Improve Conversion Efficiency with Demandbase
SEW EXPERTS: BY THE NUMBERS By Eric Enge, Search Engine Watch, Mar 11, 2009
Columns | Contact Eric | Biography
Increasing conversion efficiency should be the goal of every Web site publisher. Regardless of what you're trying to accomplish with the site (sales, leads, sell advertising, disseminating information), having a higher conversion rate than your competitor provides you with a strategic advantage.
One of the best ways to improve your conversion efficiency is with landing page optimization. This is a topic covered on a regular basis in By the Numbers by Tim Ash, so I won't delve into it too deeply here. Recently, I got a chance to look at a new tool that improves your conversion efficiency in a unique new way.
A New Conversion Efficiency Tool
One of the big problems with B2B Web sites is that more than 90 percent of the incoming traffic isn't converted into business or a lead. You spend a lot of money to build a Web site, build an SEO team to help market it, run PPC advertising, and perhaps display advertising to bring people to the site, then they come and go and you have nothing to show for it.
What if you could get detailed information on who had been to the site and reach out to them as a follow-up to their visit? This is exactly what a new tool from Demandbase is designed to do. Imagine you had a tool that provided you with detailed information on visitors to your Web site that looked like this:
Notice the detailed profile of the company where the visitor works. In addition, you can click on "Get Contacts" at the bottom left and pull up detailed information on the people in the department that are most likely to be interested in your products. With this information in hand, you can follow up with a call to the right people, and turn that visit into a genuine lead. This is powerful stuff.
How it Works
The tool uses a variety of databases to do its work. The first of these is ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. Using the IP address of the incoming visitor, ARIN can be used to determine which company (if any) that user is coming from.
This works because people sitting inside the corporate offices are shown as coming from the company IP address. This is enough to get the business name, and should be enough to get a sense of which office they're coming from as well.
Next up, they use a database that provides them information on who the key people are working in the various departments of the company, including the departments most likely to be interested in your product. With this database, they can then present you with the information on those people, including (in many cases) such details as a contact phone number.
Of course, this means that this isn't a tool for people with a B2C Web site, because the first step of looking up the IP address where the customer is, and contacting ARIN won't return any useful information. However, it's a great tool for B2B Web sites.
Benefits
The first clear benefit: you've converted an anonymous visitor into a warm lead. This has obvious benefits to the sales process. But it goes deeper than that.
Your organization is spending money to market your products through your Web site. The budget that is invested in that effort is selected based on certain ROI expectations.
What if your costs remained the same, but you increased revenue and margin dollars by 10 percent? Or 20 percent? Chances are that this will dramatically increase the margin performance of your operation.
You can then take just the profit from that, or you can double down. What I mean by that is that you can now up your spend on Web site marketing (be it SEO, PPC, or both), and gain a strategic edge on your competition.
If you have the highest conversion efficiency in your market space, you can bid your PPC campaigns up into the number one position for key terms. You can expand your SEO efforts, and increase your display advertising spend.
Ultimately, this allows you to turn conversion efficiency into market share. Now that's a virtuous circle worth pursuing.
Join us for Search Engine Strategies New York March 23-27 at the Hilton New York. The only major search marketing conference and expo on the East Coast, SES New York will be packed with more than 70 sessions, including a ClickZ track, plus more than 150 exhibitors, networking events, parties, and training days.
» Print this article » E-mail a colleague » Post a comment
Biography
Eric Enge is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of City Town Info and Custom Search Guide.
Article Archives by Eric Enge:
» Improve Conversion Efficiency with Demandbase - March 11, 2009
» Maintaining an SEO Log - February 25, 2009
» Getting Buy-In Is A Crucial First Step in Enterprise SEO - February 11, 2009
» Track Those Alternate Conversions - January 28, 2009
» Training Your Content Developers on SEO Copywriting - January 14, 2009
» Use Caution When Growing Your Site - December 31, 2008
» More Articles by Eric Enge
No comments:
Post a Comment