Website analytics are a useful tool in optimising your website performance by highlighting how users are interacting with your data. Not only does it allow you to understand how well your website is performing, but it provides insightful data about your visitors. You can use this data to your advantage when it comes to future marketing decisions, tailoring your B2B approach to give your customers exactly what they want.
Here are some benefits of advanced website analytics:
1. Know your visitors
You can identify the geographical information of your website visitors using their IP address. By discovering where your visitors are located, you can target the appropriate areas. GatorLeads can help you identify who the company is and where they are based.
Take a look at your client’s digital engagement and behaviour, are they on social media a lot, or reacting to your email campaigns or attending your events and webinars. This then gives you the visibility of which marketing channels you should be utilising to find your next customer.
2. Track where traffic is coming from
This will help determine where it is best to invest your marketing time and budget. We can provide you with detailed insights and then you can create targeted campaigns around this information. This can be done with two methods:
3. Use an IP lookup database
There are numerous companies out there that use a public IP database to see who is on their website. Think of these databases as a giant online post office. These databases know who each company is by their IP address (like an online postcode).
Now, if you’ve been gathering IP addresses and email addresses like we have been for years, you’ll have a substantial private database to work off. In fact, you can access millions of company contact details, including their employees’ email addresses. If you don’t want to go through the painstaking process of building up your own database, you can use an IP lookup tool such as ours to purchase this contact data.
With additional features, such as job titles and financial information, your sales team will know which individuals on your website to chase right away.
4. Use a personalised URL
Once your sales team know who the key decision maker they need to contact is, and they have their email address, they can start tracking what they are interested in. This is where those pesky cookies come into play. Our personalised URL feature – known as PURLs – uses cookie technology to track individuals as they move around the website.
If each sales executive created a PURL and sent them in an email to each individual lead they had bought the email addresses for, they will be able to track more individual’s movements on your company’s website. It would allow them to tailor their sales pitches in a way they couldn’t before. It would allow your marketing team to know which pages on the website work best for attracting, engaging and converting leads.
5. Gauge the success of other marketing activities and see your match rate rise.
As your marketing activities take off you will start to drive more traffic back to your website, causing your match rate to rise. When you have more companies recognised, more leads can be tracked in your analytics system, which in turn will provide more named leads and create more sales opportunities.
6. Know exactly what your customers are looking for.
You marketers have a tough job. You’re expected to know exactly what your website visitors want without ever having met them. With only 3% getting in contact with you, it doesn’t seem like most marketers are having much success either. So we’ve discovered the 3 things website users are screaming out for.
They don’t want a newsletter
You might be trying to get your website visitors to give you their email address by offering them a newsletter. Well, we’ve got news for you. Newsletters are old and stale and so 2002. Instead, try promoting an “insider guide/digest” with expert tips. This sets you apart and makes website visitors more likely to turn to you for expert advice. Establish your authority by including tips to increase revenue, well-researched content and advice they can actually use in their day to day working life.
They want to think they are the most important person in your world
We all know personalisation is key, but we haven’t taken it far enough. It’s about pandering to your website visitor and making them feel like the centre of the universe. That’s why it’s essential you give them the information they are after if you want them to engage. Get it wrong once and they might just ignore you forever. If in doubt, use visitor identification and tracking to see exactly who you are speaking to and what they want.
Side note: Sending email campaigns from a personal account will make them more likely to respond in a personal way too.
They want simple communications, NOT SPAM
With multiple lead nurturing campaigns, it can be easy to lose track of who is receiving what information. Slow it down and un-complicate the process. Each website visitor should only be in one email campaign at a time. Any more and, guess what? You’re spam.
If you’re struggling to keep up with who is in what campaign and who needs moving where for their lead nurturing journey, it’s time to consider a complete B2B marketing automation platform. That way, you can get a system that does it all for you.
7. See where you are losing customers.
A bounce is when a customer visits one page and then leaves without taking any further action or viewing any other pages. This can be clearly seen and broken down by times of day so that you can see which pages they viewed and the time that they were there. Use this tool to improve your website user journey and help leads move further through their buying journey before getting in touch with them.
Driving the right traffic is one of the most important jobs in marketing, not only driving traffic to the website but the right traffic at that. With a number of marketing channels at your fingertips, it can be easy to assume that finding your target audience will be a doddle. However, it is not best practice to flood every channel with as much content as it can handle.
Overexposure to a product, company or type of content can make your target audience immune to your communications. Instead, targeting your three most successful channels and understanding where your prospective audience spend most of their time will give you a more direct, targeted approach at a lower cost.
Ensuring you are only driving the right leads to your website.
8. Find out how to optimise your website
See which device and which browser is being used to view your site. This feeds back vital information that can be considered when redesigning your website.
So, you are confident you have driven the right traffic to your website using the right channels and you have kept a close eye on the founding source of all your website leads throughout the month. Now its time to ensure your paid for leads are followed up effectively.
