So you’re generating a pretty good return on inbound marketing.
But what happens when you exhaust your marketing channels with the budget you have and only see a slight increase in demand month on month?
You hit your targets, but you don’t exceed them.
And if you’re anything like me, you always want more. More qualified leads, more meetings booked, and more revenue.
But let’s be realistic. Most marketing teams don’t have an endless pot of cash to spend.
So essentially the name of the game becomes this…
To convert more of the existing demand you’re driving without increasing budget.
The problem is it’s hard to convert that demand if you don’t know what it looks like.
Anonymity amongst buyers is becoming increasingly common with the majority of the buying journey now taking place exclusively through digital channels.
Buyers self educate, doing anonymous research for much of the buying journey without interacting with sales until the very last minute. In fact, B2B buyers spend on average 9.3 months doing anonymous research online.
That’s a hell of a lot of time for your prospects to be researching you without you knowing about it. Think of all the engaging you could be doing to guide prospects into your sales funnel quicker!
And that’s where the problem arises. Prospects only become known to you when they decide to convert through your inbound channels. And the typical conversion rates are stark.
Did you know only 2% of your website visitors convert? That’s pretty low.
And yes, ok. That’s not to say the remaining 98% are ALL prospective buyers. We certainly don’t expect 100% of traffic to convert into a lead. Some visitors are competitors, some are looking for education, some might want to work for you, partner with you or become your supplier.
However, I’m here to tell you that a portion of your unconverted website visitors— visitors that show buying intent and fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) but don’t convert through your inbound stream— are a goldmine.
And waiting for these prospects to convert via inbound is a mistake that could cost you qualified leads.
So do the sensible thing, act on these potential qualified leads now and increase revenue potential with this strategy.
Here’s how.
- Identify the companies that match your ideal customer profile and who show buying intent on your website using a website tracking solution like Albacross
- Notify your sales team when a good fit lead visits your site so they can take action right away
P.S we devised a framework which tells you exactly what you need to do to implement this strategy. Download ‘Converting the unconverted: how to turn anonymous website visitors into sales opportunities.’
#Step 1: Define your ICP and buying intent criteria
Ideal Customer Profiles are nothing new. However, when implementing this strategy, it’s really important to have a clear understanding of what your ICP is.
Why?
Because it’s your ICP that determines what kind of companies you should be looking to capture information on in the first instance, when using a website tracking solution.
Now is a great time to revisit your ICP by firstly looking at your best customers. What do they look like?
Consider these criteria when defining your ICP and any other attributes that are important to you.
- Location
- Number of employees
- Industry
- Revenue
- Technology stack
Next, define what buying intent means for your business.
Buying intent refers to a collection of information about the behaviour of a particular company. In this instance, on your website.
When a prospect is showing buying intent it means they are likely to be considering making a purchase. For example, a returning visitor checking out your pricing page or a visitor whose session duration was high i.e. over 2 minutes, shows high buying intent.
Understand what ‘high intent’ means for your business. This will help your sales team to prioritize their outreach efforts further down the road.
When you’ve got these two attributes defined, combined with a website tracking solution, you’re in the perfect position to be able to identify unconverted website visitors.
#Step 2: Prioritize, nurture and convert prospects
The next step is to share that intent data with your sales team (the best way to do this is by feeding the information into your CRM) so they can prioritize, nurture and create meaningful outreach that ultimately increases the number of opportunities and pipeline.
Having this prioritized view (of companies that fit your ICP AND show buying intent) is essential, particularly when it comes to following up with prospects.
If the maximum lead response time is 3 hours (that’s the benchmark for B2B), following up in a timely manner could be the difference between converting a lead into an opportunity and losing out to a competitor who did get in touch straight away.
So notifying your sales team when a good fit lead visits your website is critical. There are lots of effective ways to do this, whether that be through Slack or Microsoft Teams, for example.
Then, it’s all about creating meaningful outreach that drives deeper engagement.
Using the intent data you have acquired gives you a competitive advantage. You know these prospects have visited your website and have high buying intent. The activity data you previously collected gives you insight into which topics they might want to discuss further.
At this point, you’ve got a real opportunity to not only make each engagement personalized, but to make it meaningful.
Whilst these prospects are more likely to become qualified since they hit your ICP and buying intent qualification criteria, they still need to be nurtured in the same way as other leads.
With that in mind, the simplest way (and the most effective when it comes to scaling this strategy) to engage with your unconverted website visitors is by enrolling them into your outbound sequences.
That’s a mix of email, calls and social media touches that span on average 30 days.
Effectively prioritizing these prospects and understanding the best course of action in terms of what kind of outbound sequence they should be enrolled into is something to consider. But that’s for another day.
So there you have it. A strategy for converting the unconverting without spending more budget in your marketing channels.
Of course, I wouldn’t be shouting out about this strategy if I didn’t know it was effective.
But I do, since we implemented it ourselves at Albacross (and the results were amazing).
We increased our SQLs to opportunities by 17% in one month.
Want some concrete examples of how we did this? Download ‘Converting the unconverted’ ebook to find out.
You won’t regret it.
(And neither will your sales team when you tell them you’ve figured out a way to generate more pipeline for them).
Marcus Svensson
Head of Growth
Marcus Svensson is responsible for the Growth of Albacross with previous experience as a founder and background in Mathematics.