Psychographics:  Some data offer a psychological profile of your subscribers. They may consider themselves as part of a generation (ie. Baby Boom, Generation X, Generation Y) or belong to a group that defines them in a way that a simple demographic does not (ie. Veterans, the LGBT community, Cosmo readers, Retirees, Environmentalists, etc.).
• Demographics:  These are basic data like age, sex, marital status and income. Large consumer magazines trade on this type of information, targeting huge segments of the population at large for new subscribers and advertisers.
• Business demographics: B2B specialty publishers will want to use data like job title and industry sector to segment subscribers. For example, what do pulp and paper industry business intelligence analysts value in a newsletter? Or to which associations do executive secretaries in service industries typically belong?

In terms of market research, this profile data will be transcribed against the rating questions you include in your survey. You will start to know that sales professionals really value competitor reports while C-level managers want industry forecasts. Or that retired men particularly enjoy reading about home improvement. While segmentation of your market is a useful concept for other forms of market research like panels and focus groups, if you want quantitative validation that your ideas about a segment hold true among everyone in that population, then you will need to conduct a subscriber survey. And as you design your questionnaire, make sure to ask questions that will give you relevant dimensions with which to segment your subscribers. Some rules apply:

• Don’t ask what you already know: If you ask your subscribers for a job title classification when they originally subscribe and can track that data back to responses, then there’s no reason to ask it again during a survey.
• Don’t ask what you have no possibility of using: If there is no way that you can differentiate marketing tactics for different segments, don’t ask the question. Survey space is precious. Although we may be curious about some inane demographic or another, only ask for it if you can actually use the information.
• If you ask something very personal, leave an opt-out option: Some subscribers may not want to share information about their income or lifestyle or race. If you have a survey question that is more personal, then add in the option “I prefer not to say.”
• Don’t be afraid to identify the needs of a tiny part of your audience: Some marketers think that they only attract a certain type of customer, so why even try to delineate responses by some other dimension. However, a small segment of subscribers could lead you to a new opportunity; you can use different messaging to attract that audience to your existing publication, or even launch a new publication catering to that particular segment.
• Slice your data any way you can: When you’ve finished collecting your survey data, slice each question by all segments. You may be surprised at which segments correlate (or don’t correlate) to different ratings.
• Don’t assume anything: Just because you believe something to be true doesn’t make it so. At all companies, anecdotal evidence can take on the mantel of established fact. It gets repeated so many times that everyone believes it without checking the evidence. Market research may challenge these assumptions. Let it.

Now that you’ve thought about how to conceptualize your subscriber segments, you’re ready to include the right questions into your survey, and be ready to slice satisfaction, importance, determinance and any other measure by these segments. You can then approach various types of subscribers with content relevant to their needs, enabling you to generate new business and retain existing customers.

As a marketer in the magazine industry, do you have an overall strategy to learn more about your audience? How are you leveraging your research to attract and retain subscribers, and to secure more advertising sales? Subscriber research is multifaceted, but we can break it down into four main categories:

• Research to develop a circulation strategy
• Research to benchmark customer satisfaction
• Research to sell advertising
• Research to syndicate and sell to your advertisers

Developing your circulation strategy could mean many things. You may want to grow into a new market, launch a new magazine or develop a core marketing message. With many thousands of subscribers, you are sitting on a veritable goldmine of data, waiting to be collected. But first you need a plan.

Step 1) Define your objectives
What do you want to accomplish? This could be anything from attracting more prospects, retaining current subscribers, keeping subscribers satisfied, discovering new opportunities for content or winning more advertisers. Defining these key objectives will help you focus on the research that you need.

Step 2) What do you already know?
What sort of information do you already have, and what do you need to take action? Figuring this out will help you determine what sort of research you still need. If you have nothing, then begin by doing some secondary research to see what you may be able to find. Compiling research from the web will be a lot cheaper than conducting a failed survey.

Step 3) What gaps do you need to fill?
After you have collected all prior and secondary research, determine where you need to fill in the gaps in order to meet your objectives. Do you have…

• …very little useful information at all?
• …some defining characteristics of the information you would like to collect but no overall quantitative validation?
• …quantitative validation from previous studies?

If you already have the answers you need from a past report, you may not need to do any market research at all, unless you want to verify what you know, or think a time series including past data will allow you to understand trends.

Step 4) Build a research plan based on your objectives and the gaps in your knowledge
If you do not even have a framework around which to build a quantitative study, you will need to do some qualitative research. For example, if you are a specialty publisher focused on a small niche, a systematic schedule of customer visits will help you conceptualize how subscribers think about your publication(s). If your publication is larger and consumer oriented, focus groups, panels or open-ended surveys will prove invaluable.

