Marketing technology has always changed quickly. These days it changes is so fast that Technology Analyst Forrester is producing a series of reports called ‘Emerging Technologies CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) Should Watch’. Now into its second report (Q3 11), the latest issue features a section on IP address identification and profiling technology. This is the technical term for a solution where the output is web intelligence that helps B2B companies uncover and action hidden opportunities in their marketing and business development. To date the technology is not widespread because it remains a little understood part of the internet.
So exactly what is IP address identification and profiling?
Well it’s a technology that is based on IP reverse-lookup technology. While IP reverse lookup technology has been around for a while, this is a new generation of tools. What the solution shows is the name of an organisation, where the server is based, how many visitors from that organisation have visited the website, their “journey” through the website, the pages visited, the date, the time, the amount of time spent on each page, the Google term (if used), the entry page, and so on. Importantly, the solution identifies organisations including those who would otherwise have been unknown visitors. Let’s be honest here – it’s a well known fact that unknown visitors account for the highest number of visits to the vast majority of organisations’ websites.
Why is web intelligence so important?
The plain fact is, if you can obtain this website intelligence and you know what to do with it, it offers marketers strategic and tactical insights that will significantly shape your marketing, customer relationship and sales plans. For professional marketers the ability to harness this information has critical implications for optimising business development opportunities across the organisation. Web intelligence, interpreted professionally, will serve other parts of the same company too, unveiling opportunities that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. More about this later.
New generation analytics tools
For many, the primary web analytics tool is Google Analytics or for larger companies solutions such as WebTrends and Omniture. They provide detail on “how many” people have visited your site, but you also need to know “who and why”.
This is where web intelligence tools come in. As indicated above they reveal much greater data on who is visiting your website and why. They identify visiting organisations, show you how they found your site and what they are looking for. As a marketer, this enables you to track all marketing activity, both online and offline through your website.
Technology which sits in your website and builds profiles of organisations using your website will give you valuable insights that impact your business success. In Trovus’s experience, this level of web intelligence for our clients has created new cross selling opportunities that they were unaware of previously. Some of the things our clients have also told us is that web intelligence:
- Saves time – so you only focus on the hot, not the cold prospects
- Increases conversion rates – ensuring more precise follow up
- Builds relationships with new target clients
Insights from interpretation
Web intelligence means that you understand who is visiting your website. You need to know if they are your potential customers, your clients, new recruits or just competitors. Gaining insights into how your website is working will tell you if your customers and potential customers are finding and looking at your website.
The correct interpretation of web intelligence is essential to achieving the best results, which is where your solution provider’s expertise becomes critical. You will begin to understand how your business is represented on the Internet. Is your website found through company or product name, or generic traffic patterns? What organisations do your visitors represent and what are they looking at on your site?
As marketers, you will already know who is responding to your marketing messages. It is likely you are disseminating marketing messages through routes such as PR, Direct Mail, email marketing, web marketing and trade shows. The first port of call for many people who react to your messages will be to your website. Do you know which organisations are responding to these marketing messages?
As an early adopter of the technology, Morgan Cole has seen a rise in the number of enquiries and can link these to visits recorded to its web intelligence tools, which are now paying for themselves through the number of courses being booked as a result of the initial visit being fully managed by the marketing team. Informed decision making has benefited the whole marketing operation through:
- An increased number of bookings, meaning more profitable courses
- More effective pay-per-click marketing
- Refining the CRM process and engaging with existing and new customers.
Another client, Eversheds, one of the largest full service law firms in the world, has been able to identify behaviour and buying signals about clients and prospects, as well as identify potential clients whose interest was previously unknown to them.
Through workshops to maximise the value of intelligence from their website, initiatives are supporting Eversheds’ Business Development teams in their engagement with fee earners, along with marketing campaigns such as client communications and Search Engine Optimisation. Importantly, the solution integrates with Eversheds’ customer relationship management CRM initiatives.
There are a number of vendors offering web intelligence solutions these days. A word of advice: remember that this is not just about the technology or the data. It’s about how you interpret the data and convert it into meaningful information on which you can base decisions and take actions. Of course, you need to exercise the usual care and due diligence in choosing the right partner to work with to get the right tools and technology coupled with the right services and consultancy to achieve the most effective interpretation of your web intelligence.
But having done this, you can be sure you are taking the right steps towards a truly a leading edge digital marketing future. There is no doubt that the emerging breed of tech-savvy professional marketers are embracing this future, enhancing their sills and capabilities, and – vitally – contributing in a tangible way to the bottom line.
