We used to analyze website effectiveness by how well it conveyed who you are as a company and how quickly and easily it informed visitors of the value you deliver to them. And while we continue to discuss website effectiveness in terms of conversions – providing content that prospects find interesting enough to be willing to give up some of their own information in order to receive it – now that’s no longer enough. Now, with more and more buyers doing their research online at your website and other sites, it’s important to be able to digitally track and see as much as we can about that company and person before they ever reveal themselves to us.
Online tracking of web visitors has taken on added importance for sales and marketing. While web analytics software tells us important metrics like how many visitors we have, which pages they visit and for how long, sales and marketing need more leads.
Using web analytics I can evaluate how my site’s doing as a sales and marketing tool, but now it’s time to take it a step further. I need to be able to actually see if the prospects I’m trying to attract to my website are indeed the ones visiting. I need to see what pages those companies go to and what exactly they are doing on my site. And even more to the point, I need to be able to turn that anonymous visitor into a known entity.
When a company visits your website anonymously, technology can’t tell you who the individual is, but it can certainly tell you their company. And, with links to readily available data sources (including LinkedIn) you can easily find the individuals with the titles that are your targets. When a company comes onto your website it’s an opportunity for you to proactively take its anonymous interest and turn it into a lead. We know from client experience that taking anonymous visitors and converting them into identified prospects directly leads to revenue.
The key criteria in converting an anonymous visitor to a known lead is to not only know who the company is but what they were looking at on your website. For example, if Company A was visiting the LeadLife website and it spent a long time looking at pages and blog posts related to lead nurturing, then we would know to engage the VP of Marketing, CMO and/or CEO in a discussion about lead nurturing’s value to sales and marketing, and ultimately, to the bottom line. Conversely, it would be much more difficult to generate their interest if we had instead initiated a conversation on lead scoring.
What’s now available in technology and supported through process change can help you to make sure your website is performing for sales and marketing in the most effective way. It’s no longer only important to analyze website metrics such as the number of visitors; it’s now time to convert those previously anonymous visitors to known ones.