1. Analyze your existing website

When was the last time you examined your website? What are the first impressions people get when they visit the site? Carry out some user tests even if it’s with your friends to see what general impression they get. Even better, if your site is aimed at a particular target audience, see if you can get some of them to pass on their general comments to you. Consider online surveys, or other useful free tools out there that allow online visitors to pass on their review comments to you.

Think also about the search engines trawling your site. They are important in ensuring your pages can be found when people enter search words. Use free tools, some of which are very helpful, to see how search engines read your site, and the keywords they find.

When analyzing your website, look into how it looks compared to your competitor sites. How do they rate compared to you? How does their navigation of the site compare? Does the site look more appealing or more informative than your own? If you find they are engaging with their target audience better than your own site, then its time to invest in revamping your website.

However beautiful your site is, it’s no good if visitors are finding your competitor sites instead.  How easy is their site found compared to yours? Is their site ranked above yours in important keywords? There are several good tools that give a good picture of how well you rank compared to others, and how many visitors you get compared to others, and how many inbound links you have compared to your competitors. You can even find out which keywords they target with Google Adwords.

2. Find out which are your best keywords

Keyword analysis is an important factor in getting the right people to your website. Including the right keywords in your web pages can help ensure your website is found before your competitors. Several methodologies and tools are available to make sure you select the right keywords.

Everyone wants the most popular keywords, but use the bounce rates (found in Google Analytics) to find out if these keywords really work for you. High bounce rates mean the keywords you are using are not working for you. Updating keywords is simple if you know basic HTML or have a decent content management system. However, inbound links are even more important, so consider ways of getting others to point to your website, including your chosen keyword in their link.

3. Convert your visitors into leads

Create tasty landing pages. Simple and direct landing pages continue to be among the best methods for lead generation. Treat landing pages almost like a marketing campaign figuring out the best ways to get your target audience to land on them. Include a link to the landing page in emails, social media, banner advertising, Google Adwords, and you name it – it’s all good in getting as much traffic as possible to your landing page.

Don’t forget about the anonymous visitors. 98% of visitors don’t leave their calling card, so monitor who is visiting and figure out ways to reach them. For this we recommend using our own product WebWHO (view brochure, request demo).

4. Investigate each inquiry

If an inquiry is someone who filled in a form on your landing page giving their contact details, discover everything about the ones that interest you the most as potential leads. It is said that the majority of inquiries are squandered away by sales and marketing, so enrich the data you have on each one. What’s that? You only have what they provide when they fill in a form? Wrong. There is so much more you can find out, from using their IP address to find out their location, to leveraging B2B data connectors such as from LinkedIn giving their history, experience, and education. For investigating inquiries, we recommend our product INVESTIGATE (view brochure).

5. Nurture your inquiries

Many of your potential leads will not be ready yet to be contacted by sales. So nurture them by sending opt-in email requests followed by a number of automated emails over a period of time promoting your expertise and products. We provide this service for our clients so it is all automated for you.

Curious to learn more? Contact us and we’ll be happy to send you the details.

WebleadsB2B is one of these vendors. We launched WebWHO back in 2008 allowing our clients to identify and convert web visitors to something more tangible and meaningful. We then launched INVESTIGATE which focuses not so much on the anonymous visitor but the visitors who do fill in form, providing investigation capabilities that tell you much more about that visitor. In our view, to leverage inbound marketing you need to focus on both the anonymous and non-anonymous visitor. Since then, our scope has widened but it is not uncommon for us to work in projects where we help clients convert anonymous online visitors into identifiable personas, and then take them through a nurturing and lead qualification process.

The interest in anonymous online visitors should come as no surprise. An analysis of inbound web visitors can truly provide a wealth of information that should be the basis for the first step in the lead generation process. Today, the possibilities are near endless for building a stronger prospect database to nurture and qualify them until they are mature enough to be handed over to sales.

But why are many companies not jumping at the chance of finding out so much more about their on-line visitors?  The answer varies a lot from company to company. Some:

• Still have an outbound marketing mindset and cannot focus beyond this
• They have no process or strategy for inbound marketing leads
• They see inbound web-based conversion as only a “nice-to-have”
• They do not have sufficient resources
• They feel uncomfortable about approaching online visitors unless they show more intent, such as by calling
  them by phone or email.

