Dec
3

The most exciting B2B innovation this year… read on

One of the great ‘black holes’ of B2B marketing is the data list of suspects. Organisations who are not yet known to us but who are researching our products and services.

Our heritage in database marketing for B2B works really well once we have a company or individual’s contact details – as an industry we are really good at developing brand awareness, starting and maintaining relationships and conversations and filling a sales pipeline. But until we have the company name all these actions are not possible because they depend on direct communication.

New Technology helps

I enjoy new technology and tools because they frequently improve key parts of the business development methodology.  Over time, we’ve seen the death of the corporate brochure, annual report, white paper, printed press release and the rise of e-newsletters, second generation websites, SEO and Adwords online advertising.

Each of these tools are new – but they still fit into the templated B2B biz dev methodology that I was developing in the 1990s for professional services firms and that I continue to use today.

Two months ago, I discovered a new tool that helps B2B organisations discover the identity of website visitors.

The New Tool

This is really exciting because hitherto apart from a cookie-generated IP address, there was no way of knowing who was actually visiting your website until they chose to reveal their identity by contacting you, signing up to a newsletter or downloading a white paper.

The new tool is called “IP mapping” or “Reverse IP mapping“.

How it works

It works by taking the cookie-generated IP address and using the “WHOIS” information registered with the site’s domain.  The software takes the IP address and thus finds the name of the organisation registered.

This is still an imperfect process because the web developer or hosting agency may be the site’s WHOIS contacts – but it is a whole lot better than the anonymity of a long string IP number.

Creative Agency Secrets has researched two providers of IP mapping and tested one of them out on our own website. And the technology works!

In the next post tomorrow, we’ll show you screen shots and some detail about how the technologies work.

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Posted by rebecca 3 New Business Pipeline, 5 Relationship Development, 6 Creating Opportunities, B2B, Biz Dev, IP mapping Subscribe to RSS feed
  • When we first started out in 2004, we used this on our Precis Marketing website; Marketing Agency, checking out visitors through our live help system. But as we've grown, we don't have time to man the livehelp system and we just wait for the enquiries to come in.

    If we did more telemarketing we would use this info to shape the telemarketing conversations and one of our customers does this. Also, with email marketing technologies like Eloqua you can track down to the person who has visited your website, what they viewed, and whether they came from PPC, Organic Search etc., provided they have read one of your emails.
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