Too Many Anonymous

Too Many Anonymous Website Visitors. Now What?

BY BRIAN BLUFF, SITE-SEEKER, INC.

Brian Bluff is the president and cofounder of Site-Seeker, Inc., an Internet marketing firm specializing in SEO, SEM, social media and web development, with a strong focus on the B2B manufacturing and distribution arena. Together with his brother, Eddie Bluff, vice president of key accounts, Brian has grown the company into a successful source of search engine and social media marketing solutions.

In this article, I will focus on solutions to these two problems.

1. On average, prospects are 57% of the way through the buyer’s journey before they engage with you or your sales reps? 1 2. 97% of website visitors leave your website before contacting you, even if your product or service can solve their problem. 2

Put simply, prospects don’t want to talk to you. Why should they? For the most part, they can gather information and make decisions about which products and services are best for them just by searching online.

Your job as a marketer is to change that. Here’s how.

INCREASE CONVERSION RATE - ALIGN WEBSITE CONTENT WITH AUDIENCE NEEDS

To keep your company in contention for new business opportunities, you need to convince prospects to engage with you while or after they consume your website content; and the earlier in their buying process, the better off you are.

To do this, it is critical to understand the needs of potential buyers.

The marketing tool that documents these needs is called a buyer persona. Buyer personas are fictitious archetypes representing the most common characteristics of the people that buy from you.

In the B2B world, they are typically described by job title – Purchasing Agents, Operations Manager, Welders, etc.

Buyer personas document your understanding of these groups of buyers including: • Their goals as they consume your website content including the information they need

and answers to important questions. • How they prefer to consume information - mobile devices, laptops, tablets. • What type of content they prefer - articles, case studies, tables, infographics, video, etc. • What information you want them to know about your company or offering at each stage of the buying process.

We develop B2B buyer personas utilizing surveys and interview-style meetings. Participants in the process normally include your customer-facing staff, channel partners, and actual customers, if available. The interviewer will pose a series of questions to the group and document and organize answers to tell a story about that particular buyer persona.

WHY ARE BUYER PERSONAS IMPORTANT?

Buyer personas provide you a competitive advantage by maturing your content approach to include input from those people most knowledgeable about your customers and prospects. They make the difference between a poor conversion rate (i.e., the percentage of website visitors filling out a form, initiating a chat session, or calling you) and a website that performs as a lead-generating machine.

Beyond the direct impact on your website’s performance, buyer personas can positively impact all aspects of your marketing program including: • SEO - by anticipating important content subjects and providing you the opportunity to add this content to your website. • Landing pages to support digital advertising (including Google search ads where great content means a higher quality score and

a lower cost per click) and email marketing efforts. • Printed material content and messaging. • Video content and messaging. • Trade show booth design.

LEVERAGE TECHNOLOGY TO IDENTIFY ANONYMOUS WEBSITE VISITORS

One positive result of the pandemic is that many companies were forced to rethink their new business/marketing approach. In general, that’s meant doing things differently through the use of technology to achieve a competitive edge.

The second statistic above - 97% of visitors leave a website without converting - is a painful reality, especially when you think of all the time and money you spend building your website and driving traffic to it.

I bet your website attracts enough qualified visitors in one month; to meet your new business goal for the year, if only you could identify those visitors and engage them in your sales process.

The good news is that now we can identify a significant portion of those previously anonymous visitors by company name. These solutions function by breaking backward the IP address of website visitors and associating that IP address with a specific company.

The best solutions can also automate the consumption of data by establishing filters to identify companies matching your defined target audience (size, location, industry, etc.), automatically pushing the hottest leads to sales based on your criteria (visits to important pages, number of visits, a specific company visiting your website, etc.), retrieving contact information including email addresses and phone numbers of your buyer personas and automatically beginning email drip marketing campaigns to these individuals.

HOW TO CHOOSE A WEBSITE VISITOR IDENTIFICATION SOLUTION?

Here is what we look for in a solution: • Match Rate. The pandemic has caused more people to work from home, which has lowered the match rate of these solutions. According to our contacts at Lead Forensics - the leader in this space, even at the height of the pandemic, they were still able to identify 18% of visitors on average. Match rate will increase as people begin working from the office again. • Error Rate. The secret sauce to this technology is the accuracy of the IP database and its ability to filter out IP addresses of Internet

Service Providers. In a recent headto-head comparison, we analyzed the results from two providers and found that one of the providers had a 45% error rate with most of those errors related to an ISP mistakenly being identified as the visiting company. • Data Capture Capability.

Browsing activity, location of visitors, telephone numbers, and email addresses of key people are

important aspects of the solution and allow it to be actionable. • Robust Integrations. Many

B2B companies use a CRM and a Marketing Automation platform (email marketing) to consolidate data and automate processes.

Integration with these tools is important, although they can be used in a standalone configuration too. • Automatic Distribution of

Information. Push marketing qualified leads into Marketing

Automation platform (email marketing) and sales qualified leads into CRM. • Available Support. Look for support setting up your solution and the ability to secure ongoing support as needed.

WHO SHOULD USE THIS SOLUTION?

At Site-Seeker, we have partnered with several technology providers and built our offering, Site-Insights, to include strategies for data consumption by sales and marketing, digital ad campaigns to both retarget qualified visitors and attract more of the best-qualified visitors, custom integrations, and creation and monitoring of KPIs.

This solution is best suited for companies generating a good amount of traffic (30K+ visitors per year), with a high average order value, that use a CRM, and/or that are involved in email marketing and/or have an e-commerce website.

6 TOP USE CASES

1. Land New Customers. If your

Sales Reps are skilled hunters, they will turn this information into gold. Imagine knowing that the manufacturer right down the road was on your website and looking at a specific product. This type of information turns a cold call into a hot call and increases your likelihood of starting a conversation. 2. Returning Sales Pipeline. Upload a list of active prospects and inform the assigned Salesperson when a prospect visits your website. 3. Cross-Selling. Does your sales model require that Sales Reps call on multiple people in different departments within the same organization?

If so, I would assume cross-selling is a key driver of increased revenue.

With this solution, we can upload a list of current customers and automate the process of informing

Sales Reps when a customer lands on a web page describing a product or service they currently don’t buy from you. 4. Lapsed Customers. Do you suffer from high customer churn or long periods between customer orders?

If so, upload a list of past customers and notify your Sales Rep when these customers engage with your website. 5. Cold/Lost Sales Pipeline. How many times have you had a hot prospect go radio silent overnight? One day you are talking delivery dates, and the next you’re not talking to anyone. With this technology, you can lie in wait for their return, and when they do we will notify your

Sales Rep who will spring into action and restart the conversation at the time that coincides with their rekindled interest. 6. Better Marketing Insights. As a marketer, data is everything. Imagine knowing that your campaigns are targeting the right prospects and driving them to your website. This information will allow you to make informed decisions about where you should cut back your spending and where to double down.

SUMMARY

In this bright new digital world, power is in the hands of the prospect. They control when to engage and when to creep about silently collecting information about a potential purchase.

As marketers, we can either accept this or take steps to change it.

This article addressed the use of buyer personas to improve conversion rates and thereby cause more visitors to contact you about their situation.

I also described a new technology solution with the ability to identify these otherwise anonymous website visitors and several ways to automatically activate this data to the benefit of your bottom line.

Caution - These are complex subjects and the way they are implemented will determine your ROI. I urge you to reach out if you have questions or just want to walk through your situation. I can be reached at brianbluff@site-seeker.com or 315.732.9281x 211.

Best of luck!

Sources: 1 - Gartner 2018 2 - Site-Seeker customer experience

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