The current economic turmoil has forced us to be more efficient and targeted. Here are five ways for B2B marketers to tap an easily accessible font of insight to aid them in this process – by turning their websites into a customer intelligence tool.
1. Locate customer pain points
People’s behaviour in the web world is in many ways the same as in the physical. When someone stops to browse items in a store you can tell a lot about their interests – the colours they like, the fashions. The same holds true online. Every time a visitor comes to your site their behaviour reveals what they are interested in and what their pain points or needs are. You need to be able to respond with the same degree of sensitivity as you would in the physical world.
2. Understand when a prospect is ready to engage
Having carried out initial research online, visitors to your site are more knowledgeable about you and the available alternatives than ever before. You too have to be smarter. You need to quickly establish yourself as an authority in their area of interest.
The website has become the first step in the customer engagement process. It can tell you what your customers want and is a platform to interact with them intelligently. If they look at price, for example, it may be a buying signal, and shows you that the prospect is trying to qualify you in or out of their selection process.
3. Weight and score leads
Every piece of content on your website can tell you something about your customer: what they care about; where they are in the buying process. To be able to gain this level of insight, all of your content needs to be allocated a score or weight.
This enables lead scoring – the process of calculating a visitor’s propensity and readiness to buy based on the total score produced by their behaviour on your site. Every item they read adds to their profile, allowing you to build up a picture of that individual’s attitudes and interests. It might be possible to work out even more detail by tracking them back to a web forum, or using their Internet address to figure out their location or their company.
By tying all this information together you get a lead score that measures how serious they are about buying from you. By tracking lead scores, it is possible to create agreement between marketing and sales about what constitutes a qualified lead. Not only does this help smooth the relationship between marketing and sales it makes a big impression on your customers. You can also arm your sales team with reams of data about customer interests and concerns.
4. Harness attitudinal data
Visitor interaction with your site can provide a rich seam of knowledge about attitudes and behaviour that must be shared with other databases, including customer relationship management (CRM) systems. It should be possible to tune messages and content on the website for different groups of customers and to continually improve online experiences.
Customers reveal a lot about their attitudes, especially if they start making repeated visits or complete a profile form in order to register with you. Harvesting attitudinal data allows you to start personalising interactive experiences that build on the insights gained from responses to web content to deliver optimum business results.
You can track interactions over time, test multiple campaigns, and determine what most motivates customers to engage with you.
Once you’ve connected web insights with the rest of your customer management systems, you can track lead-to-win ratios, analyse those interactions with successful outcomes, and replicate successes.
5. Track and measure impact
The process of turning your website into a customer intelligence tool involves three phases. First, you must create different kinds of web experiences – using your website to experiment with web page designs, product offers and descriptions, and content order and flow.
Second, you must leverage information about different target customer groups – determined by profiles, geographic location, or other target segments – to give them an increasingly personal experience. Finally you must track what happens and compare the results against alternative options.
Customer tracking and analysis must be tied directly to the content you deliver. Your website needs to be able to connect the underlying dots for you – how a visitor first arrived at your site, what content they browsed, in which order, and what difference a new piece of content made.
Finally, it’s vital to associate these real-time customer interactions with other customer management data, such as call centre data and other offline interactions typically held in your customer relationship databases.
This level of customer intelligence offers an unprecedented wealth of detailed insight. By tapping into your customers’ attitudes, organisations can now harness the web to build a true 360-degree view of their customers.