This is the proof in the pudding to tracking your ROI for your marketing spend. Ensure your sales teams are notified when paid for leads enter your website and are followed up with almost immediately.
Alternatively, set up automated triggered workflows to feed your leads with relevant and timely content before your sales team get in touch. The key is to make sure all paid for leads are followed up with retrospectively.
With these 3 tactics firmly in place, you will easily and effectively be able to track and identify ROI from your paid for marketing channels. This all helps to give an idea of the most profitable web journey, allowing you to better optimise it for future visitors.
Interested in more benefits? See what else you can do to turn your website into a profit engine. Better yet, why not learn how you can generate new business with GatorLeads?
Using additional data and a value proposition to target prospects
Data is at the core of all businesses. Whether its customers, prospects, leads or website visitors. Your data is the answer to your sales and marketing prayers. But understanding your data and translating it into tangible actions and makeup can be a little daunting. At CommuniGator, our data is our best friend. We carried out a Value Proposition to really understand the customers we work with and help us to identify our true target audience. We’ve got some steps that can help you do the same.
Get to know your customers
Your customers are your fruit to fortune. Getting to know them on a granular level is paramount to identifying your true target audience. Starting with the individuals at your customers; what are their job roles, their pain points and their needs. Where do they spend most of their time on the web, which of your marketing communications do they interact with and what was their first ever engagement with you?
Then broadening your research into the makeup of the businesses; industries, location, demographics, turnover and the business pain points and needs too. From analysing your entire client base, you start to identify common denominators across the board that you can apply as your killer values.
Identify your prospects
By identifying your current customers and their build up you can start to identify businesses like them in your target audience. Who is your ideal customer? The answer to this question then makes up your ideal prospect too.
By analysing your clients browsing behaviour and purchase history gives you a clear picture of how your prospects will react and where best to reach out to them at the right time.
Your Killer Values
The DNA of your existing customer data makeup your killer values. What do you really look for in a business/individual? For example, our killer values are B2B businesses with an annual turnover of £5 million or more that are actively looking to generate new business opportunities for their sales team. They must already be doing email marketing and ideally have a CRM system that we can plug into.
This is our ideal customer, and we know this from interacting with our current customer base and really understanding them and their business needs.
Segment and target
From identifying your killer values, you can really segment your data into finer detail. Target your data based on each killer value or attribute. Segment your marketing campaigns to both your customers and your prospects based on their preferences.
For instance, if you do business with both manufacturing companies and pharmaceutical companies, both audiences are going to be interested in completely different formats and topics of content. Applying this to your marketing communications will mean you see better engagement as you are interacting with the right people about the right topics.
We’re here to get you started on your way to identifying your killer values and understanding what makes up your data DNA. Download our Killer Value template today to start your journey
How to get sales to report the marketing source
How many times have you begged sales to report on where their leads are coming from? Do you feel you have to constantly chase on the marketing source of their converted leads? How would you like to fix the broken link between sales and marketing?
You think it would be simple. You do the marketing, you get the lead for sales, sales work on the opportunity and then the deal is won or lost. However, that linear approach doesn’t always work because leads don’t always covert straight away. In fact, the average sales cycle is between 6-9 months long.
Marketing -> Sales Lead -> Opportunity -> Won/Lost
The issue
The problem with such a long sales cycle is that it can be hard to report on. Often sales are expected to close off their sales by the end of the quarter, so it’s easier for them to close off a lead as “dead” rather than keep it hanging in the balance.
Other reasons sales could cut leads off instead of placing them in the CRM as converted marketing opportunities include:
- Focusing on closing the quarter and promising to upload the lead details the next quarter but forgetting.
- Not uploading the lead because they don’t want the pressure of trying to close the deal before the quarter ends.
- They don’t want to affect their win: loss ratio.
As time goes on, sales create new opportunities from this lead. Perhaps they start building a relationship with someone else in the company or the lead gets back in contact as an inbound lead. However, now they don’t have any history because the lead was cut off as “dead” last quarter. Therefore, you can’t identify the lead source or the marketing activities connected to them. There goes the marketing value in the sales pipeline.
The resolution
So, how can you combat this? It’s simple. Implement lead management into your CRM to track the lead as soon as they are in your system from marketing. You can track the whole company and every individual from there, so you don’t lose the history of any lead again. Combine this with dispelling the stigma around leads crossing over quarter target goals and you’ll soon see the link between sales & marketing start to fix itself.
With IP lookup software you can identify every website leads original source and track their entire journey. This is the bridge between sales and marketing. Marketing can keep an eye on ROI from each channel, proving the worth of their marketing spend. While sales can get a deep insight into each leads interests and pain points before initial contact. Allowing them to tailor their sales pitch.
Identifying your website traffics marketing source on a monthly basis is the foundation to successful marketing; utilising your performing channels and ensuring you are targeting the right leads at the right time with the right content.
