Unknown Unknowns- How Do You Target the Anonymous?

What proportion of the people on your website do you know? I don’t mean biblically. I mean how many of them could you put a name and some form of contact details to?

Forget about how you would achieve this and think in terms of pure numbers. What do you reckon? If it helps, put it another way: of the people visiting your website, what proportion already have a relationship with your organisation?

It’s low right? But it’s not always. We’ve learned with CANDDi that for some companies, customer traffic is dramatically greater than prospect traffic. Think about companies with a popular but high value niche application: here the vast majority of people are visiting the site because they have already paid and want to log in. Only a small proportion are new prospects.

So let’s refine the question further: of the PROSPECTS visiting your website, what proportion do you already have a relationship with?

Now I’m willing to bet that number is low.

We’ve shown with CANDDi that even for companies with a VERY niche proposition where they think they know the key people in their market, they can only put identity to a small proportion of their web visitors*.

This is actually fairly natural. Where does the majority of your web traffic come from? In most cases it is natural search and CPC advertising, plus a bit of social, inbound links from partners etc.

None of these referrers passes you identity, so it’s no surprise that most of the people on your website are unidentified.

So you have a challenge: in order to sell to these people, you need to know who they are. Or do you?

Look at what you do know about a web visitor, even before you know who they are. If you are using CANDDi Prospect Analytics you probably know:

• Where they are geographically
• Whether they are on a corporate, home or mobile connection
• Which company they work for (if they are on a corporate LAN)
• What they searched for to find your site
• Which pages they are looking at
• What content they have downloaded/watched/played
• How many times they have visited

Now based on all that information, do you think you could make a reasonable judgement as to what sort of prospect they are, what they want, and how much they want it? It’s no different from the sort of information you would get from a Marketing Automation platform of the type you might use for your known prospects.

If you had gathered this information through a Marketing Automation system, at some point you would probably make a decision whether to call a prospect, or whether to just keep emailing them.

But without contact details, you can’t intervene like that in their buying process. Can you?

We’ll soon be announcing a new module for the CANDDi Prospect Analytics platform that will allow you to do just that.

*At least when they start working with us.