After building a framework for how subscribers think about your magazine(s), you will use that to formulate a survey. Just because the 20-30 subscribers you interviewed in focus groups believe one way does not mean that the entire universe of your circulation agrees. Quantitative validation in the form of a subscriber survey will confirm what the entire population of your subscribers believes.

Step 5) Rinse and repeat
Over time, you’ll want to confirm and reconfirm your subscribers’ conceptualizations of what your magazine is all about. But the ongoing research must fit into a specific set of goals for your organization. For example, you may want to:

• Benchmark subscriber satisfaction overall, by segment and among various key attributes
• Conduct an ongoing competitive analysis of how your magazine performs in various attributes vs. other similar publications
• Continually explore new opportunities among your current customers to create new content, or launch new magazines
• Create sales materials around subscriber buying behavior that will show the effectiveness of advertising in your magazine vs. the competition
• Syndicate ongoing studies that you can sell to advertisers, helping them understand their potential universe of customers

Knowing your subscribers can prove invaluable. But before you send a survey or conduct a focus group, make sure that your market research tactics fit into an overall strategy, allowing you to leverage your collected data into an overall action plan that you can use to meet your business goals.

Spyglass Intelligence LLC has published A Competitive Assessment of the Top 12 Largest US Consumer Magazine Publishers, which you can purchase on Amazon.com.

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Michael Porter’s Five Forces is a framework for analyzing the potential profitability of an industry. Over the last ten years, the magazine publishing business has ridden a roller coaster of profits and losses due to the push of information online, financial calamity and the advent of the iPad. But overall, will profits eventually be squeezed by better technology, intense competition or new entrants?

The threat of the entry of new competitors
How hard is it to set up a new magazine? In a great article about magazine startup tactics, Dan Wiesner talks about what he does to launch a new magazine. With an eight-month budget of $20,000, a subsequent 5-6 month budget of $60,000 and a final 24-36 months at $40,000, Wiesner aggregated a list of 50,000 names and ended with a circulation of 40,000. So in three years and a relatively small amount of money, a competitor can be up, running and profitable.

This means that, for smaller magazine publishers, the threat of entry is huge. But larger publishers with circulations in the millions will have less to worry about from a new entrant. Their worries lie more with existing competitors who want to move into their space.

The threat of substitute products or services
This big threat has materialized over the last 10 years. The internet has eroded subscriber loyalty and offers advertisers a cheap, trackable marketing channel. With the iPad, magazine publishers are able to offer better services to advertisers, but the pressure for results-based marketing will be huge, especially in the age of Google.

Magazine publishers will need to find ways to mitigate this threat and prove the effectiveness of print marketing. More interactive advertising on tablets will help, as will subscriber surveys focused on the effectiveness of print ads within a certain, branded context. Without good differentiation, ad dollars will continue to leak into the search-engine-marketing world and away from magazine publishers.

The mass-market reach of consumer magazines also helps to differentiate advertising. Online advertising can reach various micro-audiences with different keywords, but creating a mass consumer psychology around certain products requires something more. The number of competitors in the magazine space dampens this advantage, so it is imperative that publishers work hard to delineate their focus on content, context and audience.

The bargaining power of customers (buyers)
Subscribers have some bargaining power vis-à-vis magazine publishers as great deal of content is now located online for free. Because prices are low, and consumers still crave a total, branded experience from certain magazines, it will be more important for magazines to keep their core focus rather than becoming generalist providers of content.

Advertisers have more bargaining power, especially with the substitute of cheap, trackable online marketing. Again, the challenge is to convince advertisers that a fully-branded, contextual, mass-market experience for their prospects is a necessity as well. Any qualitative or quantitative research to back up these attributes will be invaluable.

The bargaining power of suppliers
Suppliers to the magazine publishing business have very little power. Printers and journalists all compete for the same business. However, some personalities can exert a greater influence over content, like Oprah Winfrey or Rachael Ray. Celebrity-focused publications will lack some of this advantage.

The intensity of competitive rivalry
Competition in the industry can be fierce, especially within growing segments like food and health. But any competition will differ among brand-positioning models. For example, a niche publisher with a strong core focus will face less intense competition than a broad consumer magazine without such focus.

Overall assessment
The magazine publishing business certainly faces some strong challenges in terms of substitution and competitive rivalry. But with a strategy focused on leveraging core strengths can help to mitigate weakness on both these fronts. Some large, multi-brand publishers will do this well, organizing their magazines around core messages and audiences. Some will do it poorly and less profitably.