Still having these conversations?
Marketing Director: “Hi, what are the website visitor tracking stats looking like this week?”
Company Webmaster: “Really good, up 12% on last week”.
Marketing Director: “Fantastic, keep up the good work”.
Of course, this is not the sort of conversation about website visitor analysis we should be having today, particularly in the current covid climate.
Your anonymous website visitors are much more than just stats, they are real people (ok some are bots), so instead of just plain vanilla website visitor tracking you need to identify those anonymous website visitors.
Website Visitor Identification
When you identify visitors to your website you can begin to engage with them, convert them to customers, and keep them as loyal customers.
If you run a business, you want to know who your website visitors are at least.
But with the right software platform there is so much more information there, for example:
- the profile of organisations browsing your website
- industry
- employee size
- location
- which businesses are visiting
- how often they visit
- how long they viewed your pages
- which pages attracted them, kept their interest, lost them
- the right people to talk to at those businesses
- the email address of the people you want to reach.
This is so much more than those earlier web visitor trackers.
I remember in the early days of the web thinking it was magic how the stats counters logged website visits, but that was it.
Then it became more and more sophisticated with real time presentations of what was happening on your site right now, and all the data now available on Google Analytics for free.
Then along came the clever techies, the innovators, to take this much further, to where we are today, the era of Marketing Automation (MA).
Marketing Automation
Now we can automate the whole of the Sales Funnel, from lead capture ==> to engaging with the lead personally ==> to converting that lead into a paying customer, and most importantly ==> keeping that customer loyal.
There’s an old saying in Sales: It costs 5x more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.
But that was in the good old days before all this backend marketing technology could handle a lot of the stages of the customer journey automatically.
Self-executing marketing campaigns, pre-programmed yet adaptive to the changing customer environment are fast becoming the norm.
But there are still organisations out there (you know who you are, and if you don’t, your customers certainly do) with archaic, manual sales and marketing processes which need time and people, and hence cost more money and resources than are necessary today.
Automation has often been about productivity, and MA is no different.
Agile Marketing
Agility in the Time of Covid has to be a keystone in your marketing edifice if you are going to survive not only the current real-time coronavirus crisis, but also the long term recovery as the whole world comes to terms with the New Order.
And don’t for a moment think things will get back to “normal” sometime soon, if ever.
Agility means reacting nimbly, promptly, and appropriately to your market environment.
(Ads for Funeral Directors? Please…)
Agility also means being alert, alert to what’s new.
Embrace the New MarTech
- Are you actively responding to your customer’s changing Digital Body Language?
- Are you leveraging Real Time Content Personalisation?
- What about Deep Data Integration to comprehensively organise, present, and act on each customer’s EVERY touchpoint?
- Are you really making the most of customers’ online RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) behaviour?
In these unprecedented times basic website visitor tracking isn’t enough, there is a whole marketing technology ecosystem available.
Where to start though?
Now it’s time to declare my interest. Recently I was approached by SharpSpring’s Chad French about becoming a partner.
I did my own due diligence, but hey, I’m sure you can make your own mind up.
Click here to go to the SharpSpring demo page.
And for comparisons with the other top 5 MA platforms here.
To your Marketing Automation success!
