If you’re a digital marketeer in the B2B arena, chances are you’ll have a toolbox filled with handy tricks to get new traffic to your website, to help increase leads, keep the sales team happy, and ultimately drive new business. You may be using SEO to drive more relevant traffic to your website, by increasing your organic rankings on target keywords. You might also be using PPC, to capture visits from a whole host of applicable searches. Oh, and what about all the offline marketing that’s going on too?
With all that traffic, the leads must be FLOODING in, right? Well, hopefully, you do have a good stream of enquiries yes. With a really well planned SEO campaign, and really well optimised PPC account, with bid optimisation, ad text testing, landing page optimisation (I could go on…) you should indeed have a good stream of leads coming in on a daily basis. HOWEVER, and here’s the clever bit, what if there was a way to squeeze even more leads from the above, without having to increase your advertising budgets….
ENTER: P Tracking tools for lead generation….
What is IP tracking software?
Put simply, it is a website traffic analysis tool that allows you to see which businesses have been looking at your website, what keywords they came in on, and what pages they’ve been looking at. Yes that’s right, you get to see what businesses have been looking at your services, even if they haven’t been tempted by to buy, use the ‘contact us’ form, download your whitepaper, or leave their details for you via the usual means. IP’s are like a businesses digital fingerprint – if you have a visitors IP address you can often identify them out of the 5 million other businesses on the web in the UK.
Let’s consider the following example….
You’re an IT Support company offering a range of hardware, software, training and installation. You’ve got a great website, and landing pages, but still only 15% of visitors are submitting their details. That other 85% could include lots of hot prospects who didn’t fancy leaving their details or who got dragged away by other work before they submitted an enquiry! Enter the IP tracking tool – now you can see the names of these unconverted businesses looking at your offering. You might find for example Company123 has just been looking at your website, and they came in on the keyword “secure data backup and storage”. You also get to see that they’ve been reading all about how your data storage works, how secure it is, how reliable etc. Now, they might not have finally gone on to submit their details, but imagine how useful that lead would be for your sales team to follow up! And so, we look at the benefits…
What are the benefits?
For sales, it means you get access to leads you never knew you actually had. Not only that, they’re warms leads, and you know what they’re actually interested in! Between cold calling a list of random companies, and calling companies that have already been looking at your products and services, but just stopped short of contacting you, I know which leads I would farm first.
For marketing, it means you get to squeeze the most from the marketing budget you’ve already spent. Take the IT Support company example above. If the enquirer of “secure data backup and storage” came in via PPC and they go on to buy your service, even though they didn’t submit their contact details on your landing page, using the IP tracking tool you can now attribute this sale back to your PPC marketing budget. In effect, it’s closing the gap between the sales and marketing.
What are the limitations?
OK, so there are a few limitations. Firstly these services are not free – frankly however they are worth their weight in gold if you do invest in them. Usually pricing is based on the number of visitors to your website (also referred to as ‘server calls’).
You can only track IP addresses back to businesses, consumer data is not allowed to be displayed. Data isn’t always 100% accurate either – Some IP tracking companies manage their data manually – meaning they manually research those IP’s that are not already listed. This manual editing at their end is a big benefit to you as a customer as you are not relying on technology solely to determine relationships between IP’s and businesses.
If a business is using non-static IP’s then again this data can not appear – the service only works with static IP’s.
Added to this, the tools don’t list the actual names of the individual that has been looking at your website. So for example, if you’re that IT Support company with a hot lead that came in on “secure data backup and storage,” the tool will tell you it was someone at Company123 that’s interested, but you’ll still have to do some digging around to find the right person within the company. That said, in this example – chances are you need to be speaking to the IT Director, and if it wasn’t them, they’ll likely be able to point you in the right direction. Some of the better tools do however provide you with the correct telephone number and this saves your sales team a large amount – they don’t have to dig around for the best office or extension to call.
So, how do you use IP tracking tools?
The first step is to sign up (or start a trial) with one of these IP tracking for lead generation companies. We’ve listed a few below to help you. Once you’ve done that, you’ll then need to install some tracking code on your website (usually in the footer) – if you use headers and footers that are standardised across all pages on your site then this might be quite a simple and quick task to complete. Once that’s done, you can sit back and wait for the data to roll in! These tools allow you to see, even in real time, the names of the businesses that are visiting your website, what keywords they came in on, and what pages they have been looking at.
Who Offers IP Tracking?
There’s a range of providers on the market, all doing at the heart the same basic thing, each with added extras such as leads scoring, real time visibility and automated alerts. Check out:
Both offer free demonstrations, for you to see the benefits first hand. Lead Forensics provides telephone numbers which Wow does not. Otherwise the only difference is the way they collect their data.
Summary
If you are in the B2B arena I’d strongly recommend taking a look at these tools. Yes there are a few limitations, and it is a bit Big Brother, however to be able to trace the names of those potential hot prospect businesses that are looking at your products and services right now is hugely beneficial. IP tracking wills give you a great advantage over your competitors too. Whilst the visitor might not have actually given you their details, it is clear they’re still very interested in what you offer, so give them a call, and you might just be able to convert the unconverted!
Happy Lead Hunting 🙂
Insights
