Ten years after the crash, the dotcom boom has finally come of age. With the recession driving the need for measurable results that prove return on investment, marketing budgets are attributing more spend toward online activity. Furthermore, a report by Forrester has shown that B2B expenditure on interactive marketing is expected to double by 2014.
Whilst this growth is positive, it has also meant that companies are operating in an increasingly competitive market space, where an alternative product or service is only a click away.
Given the fact that online budgets are continuing to increase, a necessary amount of this should be attributed to improving customers’ online experience. The need not only to remove potential web stress through better website design but also to anticipate the needs of a new customer through better segmentation and targeting should be a key consideration for all companies.
Often, online marketers focus too heavily on one metric: optimising the site around that single key performance indicator (KPI). Conversion, for example, compares buying sessions against overall sessions. Used alone, this KPI doesn’t provide a thorough picture when problems occur. Consequently, the marketer may believe that the issue is price and consider lowering prices or offering discount promotions to increase conversion. This can mask the underlying issues, which might be related to the quality of traffic, navigation, creative or content relevancy.
The reality is that many factors play a role in getting the visitor to complete a conversion. Successful B2B marketers should establish a framework of appropriate KPIs, set targets for each one based both on their goals and a comparative benchmark, and review them on a regular basis to make sure targets are being met. Once again, web analytics can be used to monitor and analyse these.
Analysing visitor funnels/paths is a key step in identifying customer journeys and drop-off points, including abandoned transactions, downloads, video plays and form completions, which in turn can help to identify problems with the website. By using behavioural segmentation to slice and dice the data, marketers can delve even deeper to establish the reasons why this may be happening. A company may want to look at keywords and phrases driving visitors to the site, the length of time spent on the site/page and bounce rate, as well as onsite search terms. They should also examine segments of new versus repeat visitors, traffics sources and more advanced segments, such as serial abandoners and one-page visitors. These insights can be used to improve SEO, adding new content, optimising online forms, creating more relevant content to improve the site’s stickiness and ultimately increasing the number of leads or conversions.
Whilst ‘merchandising’ is traditionally a retail term, it is essentially the process of optimising the saleability of products and services, an equally applicable need within the B2B space. If done right, online merchandising leads people past the homepage to view products and services. It entices them with cross-sell and up-sell offers to drive up average order value. It ensures that pricing is in line with the competition and helps visitors move effortlessly through buying processes. However, this is a complex process, and is by no means a case of ‘one-size-fits-all’.
It is important to remember that product and service categories represent internal product and service groupings, not necessarily how people buy. Products and services must be grouped on the site according to multiple customer preferences, e.g. business need, pain or issue and by sector and function. Similarly, organisations can offer relevant and personalised content, such as whitepapers, case studies and opinion pieces, to enhance the customer experience.
Profiling enables organisations to analyse the visitor lifecycle, the potential to convert, and track and score leads. This includes tracking repeat visitors, visitors that view multiple content – and across multiple sessions – and content affinities where combinations of content are viewed. It also includes analysis of conversion attribution to understand the marketing mix that leads to a successful sale. In doing so, companies can score them and apply this knowledge to inform the decision as to when and how a lead should be contacted, as well as what content to include.
Fundamentally, all of these tips are dependent on a deep understanding of the customer. By using web analytics, organisations can effectively put this advice into action and adapt their offering in response to their existing customers’ and potential customers’ needs.
