It doesn’t take a face-to-face meeting to learn what your customers and leads are seeking online. They are already telling you through their behavior on your website and their interactions — or lack of interactions — with your content across channels. Once you have a robust understanding of these behaviors, you can predict your customers’ future behaviors and use those insights to cultivate brand loyalty.
The path visitors take through your site holds a wealth of information into what content your customers find valuable and what they could do without. Start by investigating where your visitors leave the site. Are there pages on your website where people seem to be spending much less time? Do visitors routinely leave the site after viewing a given page? If so, this will tell you that your audience isn’t finding what they are looking for. Take the time to figure out what gaps exist. Also assess what kinds of content encourages website clickthroughs and longer session duration. With these key insights, you can make the most out of every page on your site.
Just as valuable is information about the different paths leads take through your site, especially when they go on to initiate contact with the sales team. Examine patterns in these behavior flows to learn what aspects of your site are successfully pushing leads down the funnel.
Think of every action taken on your site as a comment from your audience. Learn to read the data and you can begin to understand the messages your customers are sharing about their likes and dislikes.
Your marketing is cross-channel, so your data analytics needs to be cross-channel as well. Every platform on which you engage with your audience is a valuable source of intelligence on your customers. Use a CRM to track lead engagement, paying careful attention to what marketing materials entice them further down the funnel, and tracking these interactions as precisely as possible. Monitor what engages leads on every channel, whether it is links in your email marketing, a particular video in a video series, or a given slide in a Slideshare presentation. Knowing the specifics about what content catalyzes conversions will allow you to make better decisions.
Again, pay attention to your audience’s implied feedback. When you invite customers to share their personal contact information in order to subscribe to a newsletter, download a white paper or join a webinar, how many of them complete the form? A high degree of interaction with these aspects of your marketing indicates that your audience trusts you and finds your content valuable. However, if most visitors leave these pages without following your calls-to-action, it’s a sign of the opposite. Experiment with new types of content and topics until you find something that attracts leads.
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