How visitor identification can help you generate more leads without increasing budget

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We’ve all been there; quality conversions are down, the sales team is sitting idle, and hitting revenue targets is getting more challenging by the day.

So, what can we do about it?

Place more reliance on outbound sales or get the team to up the volume? Maybe – but this is a short-term solution to solving the symptom, not the underlying problem. Plus, with the direction cold connection rates are going, adding additional volume will only see diminishing marginal returns and negatively affect your brand.

Divert more budget into paid? Yes, but this is another symptom solution without addressing the underlying problem…

Not all leads are created equal

Is it simply a conversion, or is there more to the story?

Conversions are sadly not equal. Some leads visit the website once, download an e-book, and are never seen again. These are the kind that upset sales teams. There’s no real intent, and pursuing them will likely amount to wasted time and energy on the rep’s part.

The other type of conversion we all know and love. These leads match your ideal customer profile, consume multiple pieces of content, and are ready for a sales conversation.

Thankfully, there’s a third kind. The type that visits your website multiple times and consumes numerous pieces of content. They are in-market, displaying real intent, and actively considering their options. But they never submitted a form – or did so using a nondescript address such as their Gmail.

After all, buyers know that submitting forms exposes them to a high likelihood of getting pursued by sales. And the B2B market is trending towards higher percentages of people preferring a rep-free experience.

43% of buyers are gravitating to rep-free experiences but here is the kicker, the future looks even more product-led – over half of the next generation of leaders, the millennials, prefer rep-free.

Source: Sales Tech Mayhem: More Unicorns, Sales Enablement Mayhem and New Entrants (Gartner)

Generating more leads

Define what makes up a ‘quality’ lead for your business

After getting marketing and inbound sales in the same room, reach a consensus on what qualifies as a quality “inbound” lead.

There are the basics, such as company information on size, location, industry, and, perhaps, tech stack. In other words, your ideal customer profile.

Then there are intent (behaviour) markers. Are they actively researching your solution? Are they looking at your product or service specs, pricing, integrations, client stories, support, etc.? Or are they talking to your competitors?

What’s the minimum amount of intent the sales team believes makes a lead worth investing time in?

You should end up with a matrix that looks something like this:

🏭 Industries	👥 Sizes	💼 Departments	🖥️ Site engagement	📄 Pages consumed
Marketing and advertising	11-50 employees	Outbound sales	5 minutes	Case study
Computer software	51-200 employees	Paid marketing	4 pages	Pricing
Information and technology	201-500	ㅤ	ㅤ	Guide

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Pro tip: Learn all about defining your Ideal Customer Profile in our ICP Guide

Add visitor identification into the mix

Visitor identification software enables you to identify the companies that visit your website, even if they do not fill out any forms. This allows you to obtain a comprehensive list of companies engaged with your brand. Details include firmographic data like industry and size, as well as information about their visit, such as how they found your website and which pages they viewed.

What's more – visitor identification can provide a much more holistic view of website engagement than traditional CRM tools.

Why?

Because CRMs are only able to track the activity of users who have converted, and even then, their ability to provide an accurate timeline of the user's activity is limited if the user has cleared their cookies or switched devices.

Essentially, this means that CRM data only provides a partial and limited view of how companies as a whole interact with your website.

The right visitor identification tool will help to deanonymize your website traffic and supplement low conversions, so you can begin solving the symptom of low conversions, immediately.

Get more leads from your existing marketing programmes

Input the results of your discussion with sales and marketing into your visitor identification tool to generate a list of all companies matching your criteria.

This list (and any new additions to it) can be automatically passed on to the inbound sales team through integrations and exports. Or, it can be managed directly within the tool itself. Plus: sales can set up real-time notifications on further visits to better inform their outreach process.

Now your team is back to working on real leads – the immediate hole is plugged and revenue projections can take a breath.

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Looking to supercharge your lead generation efforts with visitor identification software? Run our 14-day free trial, so you can experience the power of Snitcher – without any commitment!

Solving the low conversion problem

Analyze the quality of your traffic

The first step is to look at the percentage of total website visitors actually within your target market. In essence how many of the people visiting your website are from an organisation capable of realistically purchasing your product or service.

If you find a low percentage of target companies visiting your website, this has a significant impact on conversion rates. After all, if you're not attracting the right people to your website, it's unlikely that they'll become customers.

Traditional analytics tells a poor story of marketing performance as it’s mostly just numbers without context. What makes up those numbers? You may see total visitor numbers going up, when in reality a large proportion of them are from bad fit companies just there to consume content. Or they have been driven by ads that led to content they weren’t actually looking for.