Given the established fact that most buyers are now using the Internet, I remain a little puzzled by this hesitation. The technology now exists to achieve this and get the best from your inbound marketing efforts, so why not try it?

So for those who have not made the jump yet, ask yourselves:

• How does your organization track anonymous and non-anonymous online visitors?
• Does your organization just track clicks and visitors numbers using Google Analytics?
• What happens to the data you collect about your visitors?
• Is there a process in place to ensure that online inquiries are quickly and efficiently analyzed and investigated before they go through the sales cycle process?
• Do you know how to convert an anonymous visitor into a name you can follow up?

Please leave me a comment to share your thoughts.

Carlos’s views on this are very similar to my own, especially when it comes to trying to get companies to focus on lead generation and not expect the lead management software they have to provide the answers. What WebleadsB2B would emphasize more on demand generation is the need to know the businesses you want to TARGET. By this, I don’t mean general terms like, “we target software houses with over 100 million in revenues”, but knowing the exact names of the businesses that fall under this category. By having the exact name, you have a clear hit list of businesses you want to sell and market to. This is something we can do because of the very large B2B database we have, enabling you to identify just the businesses you should be after.

If this is something you think you could also benefit from, contact us at support@webleadsb2b.com

They surveyed more than 500 U.S. online marketers in August and September; about two-thirds of which identified themselves as B2B marketers.

When we really think about it, this result should come as no surprise. In the campaigns we do, we still find email marketing and optimized landing pages to generate more leads that social media and PPC, certainlyin the B2B world.

The surprise for me is the continued emphasis on how we get visitors to our web-pages, rather than what we do when we have got them there.

Isn’t this a bit insane? If you were a shop owner, which one would you focus on:

• The visitors in your shop
 (or website)

• Or the people out on the street who are by chance walking by (the internet users)?

Surely it makes more sense to pay attention on those in your shop, focusing on whether they look like probably buyers (for which we use profiles), and then talking to them (which we can lead nurturing).

If you agree, then please go to the Resources section of our website to download our whitepapers explaining this in more detail. For more on PROFILES and why they are so important, please read our “The Benefits of Post-Click Marketing  Whitepaper”  – I think you will find it useful in improving your lead generation results.

Detection is not so simple. The hard (and most common) method is to start examining each IP address, 1 at a time, for suspicious behavior. This is often quite a tedious and laborious task, looking for repeat IP numbers to your website for the same keyword, or different keywords, often over a period of time. Other things to look out for is the length of the visit, a very short visit indicating possible suspicious behavior, where people are clicking your link then hitting the back button almost immediately.

Having done this, the next step is to write each IP address down that you regard as suspicious. Once you have this list, you can then exclude these addresses from seeing your AdWords adverts by opening AdWords, navigating to the tab entitled “Opportunities”. Scroll down until you can see More Tools. Click the More Tools link, and you will see some more options – choose IP Exclusion.

Note that you will need to exclude all the IP addresses for each and every campaign in your account. Select the first campaign and click Go. Unfortunately, Google allows you to only exclude up to 20 IP addresses, or ranges of addresses – but this small number can be enough.

Is there an easier way to do this?
Yes, there are a number of tools that can help here. For example, our own WebWHO tool makes detection a lot easier by showing you the organizations visiting your site, such as through Adwords.
Most people can’t remember IP address numbers, but they do know the name of their competitors.
So simply spot your competitors, and drop them into the WebWHO competition list. WebWHO helps in a number of ways which include:

• Showing how often the competitors visit. The referral will show you if they are coming from Adwords
• Show you how long they visit – anything that is a short time will be indentified by WebWHO
• Show you a click path including the time on each page.
• Generate PDF and excel files of visitors for further detailed analysis. For more on this, including screen-shots, please see our earlier blog “Unmask the people clicking on your Google Adwords”

Contact us at support@webleadsb2b.com  if you need more information on this.

” Thank you – it’s great to be invited to your frog blog.

