How to use website intelligence to increase marketing ROI - 24th December 2009

If you are interested in the product or service of a company, what is the first thing you will do to find out more about them? It's pretty likely that checking out their website and blog will be high if not top of your list.

So if you follow this logic, as a b2b marketer any marketing campaign should result in activity on your website. In short - you stimulate your target market with marketing campaigns - they then come to your website to find out more about you.

Traditional measurement techniques such as Google Analytics focus on counting the number of visitors coming back to your site, but how do you know if your marketing messages have hit the right target audience or not? Wouldn't it be useful to see the profiles of those companies who are visiting your website and what they are doing on your site?

Gartner describe part of this as a ‘customer centric website strategy'. To a b2b marketer means being able to understand browsing profiles from individual companies and respond to that activity appropriately.

In this simple guide, ther e are four key elements to being able to help you generate a higher return on your sales and marketing investments. The underlying key is making sure that relevant information gets to the right person at the right time and that appropriate actions follow this information.

1) Relevant Information

This is more than just seeing the names of the companies visiting your site. It is seeing the entire profile of companies - how many different people from that company visited your site, on how many different occasions, what search terms did they use to arrive there, what time of day.

Far more importantly the relevancy part is overlaying this with what the relationship with that company is. For example, is it a lapsed client and suddenly there are 4 different visitors from that company looking at your site - is it a strong sign they want to engage with you again? Could it be that of the 100 companies you recently targeted in a mail shot, that 5 of them are showing really serious interest and are looking at all your product pages? Would this help leverage your time in terms of prioritising which companies to focus on?

These profiles contain a wealth of intelligence and need to be understood in the context of your relationship with them.

2) Right Person

The information needs to get through to the right person. Imagine if a salesman has 20 prospects and two of them are showing significant interest by both looking at many case studies pages on your website.

That information on those two prospects needs to be in the hands of the salesman so he can prioritise and focus his conversation.

This information has limited value if it simply stays in the hands of marketing and doesn't reach the salesman who can drive appropriate actions from this actionable intelligence.

3) The right time

Our salesman in the previous point needs to have this information straight away. It's significantly less valuable if he gets the information in a report at the end of the month. The response needs to be timely to be most beneficial.

4) Driving the right actions

For the intelligence to be truly valuable rather than "oh that's interesting", specific actions need to be driven off the back off the information. This could be salesmen contacting prospects at the right time and having the right conversation with those prospects.

It could be account managers driving the right conversations with clients. It could be marketing teams identifying say 20 prospective companies who are looking at their website and then focusing their marketing activities on only those 20 companies as they are already interested in your services.

Our experience is that when these four factors come together to act on website intelligence it is hugely powerful and can lead to meaningful sales growth driving a much higher return on your sales and marketing investments.

We have found that the best process is one of test and measure - working out what works for you and what doesn't is the route that has been most successful in driving growth for our clients. Remember - the key is getting relevant information to the right person at the right time and driving appropriate actions.

By Caspar Craven, co-founder & director, Trovus 

Written for Utalk Marketing How to Guides 

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