The article below by Stephen Wellman at Gartner landed in my inbox this morning just as I was getting on a call with a technology provider who looks at website visitors and analytics. It really helped me fill a few gaps in my own ideas on the value associated with leveraging website analytics for business growth.
My interest stems from understanding more about the needs of enterprise clients. As a technology provider (like many) we can contribute to range of needs however when selling you cannot 'boil the ocean' and must focus on your core proposition. That said, it is extremely useful to also understand where you can assist further. If you are a large enterprise yourself with multi products/services this is particularly useful e.g. management consultants or professional services.
As Stephen points out, focusing on existing customers can be a great source of revenue and the need to understand and offer these additional products/services is key.
For this to work you need a good understanding of your own technology and the commitment/buy-in from all parties internally. This is the conundrum for most organisations (as Stephen points out) however there is a solution.
Your company is typically full of experts. These experts will sit in various different teams however their knowledge of your business and personal role can be a great way to connect with additional needs of your existing clients.
Since your customers are typically signed up because someone in your company understands their needs and is in constant contact, you can have these individuals share relevant content from your internal experts as they see fit. Equally by having this diverse range of content on your domain your technology can play a key role in identifying new areas of interest to feedback to your team internally to pass onto the client e.g. your recruitment team writing content about how your product assists with their role or a lawyer writing about their niche area of law that you might have not realised was important to your existing client until you saw them reviewing online.
What you cannot cheat is having real experts create this content. Unless it is authentic, timely and expert-led it could possibly do more harm than good. The good news is you will not be in short supply of these in your business since B2B deals are done on an expert-to-expert base.
The next piece of the puzzle is to create long term sustainability. You can do this through feedback. This is where your technology comes in. Explaining the value and business outcomes that impact each person involved in the cycle is key.
I haven't touched on the positive impact this has on the new GDPR rules, I will leave that for another time! Here is a great bank of GDPR related content in the meantime however.
In summary I would suggest:
- Identify which companies in your portfolio have an opportunity to expand
- Setup your internal infrastructure to measure and deliver feedback
- Engage your internal experts who can demonstrate expertise that understand key issues facing the client to create content
- Build a feedback loop that directly reflects and positively impacts the targets of each internal stakeholder involved
- Share success together
2.) Be smarter with analytics. While many marketing leaders have data and the analytics at their disposal, most aren’t leveraging them effectively. Marketing leaders need to get a better handle on their customer data, targeting key accounts and using better analysis to identify opportunities for growth (for more on how to leverage customer data see Four Ways B2B Marketers Can Generate Demand Within Existing Accounts, Gartner subscription required). For example, marketing leaders need to look for opportunities to cross-sell more products to existing clients or look for upsell opportunities. By mining purchase patterns and content consumption history, marketers can unearth new insights that they can leverage for more business. 3.) Better align sales, marketing and technology. Alignment between sales and marketing in B2B organizations can be an elusive goal.