Focusing on lead scoring first works well if you’re primary problem is that you have too many lead. If sales is having a difficult time sifting through them, trying to separate the ready-to-buy ones from those who aren’t yet at that stage, lead scoring is a good process to tackle.

If you’re just starting out, it’s worthwhile to focus your efforts on developing a comprehensive nurturing or content marketing plan today.

Imagine if you are going out fishing. You go to where you think the fish are, you put some attractive bait on the line, you cast out right where you think you may get a bite. You wait. Perhaps some fish notice your bait and consider taking a bite at it. That’s nurturing.

After the fish is on the line and you reel it in, you have a look at the fish. Perhaps it’s too small. Maybe it’s the wrong kind of fish, one you couldn’t possibly eat. Or perhaps you just caught an old tire. You have to figure out what to do with it now that you’ve brought it in. That’s scoring.

If you have plenty of fish to sift and sort, you should first look at a lead scoring system. If you need to provide a continuous stream of leads to sales, look first to your nurturing programs.”

How many of them are you turning into contacts you can reach out to, or turning into real customers?

Well …probably not enough. In fact, most of your potential prospects are probably ignored after the first point of contact.  So what can you do about it? The answer, at least for those who have tried it, is quite simple: introduce a simple yet effective lead nurturing program that addresses both online and offline leads “automatically”. That’s right, automatically.

Once you are clear on who your target audience is, you can pull them out from the many who visit your website, and then contact them.

Contacts will convert into customers who most likely will come back for more.

The good news is that lead nurturing is simpler and cheaper than most people think it is, and easier to implement than you might consider.

As advocates of “post-click marketing” we strongly encourage you to put as much effort into cultivating the contacts that are already in front of you, than pouring more money and effort into getting visitors to your website. After all, what’s the point of getting them to knock on your door, but not opening the door? So, to get you started in thinking about lead nurturing, here are our top 5 tips.

1. Identify your target audience.
Which organizations are you selling to? Who are you selling to? Which countries or countries do you target? Confirm this by simply writing them down on a piece of paper, so simple rules can be defined to separate your target audience from the rest. Lead nurturing tools such as the ones we advocate will do the rest for you, filtering out the business and individual visitors than come to your website. As we separate the businesses who visit into the “targets” and “non-targets”, you soon get a pretty good idea if the rules you have set to identify your  targets are defined well enough. Many of them will not be buyers at this early stage of the game, but nurturing may well change that.
2. Pre-qualify all incoming visitors.
It’s important to “pre-qualify” your visitors. Make sure the businesses who visit your site, or the people who fill in your landing pages, meet the basic criteria of your target audience. Are they from the vertical market you are targeting? Does the person who filled in the form have the “target role” you are after? Also ensure all the ones you know will not be accepted by sales are weeded out. Are personal emails such a gmail or hotmail a no-no? Should existing customers be also filtered out?
3. Give priority to your target audience.
Ensure your target audience is the centre of your attention. Firstly, consider using “profiles” to ensure your target audience is immediately identified. We can help you here by helping you discover the organizations who really fit your target profile. Do you target organizations with revenues over 100 million in revenue, or companies from certain vertical markets? With our database of 3+ million companies, we can ensure they are identified for you.
4. Consider out-bound marketing too.
Web visitors are often considered to be inbound since they come to you. But why limit your lead generation focus to just the web?   Once you have carried out the above 3 tips of identifying, pre-qualifying, and giving priority to your target audience, you are in a position to use this for outbound marketing activities such as email. Once you know who your target companies are, there are number of options for finding your target audience within them.
5. Automate or out-source the process
While not everything can be automated in marketing, the good news is that a lot of the more dreary activities can. Do you still wade through spreadsheets, or perhaps even copy them down to another database? Do you then let them sit there getting cold until your next marketing campaign when you will suddenly collect all the contact you have? Well, let me assure you there are many effective ways to remedy this, ensuring your target visitors are not only given an auto-responder reply – don’t tell me you don’t even do that yet! – but feed a number of emails in the following weeks that promote your services or products.

Probably one of our biggest frustrations was not knowing much about the effectiveness of our Google Adwords. You see, even today, Google Adwords provides reports that tell you how many clicks and impressions the Adwords generated, and they will even tell you the costs of these clicked Adwords. Yet, what we wanted was to go one level deeper and ask, “ who are the people clicking on our adwords, and are they the type of companies we want to attract”?

