According to a research conducted by Google and the Corporate Executive Board, "The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing," buyers complete nearly 57 percent of their purchasing decisions before ever engaging a supplier sales rep. By now we all know that content marketing helps drive traffic, but how do we engage a client early in the buying process without relying on content pieces?
There is a growing trend for companies to use content to drive traffic to their websites. While this is a great practice, we don't sell our sites, we sell products and services. Typically B2B companies are not e-commerce sites. Instead they rely on highly-trained sales teams to build relationships with their clients to sell their products.
When B2B marketers focus their effort purely on content creation, they essentially are saying, "My website will sell my products." Are you prepared to allow your content to sell your business? Selling purely based off content creation takes time, effort and a creative team to effectively sell your products or services.
The goal for B2B marketers is to deliver the sales team new, qualified leads. It's proven that having an online presence via your company website is great for marketing and general brand awareness, but what about generating leads? Sales teams struggle without qualified leads to reach out to, so how do we get them those leads?
Many marketers have moved to a "quid pro quo" strategy with their "contact me" forms. Typically, visitors must fill out these forms in order to receive access to PowerPoint presentations, sales collateral, videos, newsletters and other valuable content.
While "quid pro quo" can be a great strategy, it often leads to early exits from your site or false information given by the user, leaving marketers flat on their heels to produce new qualified leads. We have all encountered the "quid pro quo" tactic while searching the Web and are often hesitant to offer up our information.
But in the B2B world, identifying businesses that visit your site can be a potent tool. Anonymous visitor identification software is a powerful technology geared specifically to B2B marketers. Using this technology allows marketers to identify all site visitors and provides website owners with information on the visitor such as date and time of site access, company name, location, referrer, number of page views, pages viewed, duration on site, visitor's website, and the user's company phone number.
Thanks to this information, what once were anonymous users moving through your site are now newly-identified leads. Knowing where the company is located, what pages were viewed and how long a user was on your site provides useful information for your sales team so they can reach new potential clients while they are showing interest in your company.
