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Six Ways to Connect with your B2B Website Visitors

Website visitors are among your most valuable prospects. They have found you, searching around for a solution. They’re clearly interested in your category and it’s very likely they are in the market for an offering like yours. The only problem is that they tend to come, poke around and leave.  Without a way to engage them, you may lose a sizable opportunity. But there are methods for converting business visitors to identifiable prospects, for ongoing marketing interaction and development. Here are six methods to connect with your website visitors.

Motivate visitors to fill out a webform. This is the oldest trick in the book, but is oddly missing from many B2B websites. A content offer is the most effective way to persuade visitors to give you their contact information. Offer a research report, a guide, a case study—something that will help them address their current challenges. Or invite them to sign up for your newsletter. Then nurture those prospects until they are ready to have a sales conversation. You can append additional data to the email record and create an omni-channel nurturing program using social media, postal mail, retargeted digital ads and other channels for your follow up.

Identify their company. If they came to your site through their company browser, you can easily identify their firm through the IP address. Many of the leading marketing automation tools today, like Marketo and Hubspot, have this functionality embedded. Once you know the company your visitor represents, there are a variety of actions you can take. If the firm is already in your database, then let the account rep know someone has come by.  If it’s an entirely new prospect, create outbound marketing campaigns to various contacts in the firm to introduce yourself and get a conversation going.    

Enhance the company ID with specialized software. A variety of services have sprung up to automate the company-identification marketing process. This specialized software will send you an email alert about the visitor and also provide you with the names and contact information of various top executives of the firm. Some will even send the visitor record directly to your CRM for follow up. 

Use Identity Graph tools to link visitors across devices. As more employees work from home due to the pandemic, it’s getting harder to connect visitors to their company IP addresses. But identity tools will help link the business and consumer personas across their various devices and provide you with richer “visitor intelligence.” 

Install a chatbot. You may think of bots as customer service tools, but they have become much more than that. While answering questions, bots can also be programmed to ask for name and email address. More sophisticated tools do all that plus connect with your CRM to customize the chat, schedule meetings and deliver outbound messages. These chatbots help turn a question into a relationship.    

Use the LinkedIn Insights tag. Install this piece of code on your website—it’s free—to connect individual visitors to their LinkedIn profiles. This allows you to retarget them with LinkedIn advertising, and also analyze their characteristics and firmographics.

Lots of opportunity to de-anonymize your website visitors and turn them into productive relationships. 

Ruth Stevens

Ruth Stevens advises clients on customer acquisition and retention. Ruth serves on the boards of directors of the HIMMS Media Group, and the Business Information Industry Association. She is a trustee of Princeton-In-Asia, past chair of the Business-to-Business Council of the DMA, and past president of the Direct Marketing Club of New York. Ruth was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Marketing by Crain’s BtoB magazine, and one of 20 Women to Watch by the Sales Lead Management Association. She serves as a mentor to fledgling companies at the business accelerator in New York City. Ruth is an author and contributor to many notable business publications. Her books include B2B Data-Driven Marketing: Sources, Uses, Results and Maximizing Lead Generation: The Complete Guide for B2B Marketers, Trade Show and Event Marketing, and co-author of the white paper series “B-to-B Database Marketing.” Ruth is a sought-after speaker and trainer, and has presented to audiences and business schools in Asia, Australia, and Latin America. She has held senior marketing positions at Time Warner, Ziff Davis, and IBM.

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