Your company website can be a vast source of new leads, but many companies squander these leads without ever knowing it. Think about it: most companies are happy with converting just 1-2% of all website visitors. That means 98% of all visitors are largely ignored, with all the marketing resources dedicated to that top 2%. But there is a way to generate more leads with your website, even if your conversion rates largely stay the same.
#1: Identify website visitors
One popular tactic to consider is website visitor identification. It is what it sounds like – a way to find out the identities of people visiting your site. There are plenty of B2B marketing software packages that will help you do this, but it basically rests on a single principle: every time you connect to the Internet, you are doing so in a way that reveals information about where you are, and what type of Internet connection you are using. So there are plenty of companies out there that claim they can turn all that information into valuable data, especially if they can see that people are connecting from corporate networks.
#2: Segment visitors by behavior
Not all customers are the same, and neither are all website visitors. What you need to do is come up with a way to segment all those visitors in a meaningful way. Usually,that involve tracking certain behaviors on the site. The way most companies do this is by having people sign up for various things (newsletters, emails, mailing lists) or download certain things (e-books, whitepapers, case studies).
From there, you can filter out the best prospects. For example, you may know that people who download an industry whitepaper are much more likely to become a future customer than someone who just signs up for a mailing list. And you can cross-check that information with what you know about social media activity. For example, someone who is a follower on Facebook and who signs up for an email newsletter is more valuable than someone who just signs up for the newsletter. If you are able to segment your visitors into at least three different groups, you can assign them a priority for follow-up by the sales team.
#3: Ask for less – not more – information from visitors
It’s just a reality that if you ask for too much information upfront, you are going to lose prospects. That’s why most companies will just ask for something very simple and non-committal – like an email address. If you want someone to leave their company name and their job title, then you better be ready to provide something of significant value.
Once you have the website leads, what do you do with them? You want to make sure that you have a seamless hand-off from the marketing team to the sales team. It’s up to the marketing team to qualify the leads, and make it very clear to the sales team which ones are worth following up on.
By using these four tactics, you can help to turn that 98% of website traffic you’re missing out on into potential leads. Instead of constantly looking for new visitors, you might find that you already have all that you need to really gear up your B2B selling efforts.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.