What if your marketing organization had NSA-level surveillance and reconnaissance skills to gather real-time marketing intelligence that could help your C-Suite make actionable decisions with the same Command-Control approach practiced by super-spies? Well, it’s a rhetorical question. If your business’ marketing department isn’t able to currently tell in real-time who is visiting your web site, what their purchase intent is and provide ‘Caller ID-like’ intelligence to Business Development, you might as well declare yourself a relic of the Cold War and use a shoe-phone to present postmortem Google Analytics that show what happened yesterday.
Right now, as you’re reading this blog, savvy corporate marketers are embedding ‘Caller ID’ like visitor marketing intelligence technology services that allows them to link a visitor to any corporate communication objective from branding to public relations to reputation management to sales and business development. And all of this information is sent via email straight to their inbox in real-time.
Moreover, these savvy marketers, can even design and profile (score) each digital corporate visitor and customize the reporting so your C-Suite (Command Control) is informed of any and all new potential business leads.
You might think that it might seem a little creepy to collect this information before a sales prospect actually called or filled out a form on your site, right? WRONG. Implemented correctly and acted upon ethically, ‘Know Your Visitor’ is not just a pre-sales intelligence tool but a powerful strategic communications overlay that can help your entire brand communications operations succeed and remain in-the-know.
Some of real business application scenarios that we advise B2B clients to engage this technology with:
1. Real-Time Competitive Marketing Intelligence: A Big RFP is out and your business development team is trying to figure out what the competition is doing and who is checking you out. With visitor intelligence software, you can send that intelligence in seconds to your BD Capture team and allow them to adjust their strategic messaging for the ‘win theme’ accordingly.
2. Real-Time Crisis Communications: Wouldn’t you like to know if a reporter visited your website before they ambushed your CEO to dig up dirt? In fact, wouldn’t you like to know what media groups are snooping around your corporate site repeatedly?
3. Real-Time Recruitment Communications: When you are seeking candidates with certain demographics, for instance looking to hire someone currently working for your competitors, a huge lead for your Human Capital chief lies in the knowledge of which companies seem to be visiting your Career page repeatedly. Or perhaps use this information to form a preemptive strike to avoid the competition poaching from your talented team?
4. Real-Time Business Impact & Metrics for Communications Campaigns: With visitor intelligence at your fingertips, you don’t have to wait until a campaign is over to see which content marketing campaign actually is driving traffic and creating buzz. Campaign performance can be analyzed in real-time and reported to your C-Suite to maintain corporate buy-in and real value of NSA-Grade marketing intelligence.
You might be wondering what are the best Visitor Intelligence technologies out there. In my experience, after evaluating multiple platforms with a variety of clients, it appears that many of the providers are using publicly-available data links that interface with their software. With these types of mixed-source software platforms, a visitor logging in from a corporate domain that has a profile on LinkedIn and/or been captured by Dun & Bradstreet or Data.com is highly likely to come with a high level of detailed information, down to an accurate email address of the top decision makers at the visitor’s company. Three solid options to consider include Optify, LeadFormix, as well as SalesForce.com.
So how do you become an NSA-Grade analyst for your marketing organization and reap these incredible business benefits?
Step 1 – Select a marketing communications agency that can help identify and prioritize the critical marketing intelligence data points that provide instant value to your C-Suite. Ask them to audit your existing CRM system so which Visitor Intelligence Technologies out there could be integrated with minimal costs and maximum business value.
Step 2 – Select a Visitor Intelligence technology provider and ask them for a trial period so you can actually validate and compare your Google Analytics dashboard data to their newly provided analytics. During this trial period, verify that the contact information provided about the corporate visitors is accurate and up-to-date.
Step 3 – Create a Strategic Dashboard and ‘profile’ the most important data points, mapping out an efficient process to get the intelligence to the right hands so it is fresh, actionable, and relevant. Sales often looks down at marketing because they feel you are wasting their time with bad information and this is a chance to prove them wrong by providing hot leads in real-time.
Step 4- Engage the entire C-Suite and share the top-line reports to demonstrate the measurable value your marketing department provides as the ‘real time pulse’ of the new information age.
Now don’t be shy, be a spy! It’s a good thing for your business.
As seen on The Hub