Sales discovery helps determine ad efficacy

There’s a well-known saying in the advertising industry that goes:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

The sentence is credited to John Wanamaker, a successful turn of the century merchant, who died in 1922.

Nearly a hundred years after his death, his basic truth about marketing is on the verge of changing so profoundly that he would be stunned. You can now get much closer to knowing which part of your spending is successful!

One way that marketing is improving is through what’s called “sales discovery.” Sales discovery is a new aspect of marketing that uses digital tools and sneaky strategies to gain valuable insight into how your clients are engaging with your online content. When used astutely, sales discovery helps you isolate the advertising dollars that are being wasted so you can maximize the profitability of your marketing efforts.

Sales discovery has many aspects, but the one that we will focus on today is perhaps the most impressive. Did you know? There are tools out there can help you identify the otherwise anonymous traffic that visits your site. That means, you can see exactly who the business and organizations are that are checking out your web pages. Here’s how it works:

You’re probably used to looking at Google Analytics to see how many people have been visiting your site and how they have been interacting with your content. But you generally only get their contact information if they offer it to you — on a contact us page or by signing up for a newsletter. You have many people visiting your site who are further up in the sales funnel and haven’t identified themselves yet.

Now, using new tools like Leadfeeder and Clearbit, you can see which businesses and organizations are visiting your site, enabling you to do more proactive advertising.

These new sales discovery tools match the public IP addresses of people who land on your site to the organizations that those IP addresses belong to (all public information). With this information you might see that a major B2B prospect has been visiting your site. Repeatedly.

Not only that, you can see what pages they visit and how long they spend. Armed with this information, you can begin to do a tailored campaign of advertising, mail-outs, retargeting, or other techniques to court the business that has been secretly, up until now, visiting you. This enables you to get out in front of prospects and more efficiently market yourself to those who are already interested.

Likely, some people might take this too far. You don’t want to look like you are spying on your prospects. That’s just creepy. The information you gain could be used to actually scare prospects away! Be careful not to do that.

Rather, you might consider integrating sales discovery tools into your CRM so that you can create tailored advertising strategies for prospects that are at different places in the sales funnel.

Or, if that sounds too complicated, then just simply imagine having more information about a prospect when they finally do pick up the phone and call you. You could see which pages they have been spending time on, and what products or services they might be interested in. And with that extra confidence, you can complete the sale.

Laurie Macomber is owner of Fort Collins-based Blue Skies Marketing. Reach her at 970-689-3000.

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