The Future of B2B Sales – Part 2: The Importance of Analyzing B2B Website Data
In Part 1 of this series, we talked about how the B2B landscape has changed. Now we're taking a deep dive into the importance of analyzing B2B website data. If you are in the business of selling your product or service to other businesses—business to business sales (B2B)—understanding the behavior of your website visitors is one of the most crucial aspects of your sales success.
How else can you know what your visitors’ intentions are if you are not plugged into the behavior they exhibit while they are on your website?
That’s why we want to show you the best tools and tactics for monitoring website visitor behavior and how to take advantage of the data you collect to improve your B2B sales.
This article from Influence and Co. is a great resource to get you started if you are not already tracking your website visitors or want to increase your understanding of how to effectively do so.
Here is a quote from that article:
“If you’re not tracking your visitors, then you (and your bottom line) are in for a world of hurt. Forty-two percent of B2B marketers agree that the biggest barrier to their lead generation efforts is a lack of data. Understanding how visitors and leads interact with your site can give you incredibly rich data to help optimize your design, improve your content strategy, and generate leads.”
Fortunately, there are digital tools built specifically for analyzing website visitors’ behavior. The most popular analytical tool is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a tool that generates detailed statistics about activity on any website. On its website, Google explains that the system “helps you analyze visitor traffic and paint a complete picture of your audience and their needs, wherever they are along the path to purchase.”
Google Analytics is used by most savvy B2B marketers, but what you may not realize is there is much more to the tool than just the analysis of website visitor behavior.
This helpful tool allows you to…
- Discover what visitors are searching for when they land on your site
- Identify your highest-performing pieces of content
- Pinpoint where in the sales funnel your prospects frequently drop off
- Learn which of your campaigns result in the most traffic and conversions
- And more
However, we like to take things one step further by discussing the importance of marketing segmentation. Because honestly, as we state in the following blog post:
“The common mistake made by most marketers is that most use marketing segmentation as an average of all data. This then leads the organization to communicate and market to the masses on average, when in fact there isn’t an average customer, there are only groups of customers with commonalities.”
In other words, you must get down to the nitty-gritty when it comes to identifying who is visiting your B2B website and understanding exactly who you are dealing with.
Let’s take a look at the different types of marketing segmentation you should be aware of.
- Demographic: “Demographic segmentation is market segmentation according to age, race, religion, gender, family size, ethnicity, income, and education. Demographics can be segmented into several markets to help an organization target its consumers more accurately.” – Study.com
- Firmographic: “Firmographics are descriptive attributes of firms that can be used to aggregate individual firms into meaningful market segments. They describe businesses, nonprofits, and governmental entities. Essentially, firmographics are to businesses and organizations what demographics are to people.” – The Wiglaf Journal
- Psychographic: “Psychographic segmentation divides consumers into sub-groups based on shared characteristics. As the adjective ‘psychographic’ suggests, those characteristics relate to psychological influences, including subconscious or conscious beliefs, motivations, and priorities. Very broadly, psychographic segmentation applies behavioral and social sciences to marketing research. In other words, psychographic segmentation focuses on what makes individual consumers tick—their attitudes, values, personalities, lifestyles, and communication preferences.” – Merriam Webster
- Behavioral: “Behavioral segmentation is a marketing strategy based on actual consumer buying behavior. It divides the market into groups of customers according to their knowledge of, attitude towards, use of or response to a product.” –Wordstream
So now you may believe that you are all set. You are using Google Analytics to analyze the behavior of your B2B website visitors’ behavior and feel you are on the way to increased sales and productivity.
Not to rain on your parade, but as ClickZ points out in this survey, actionable insights from collected data are still the biggest challenges of marketers.
In other words, unless you are effectively putting the data you have collected to good use, your efforts won’t have any real major effect on your sales.
Below, we have included some highlights from the survey, which you can download for free here.
The State of Marketing Measurement, Attribution & Data Management is based on a survey of 370 marketing professionals conducted in September 2018. Respondents to the survey were split between brand/client-side marketers (63%) and marketing agency professionals (37%).
First, the study looks at how companies—specifically brands and marketing agencies—are managing their data to get a better view of their current and potential customers. It then analyzes how they are operationalizing this data to generate insights across marketing measurement and attribution to drive business value.
Other key findings include:
- Businesses are using 7 separate technologies to extract insights from their data, on average.
- Just 33% of brands believe that their current measurement solutions offer accurate attribution of all media and data.
- 29% of survey respondents use attribution technology on all digital marketing campaigns.
- 5% of businesses have a clear view of the customer lifetime value (CLV) of their customers.
- 9% of marketers believe their organization has an “excellent” understanding of multi-touch attribution.
Pretty bleak statistics, right?
Don’t lose heart.
All the survey really shows is that we all have a ways to go in learning to use the data we collect effectively. It reveals that even though businesses are keeping track of website visitors, most marketers don’t seem to have much faith in the data they collect. It also shows that many businesses have spread their data collection too thin and need to learn a simpler, more streamlined and laser-focused way of collecting data.
However, what the main point of the survey helps us see is this…
Now is the time for you and your team to learn how to effectively use the data you are collecting with your website analysis to begin converting your B2B website visitors into real paying customers.
Where do you start?
As previously mentioned, segmentation is a huge factor. Understanding your B2B website visitors’ demographics and other characteristics is crucial to converting leads into customers.
With that in mind, don’t be afraid to do some testing in order to find better ways to connect with potential B2B customers. Experiment with the following:
- Landing pages
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- CTA buttons
- Headlines
- Emails
Always be trying out something different to discover what works best.
We’re big fans of content marketing. With Google Analytics, you will be able to discern what search terms website visitors used to find you and which of your content gets the most hits. You can tell exactly how long a visitor stayed on your website and which information they found that kept them there the longest, and expand on it.
Another way to convert leads is by always staying in communication with website visitors.
- Reply promptly to blog and social media comments.
- Make sure your customer service is first class.
- Ask happy customers to write good reviews of your product and your customer service.
Bottom line, to make the website visitor information you have gathered work for your business, you must study each piece of data as if you were mining for gold. Put the information you collect under a microscope, analyze it, then figure out the most effective way to put it to use.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series, in which we talk about the importance of social media for sales success.