At Gossamar, we practice what we preach.  That’s why we’ve implemented the complete end-to-end Inbound Marketing Automation solution on our own website, which includes Demand Generation software.  To implement best practices, to play with the variables, and sometimes just to push the limits.

And on some days, when you just stand back and watch it work, the results are pure magic.

Let me give you an example. Let’s take a closer look at visits to our website last Tuesday. And let’s compare what we would know about these visitors without Inbound Marketing Automation, to the wealth of actionable information that is revealed with Inbound Marketing Automation.

Alternative #1:  Last Tuesday without Inbound Marketing Automation

Want a clearer picture of your Prospects?

If we are armed with an analytics package like Google Analytics (but no Inbound Marketing Automation), we would see details like the number of unique new visitors, bounce rate, average page views, average session time, traffic source, and keywords used in the organic searches used to get to our site.

Great stuff, pretty colours, nice charts, but really quite useless. Why? Because on the internet, much of your traffic is made of students, competitors, and what we call “internet vagrants”. If you can’t sort the garbage from the gold, what are you really measuring?

And hidden in all that data is one visitor who arrived with a keyword phrase search of “B2B Marketing 2.0”. One search like many others. The visitor came. The visitor left. No one is any wiser. And everyone continues on with business as usual.

Alternative #2: Last Tuesday with Inbound Marketing Automation

So what did our Inbound Marketing Automation system tell us about this visitor who searched on “B2B Marketing 2.0”

For starters, we received his name, email address (hence his website address, because our system only allows business email addresses), and title (a President), because the prospect (note how the visitor changes to a prospect with further insight) downloaded our whitepaper: “How to harness the power of Marketing 2.0 for your B2B company”.

We can also see all the details of this particular prospect’s journey through our site: what pages he visited; how long he viewed each page; and when he viewed each page (at work, or after hours at home).   Even whether he hesitated to provide this business email address.

Now, armed with this insight, and after reviewing the prospect’s website, we quickly put the pieces of the puzzle together. This is the President of a medium-size B2B company in the plastic additives market, located on the west coast in the US. His website is partially under construction, indicating that he is rethinking his “go-to-market” strategy. Hence his search for “B2B Marketing 2.0”. By his digital footprint on our website we can see that he is “raising his hand”, and ready for sales contact.

Wow: A pre-qualified prospect that is perfectly aligned with our product offering. Sales ready!

Now here’s the only question you need to ask yourself:  Which way do you want your next Tuesday to go? Alternative #1: Completely in the dark. Or Alternative #2: Prospects and Market Insight handed to you on a platter.

Until next time – Axel

Tags: b2b marketing, Demand Generation, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation, Sales Lead Generation

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Blog Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.