For example, if we generated 100 clicks, what does that tell me about whether the Adword was successful other than those who became “conversions” and went on to fill in a registration form? What I really wanted to know was the names of those clicking on the Adwords – were they coming from companies in a vertical market we target, or possibly students who were just surfing the web?

Let’s take a typical report generated by Google Adwords and see what information it provides. View Google Adwords Report

In this example, we can see a Campaign Report displaying the clicks, impressions and cost. One Adword in particular is costing me much more than the others. So the question is, “is it worth it”? Should I try to get more of these clicks, or not?

Well, if we look at this next WebWHO Report which reveals who is clicking on the adwords, I feel I am better informed to answer that question. For example, I can see in the ORGANIZATION column the names of the organizations visiting my site via the Google Adwords.  The PROFILE TYPE column tells me if they are a target company for our business, or a general business visitor, or an ISP (internet service provider).

From this I can make some useful decisions to get the best results from my Google Adwords. For example, I analysed who visited during the weekends and saw none of them to be from businesses. For this reason, I now stopped the Google Adwords during the weekends, saving me quite some money.

Today, we have many customers using WebWHO reports in this way, and they, like ourselves, feel like it makes a notable difference in making informed decisions about what to do with our Google Adwords. Contact us at support@webleadsb2b.com if you would like to know anymore about how you too could receive similar reports.

A common misconception about marketing automation is that it involves just the use of software. While marketing automation products play a part, marketing automation is actually something much wider than this. It’s more the other 3 Ps : people, procedures, and practice.

Take just some common elements of marketing automation such as “lead scoring”. This involves a group of people (often from Sales and Marketing) getting together to come up with a set of rules and procedures for lead scoring, let alone what needs to be done for nurturing and managing the  prospects that progress through the next  stages of the sales funnel.

Marketing automation procedures should be determined before using any marketing automation software, but all too often this is not the case. This is not necessary a problem since the software can act as a catalyst to start maturing the marketing automation procedures and, over time, help develop best practices.

One could even argue that “policy” is the most important ingredient of all. Without a policy, given full support from senior management, marketing automation can very easily end up in the side-line, used by a small isolated group while most of the sales team continues to focus on using their CRM to try and create and manage their leads.

There’s no doubt in my mind that marketing automation can deliver great results, but it’s down to the people, procedures, and practices to make it happen. Bear the following in mind:

1) Sales is complex, and involves many people
Especially in the B2B world, a purchasing decision can take months and usually involves many individuals. This results in complicated sales cycles where more than one person needs to be convinced to clinch a deal. This is a challenge for marketing automation since not all of these decision makers will be approachable via the internet (to see if they visit your site) or emails (to track their behavior).

It could be argued that as long as marketing automation has helped nurture a prospect into a situation where sales has many people to deal with, then the job is done. As long as marketing automation has led a prospect to say “Call me, I’m interested in your solution”, then it’s already of great value. I would not agree with this since marketing automation can help even beyond the first sell, but it does lead to the next main challenge.

2) Sales like to cherry-pick
For all the procedures and agreements you put in place, it is difficult to stop sales wanting to cherry-pick – select the prospects that look the most appealing. This manifests itself in a number of ways that can be problematic.
Firstly, there can be an attitude or perception within Sales that marketing automation is nothing more than a nice to have. “If it brings up one or two interesting potential leads, then I will take them, but don’t expect me to get involved in maturing the rules, procedures, and best practices”. This results in sales executives who are not really valuing sales automation. In such situations, sales automation is likely to fail.
Secondly, cherry-picking can lead to the abuse of agreed procedures put in place. If it is agreed that only prospects reaching a certain score should be passed to sales for action, this should be respected. Sales should not by-pass this just because they see a prospect with a great name. All too often Sales waste time and money on small opportunities that are just not mature enough – so get Sales to focus further down in the sales funnel where their skills are particularly needed.

Forewarned is forearmed. I hope by knowing about these challenges, you can make marketing automation work for you. We welcome you to contact us if any assistance is needed along the way.