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In the era of Big Data, companies must capitalise on the bombardment of new types of information – identifying and harnessing it to better engage customers and prospects says Caspar Craven
ISSUE TEN • JANUARY 2013
Our research benchmarked 100s of websites to understand what percentages of visits to a website are important, the types of web behaviour and trends from web visits. It draws on unique datasets from real life case studies, and includes trends analysis over the websites of financial services, legal and technology companies.
And it sends out a stark message that customer intelligence and social media are ‘ignored at our peril.’ Web intelligence and analytical skills are needed to make sense of data and chart the way forward.
If you think about the B2B world of banks, law firms, accountants and technology providers, customers tend to be loyal. Given that corporate decision making takes time, and they also customers tend to buy more than one service from a trusted advisor, a lot of the marketing and business development campaigns are around up and cross selling. The full engagement cycle is long, with regular interactions and different touch points between customer and supplier. They all contain intelligence ready to be exploited.
Time to move on By ‘stuck in the noughties’, I mean that many companies still rely on tools first introduced in that era. We mean the off-the-shelf web analysis tools that deliver just the basic insights into website visitors. Things have moved on. There’s much more to capturing and understanding information from our websites.
Insightful trends
We now hear terms like ‘web or lead forensics’. From web intelligence, and crucially the skills to interpret it, we can observe much more deeply the behaviours of our websites visitors. And we can turn these insights in plans of action to yield positive results that hit the bottom line, knowing when and how best to begin engaging prospects and customers.
Our research cites examples in the Legal market, where insightful trends were revealed in how market sectors reacted to announcements around changes to the legislation on the agency worker directive. It shows a 100% increase in interest in this area for Technology and Telecoms organisations over the summer months compared to the start of the year, as well as a five times increase with Financial
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Caspar Craven is Co-Founder and Director of Trovus. Trovus is a customer intelligence consultancy, see www.trovus.co.uk for more information
Recent Trovus research reveals that many organisations may be ‘data rich’ yet ‘insight poor’. It highlights that a better understanding of customer and prospect online behaviour and data – to improve customer engagement and long term relationships – eludes most companies today.
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