How to Use Video Data to Score Your Leads

Are you focused on helping your team close more sales? If you’re like most marketers, you are. And you probably already know that lead scoring can be really helpful.

Creating a simple lead scoring system isn’t easy — especially if you want to include video data. Video is engaging for your visitors and can indicate purchase intent. But if you’re not careful, you can get bogged down in the details and overcomplicate things.

It doesn’t matter if you’re just getting started with lead scoring, or already have an advanced algorithm in place; many marketing and sales teams struggle to understand video’s place in this system. If you’re using video to generate leads and qualify prospects, it makes sense to include video data in your scoring criteria.

At Wistia, we spend a lot of time creating videos, and we use lots of data to inform our marketing decisions. How we use video data in our lead scoring has evolved over time, and we’re happy to share what we’ve learned. Ready to go? Let’s dig in.

Wait, what the heck is lead scoring?

The idea of prioritizing and ranking your sales leads has been around a long time. As our world becomes more digital, it has grown increasingly popular for marketing, sales, and analytics teams to try to understand which online behaviors and attributes assist conversion.

The topic of lead scoring has really taken off in the last few years. Just take a peek at the Google trends graph below, which shows searches for “lead scoring” steadily increasing since 2011.

Lead scoring 101

In this article, we won’t spend a ton of time defining what lead scoring is. There are plenty of other blog posts for that. But here’s a three-sentence summary in case this is all new to you:

Scoring your leads is the practice of assigning points, based on certain online characteristics and behaviors that indicate purchase intent (like visiting a pricing page, downloading a product brochure, or requesting a demo). The more purchase intent the behavior shows, the more points get assigned to the lead. Leads with a higher number of points get prioritized by your sales team.

This scoring system helps determine which leads are more likely to be valuable to your business. A visitor who views your pricing page 4 times is a lot more valuable to your business than a visitor who’s only viewed your educational content.

Not all videos are created equal

Some videos are going to be more important to your sales strategy than others. A demo should probably receive more points than a culture video about your company dog, right? Before you can score your videos, you’ll need to prioritize them.

Many companies assign points to leads who’ve watched any video. While this technically works, your videos all have different goals and functions, so treating them all the same is a waste.

First, map your video content to the buyer’s journey

The first step in determining which videos are most important is to perform a video content audit. List all of your videos in one document and then categorize them in terms of their impact on the buyer’s journey.

The buyer’s journey is the research process that a lead goes through leading up to purchase. It includes 3 steps: awareness of a problem, consideration of potential solutions, and a decision on which solution is best for their particular situation.

We like to organize our videos by these stages of the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, or decision). You can also think of these categories as your funnel: top of the funnel (awareness), middle of the funnel (consideration), and bottom of the funnel (decision).

Top of the funnel videos

These videos are typically about your industry and not about your products. Their goal is to educate prospects who have awareness of a need.

The viewer is trying to educate themselves about a specific topic, and they’re not ready to buy your product (or a product similar to yours) just yet.

At Wistia, these include our DIY production “how to” videos, like this one:

They’re targeted to anyone who’s aware that their video efforts can be improved, and are looking for some help. The videos aren’t product or sales-focused, and they usually don’t harp on the Wistia brand.

If someone is interested in creating better videos, they’ll find this content helpful. And maybe down the road, they’ll think of Wistia when it’s time to update their video hosting.

Another good top-of-funnel example example is Moz’s Whiteboard Fridays video series. This series lives on their blog and contains information for viewers who aren’t getting enough traffic, and are interested in learning more about marketing.

Middle of the funnel videos

At this stage, videos introduce your product to prospects who are aware of a problem, and are considering potential solutions.

They are interested in your industry and trying to learn about who you are, and what you do. They might not be sales-ready yet, but they’re interested in learning if you might be able to help.

For Wistia, these include our product overview videos. These videos are created for prospects looking to use software to improve their video efforts. They introduce you to our company and our tools, without diving into anything too specific.

Olark’s fantastic product explainer video on their features page also achieves this goal. Their video gives you a great idea what Olark does, and how they can help your business.

Bottom of the funnel videos

In the last step of the buyer’s journey, videos should help viewers decide which product is the best for their specific situation.

It could be a deep dive into a product feature, a case study, or a testimonial. Viewers watching these videos likely have a short list of vendors they’re evaluating.

At Wistia, our demo gives viewers a detailed tour of our product:

It answers a lot of the questions that prospects typically ask as they’re deciding between Wistia and another solution.

Another example of a bottom of the funnel video is MailChimp at work, which highlights their customer success stories.

Next, assign points to your video views

Now that we understand the different stages of the buyer’s journey and how video comes into play, it’s time to categorize by funnel stage and then assign points.

Assign the most amount of points to leads who watch your bottom-of-funnel videos, since they’re most closely related to sales. Assign the least amount of points to leads who’ve watched your top-of-funnel videos, since these videos are usually more educational.

We like to use Excel to keep ourselves organized for these types of video content audits, but you can use other list tools for help. When you’re done, the results of your audit will look something like this:

If you have a lot of videos, start with the most important and most viewed first, and then add more later.

We didn’t include the exact number of points you should assign to each stage of the buyer’s journey on purpose. No business uses the same scoring scale, so the numbers will be different for your business and your lead scoring criteria.

For advanced marketers, add a column for personas to this document and assign extra points to personas who are more valuable to your business.

Don’t forget about engagement

Now that we’ve categorized our videos by the buyer’s journey and assigned points, let’s add an additional column for play length to our document.

This part will be more intuitive. More engagement = more points. But how granular should you get?

For companies just beginning with lead scoring, we’d recommend starting very basic. Use 50% watched as your baseline. In other words, if someone views more than 50% of your video, assign them additional points. If a viewer watches less than 50% of your video, don’t assign those extra points. That’s it.

When you add this layer to your worksheet, you’ll end up with something like this:

To create a more advanced video lead scoring system, you can expand this by assigning different amounts of bonus points for 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% engagement. Again, we strongly advocate starting simple!

It’s time to score some leads with video

At this point we’ve mapped our videos to the buyer’s journey, and included engagement in our scoring criteria. It’s time to take this information and plug it into your lead scoring system of choice. Happy scoring!