How isinbound marketing useful for profiling anonymous users? In an inbound marketing strategy aimed at generating qualified leads, content plays a key role in attracting visitors by giving them the information they need to solve a particular problem.
It is through such targeted content that a site can be discovered by a user looking for the solution to one of his or her problems. Good practice would therefore want such articles to be written imagining specific problems of the buyer person we intend to attract. How, however, can we present the right content to our anonymous visitors? Let’s find out together in this article.
A user’s decision-making process is almost never as linear as we have imagined it to be. In fact, the ideal buyer’s journey should provide that such a user, searching the search engines for an issue or symptom, comes across an article we have written that is attractive enough to convince him or her to click the link and read it.
Within or at the end of this article you will find CTAs inviting you to explore further, perhaps by downloading a material that will entice you to register on our site, thus subsequently giving us the opportunity to contact you again and ideally turn you into a customer of our service. There is, however, one small problem…this happens on average (if we are good!) in 2% of cases, and for all the rest of the traffic what do we do? Is it possible to increase the percentage of leads generated?
Personalizing the customer experience: let’s start with content
“A piece of content for everyone is a piece of content for no one,” goes an old motto of inbound marketing. Writing specialized content that interests our various buyer personas is a prerequisite for being relevant to them.
Suppose, however, that your business-as is the case in most cases-targets different buyer personas and perhaps different Industries. This will force you to make your homepage extremely generalist, so as not to run the risk of giving more prominence to information that is not important to the user and consequently making you perceived as being unprepared on the topic of his or her interest. We could therefore say, paraphrasing the motto above:
“A Homepage for All is a Homepage for None.”
It is at this level that personalization becomes crucial since, by being able to perform user profiling by segmenting even anonymous users, we will be able to present them with more relevant content consequently being perceived as specialists in the specific subject they are interested in, without actually having made any additional effort.
Inbound marketing: different content for different users, but…
It is an established fact that personalizing the user browsing experience is one of the activities that can most improve our conversion rates.
Greater relevance means greater engagement , and this translates into the fact that our prospects will consider us a more qualified source to advise them in solving their problems.
But how is it possible to improve this engagement for anonymous users? As we said a moment ago the vast majority of visitors to our site will remain anonymous to us, not registering to a form where they will “self-declare” their role, their business functions and possibly their needs. The result is that we will have written perhaps dozens of articles thinking of an ideal buyer person who, however, will never get a chance to read them, simply because to find them he would have had to do a thorough search through the meanders of your blog. In fact, not recognizing them, we will have submitted to them on the homepage as well as on the different pages of the site and of our blog, the same articles that we show to everyone. This happens first of all for two reasons:
- Inability to segment and profile anonymous users
- Inability to submit to them, in real time, the best articles
Moreover, this activity, in addition to being important for increasing conversions on anonymous users, can also allow us to be much more relevant to what we will call “soft leads,” visitors who may have only left us their email to sign up for a newsletter. Think how much more effective our newsletters could be if we could automate them and personalize them according to their interests. Today it is possible to monitor behaviors for the purpose of segmenting and profiling users, in this article we explain how.
Inbound marketing strategies: conclusions
But what is the point of all this you may be wondering? The clearest answer is highlighted by this statistic:
74% of consumers get frustrated when website content appears that has nothing to do with their interests.
A personalized experience is likely to generate more engagement and, combined with the perception that you specialize in the problems of the specific user, will be able to increase your conversions considerably, much to the chagrin of your competition!
