Jay LeonardTo grow a business in the B2B arena, nearly all companies will seek the exploit the power of the internet to generate leads for new business – utilising SEO techniques to generate organic traffic, email marketing campaigns to inform potential customers and Google adwords to target new business areas.
Most marketing techniques, both online and offline, are designed to drive traffic to your website and increase the amount of enquires for your business sales team to chase – but what about the visitors to your site that don’t take the final step and get in touch? These visitors are a untapped area of potential leads that your business could reach, and for most businesses, they are hidden.
By utilising IP Lead Traffic, this sector of previously hidden leads become approachable – letting you track and measure their interaction with your companies online presence, and more importantly, contact them as part of your sales process, without increasing your adwords or SEO budget.
IP Lead Tracking Explained
IP Lead Tracking lets you see the businesses that have been on your website, as well as the way in which they reached you (directly, Google, PPC, etc.), the search terms they used to get there, the pages they browsed through, even the length of time they spent on each page.
Tracking this way will let you view companies who have trawled through your site, downloaded white your whitepapers, read through your blogs or how-to guides, and even the ones that got to your contact form but didn’t complete the final step. This lets you prioritise and target the companies that are most interested for contact by your sales team, and discard those that are not relevant leads – e.g. those business that got to your site ‘accidently’ looking for a similar, but unrelated search term.
With the main benefit –being that many of these leads will be ‘warm’ – companies with a need or a requirement for your services, giving you an instant advantage over cold-calling businesses.
The data provided by this type of analytics also lets you increase the efficiency of your other marketing activities and budgets by analysing the effectiveness of your PPC/SEO keywords and targeting those which are provided the best return.
The limitations of IP Lead Tracking
IP lead tracking isn’t perfect, or infallible. There are limitations in place due to the nature of the way IP addresses operate.
You can only track IP addresses back to businesses, not stand alone consumers, and only to businesses that operate through a static IP addresses and that haven’t gone out of their way to mask that information (however this is only a tiny section).
The companies that offer IP lead tracking use a combination of automated techniques and manual management to maintain IP addresses and the businesses they correlate too. This means that the tracking isn’t always 100% accurate, there can be mistakes with companies names and information in small amount of cases (however they are usually very obviously when you back track them to their website).
It also means you don’t get personalised information of who was your site – you only get a company name. Leaving your sales team to do some digging to find the relevant contact person – or act on the lead in a relevant way to your business. LinkedIn integration within the IP tracking site itself makes this a quicker task that would first appear to be.
The other main downside is the obvious one – these systems cost money, and how much depends on the level of traffic to your website.
Getting Started
The two main players in IP lead tracking at the moment are WOW Analytics and Lead Forensics. Both offer similar packages with slight differences in how they manage their IP databases, and both offer free trials and demonstrations. Both offer automated alerts, live viewing of business on your site and as much contact information about the viewing businesses as is available (name, address, contact info, website).
Once you’ve signed up, you insert some tracking code onto the pages of your site (the same way Google analytics is handled) and wait for the leads to roll in.
Summary
Online B2B marketing is all about maximising quality leads and improving the efficiency of your time and budgets. IP lead tracking adds an additional tool to find those companies that were previously hidden to you and your business and fold them into your sales process. While IP Lead tracking has its limitations and isn’t complete infallible, it can still provide your business with an extra set of potential customers with a minimum of time and effort.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Hi,
Clear article on this item, the only point is that you get more than 15 providers with really different end features more sales oriented or more marketing oriented with cost going from 75$ a year to 2.500€ a month as saas clic to buy tools. And most providers look for accoutn with higger revenues. Let’ name some providers: Azalead, Getplus, Webleads-tracker, Enecto, leadshancer… to discover more about it: #B2B 2015, web #leads automation & remarketing, une nouvelle piste à suivre? http://www.weesifi.com/WEESIFI-LEAD_a46.html