Once you have a better holistic understanding of traffic quality, you can apply visitor identification to channels, ads, content, referral sources, and affiliates. By doing this, you can begin finding sources and content containing the highest and lowest percentages of target company traffic. These insights will help you focus on what's working well and divert resources away from what's not.

For example, if you find particular ads or content is attracting a high percentage of target company traffic, invest more resources until you begin seeing a diminishing return. Conversely, if a certain channel or referral source is bringing in a low percentage of target company traffic, you may want to consider running a cost benefit analysis and adjusting your strategy to reallocate resources to more effective channels.

Focus on retargeting

Are you simply collecting all website visitors, then running a series of somewhat generic ads at them? Or maybe you’re slightly more sophisticated in your approach, and only retargeting visitors who visited high-intent pages.

Either way – retargeting everyone who has interacted with your website or exhibited specific behaviour can lead to rising costs and falling conversions. Especially as traffic volume grows.

Aside from the wasted advertising budget used on retargeting bad-fit organisations, it’s challenging to serve relevant ads. This makes it important to be strategic about how you select and manage your retargeting audiences.

To begin solving these issues, start by creating audiences from only good fit companies. If you have the volume, this can be combined with their behaviour on your website.

For instance, create an audience of companies that fall within your ICP. This ensures ads are targeting people who are at the least capable of purchasing your product or service. Plus you can add behaviour in to get those who have demonstrated a certain level of engagement with your brand to warrant the expense of retargeting them.

Here’s an example:

Similar to the above process to capture leads for sales, filter traffic into groups you will be able to reliably serve relevant ads.

Company location (language)

Company size

Company Industry

Relevant Action = viewed client story XYZ and ABC

This concept can be applied to different groups of companies that took different actions. For instance; a security sensitive organisation might benefit from a story on how you have worked with similar organisations.

It’s worth noting with the better visitor identification providers, you can build LinkedIn ad audiences or send data to Google Ads to retarget on search or display.

If sales is on the same page and actively working these leads, the chances of creating a connection or booking a meeting have now doubled!

Turn your attention to on-site improvement.

The goal here is to gain a deeper understanding of where ideal visitors are dropping off and engaging the most.

You are looking for the top pages visited by companies within your ICP. Do they match up with the top pages visited by all of your traffic? This can be further broken down by industries and sizes. Try getting a feel for where on your website different types of companies navigate.

Next up, you will want to find the pages that ICP companies engage with the most. What content is really hooking them in and keeping their attention. This is the type of content to make more of and link to.

On the other side of the coin, which pages do target companies exit on?

Armed with this information you can begin producing more of the content your audience actually consumes, which will increase on site engagement and by extension conversion rates.

You can also optimise the pages ICP visitors see the most to include CTA’s to the content they engage with the most. Pages that perform poorly with target visitors can take inspiration from better performing pages and traffic can be directed to where you know there is better engagement.

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Pro Tip: the same concept can be applied to analysing SEO effectiveness. What’s driving and engaging ideal visits? Plus; are there initiatives that are only driving volume but not an ROI?

Optimising ideal visitor journey’s

While there isn’t a straight path from initial engagement through to conversion and eventually purchase, there are a series of phases that a buyer needs to move through in order to reach the realisation that starting a conversation will be valuable.

To assist them through the journey: let’s explore website personalisation.

You may be running website personalisation already in which case we don’t need to educate you further - just make sure you have a good quality identification data provider.

If you aren’t; the concept is relatively simple. There are likely parts of your website that relate more to some types of companies and less to other. Having gone through the on site analysis above, you will already have a strong understand of where different types of ideal visitors navigate and engage. This is where website personalisation comes into play.

You will need to select a website personalisation tool and without going into too much detail trigger a specific website journey based on the type of company your visitor identification tool captures.

For example, when a Finance company visits the website, you already know what content engages them the most. So it makes sense to ensure they see this content before they have a chance to leave the website. You may also have a few case studies of how you helped similar companies they will gravitate toward.

Alternatively, you could consider displaying badges of competitors or related companies to give visitors the feeling you are an expert within their field. That you’ve solved the problems they are facing. It certainly beats your competitor showing a bunch of unrelated badges and case studies right?

This will improve visitor engagement, brand authority and ensure that you give your best content the highest chance of being seen by the people it was written for.

Conclusion

There’s no one size fits all tactic or strategy to generate better results from the same budget. If it was simple everyone would do it.

We are naturally big believers in visitor identification and the many applications across both marketing and sales. Weather you use us or another provider, we hope this article helped to highlight the technology can be used as a quality lense to find areas for improvement throughout your marketing program. From quick wins to long term optimisation, it’s all possible.

If we as marketers hope to make more efficient use of our budgets, we can’t hope to continue playing the volume game and expect good results. Quality needs to be constantly scrutinised and measured.