Are you struggling with B2B lead generation? If so, ask yourself a simple question; ‘How well do I know my audience?’
Unfortunately, market research is no longer enough to know the ins and outs of your target customer. Modern audiences want content that is tailored to them as an individual.
But what’s the trick to understanding your customers? Behavioral analytics.
B2B businesses from all industries are using this process, and in this article, we’ll explore how the right insights can transform your lead generation.
What is behavioral analytics?
Behavioral analytics is the process of analyzing customer interactions across different touchpoints. Whenever a customer engages with your brand, they leave a digital footprint.
Let’s imagine a customer visits your website, reads your blog, and then signs up to your mailing list. This journey contains many potential insights into a customer’s behavior: What sort of content caused them to linger on your blog? What persuaded them to sign up to your mailing list?
Behavioral analytics can unpack each of these interactions and produce valuable insights that help to guide your lead generation activities. By understanding ‘what makes customers tick,’ you can create content they are more likely to respond to.
Of course, lead behavioral analytics encompasses more than just website data. It can include information from customer support, social media, email, and any other touchpoints.
Large-scale organizations dealing with thousands of datasets may require Apache Hive documentation to access and manage their data effectively. However, having large amounts of data is not a requirement for behavioral analytics.
Every leading B2B organization uses some form of behavioral analytics tool. If you want to get ahead of the competition, it’s time to start making the most of customer data. As you gather insights about different customer preferences and behaviors, this can also guide strategic decisions such as selecting a business name and marketing campaign themes that resonate well with your target audience, reflecting what they value most in a brand.
8 ways behavioral analytics can help generate leads
Here are some of the major reasons to utilize this tactic.
1. Understand different customers within your audience
Not everyone in your audience will be the same. Your customer base will consist of many different types of people. For B2B businesses, this includes people of different seniorities, departments, and industries.
Each of these different types of customers will behave slightly differently. They’ll use your product for various purposes, consume media differently, and favor certain platforms for interacting with your brand. Understanding these differences is key to effective lead generation.
In the past, a business might have spoken to customers directly using its PBX telephone systems. They’d ask questions about their preferences and their thoughts about a brand. Today, though, behavioral analytics allows us to go much more in-depth.
Using a feature called ‘lead segmentation’, behavioral analytics tools can break your customers into smaller groups. You can segment by demographic, location, career, and many other factors. You can analyze segments to understand your audience on a more granular level.
Incorporating lead enrichment here can enhance the depth of these segments, providing even more detailed data by adding external information such as social media activity or previous purchasing behavior. This enriched data can give a fuller picture of potential leads, helping to tailor marketing efforts more effectively.
This information can be used to create more accurate buyer personas, helping to inform future lead-generation efforts.
2. Improve loyalty through personalized content
Modern B2B audiences love personalization. It’s a tactic that has proven to be successful time and time again for lead generation.
One study showed that, as a result of personalized content, engagement with calls-to-actions increased by nearly 70%, year-on-year. At the same time, requests for product demonstrations grew by four times, and conversion rates doubled for personalized experiences.
To offer tailored experiences, you need to understand the preferences of your audience. We’ve explained how behavioral analytics helps you understand the different types of audience members.
Using this knowledge, you can begin to tailor experiences for individual customers. This can be as simple as addressing customers by their first name. You can go much further, however, ensuring customers are sent links to relevant deals and content.
Incorporating email marketing strategies that leverage behavioral analytics allows for even more personalized communications, making it possible to send highly targeted emails based on individual behavior and preferences.
As you provide customers with favorable experiences, their loyalty will increase. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that they will become qualified leads.
3. Find winning strategies through A/B testing
A/B testing tests two versions of the same web page to see which version performs better. We’ll demonstrate this through a simple example:
You have two landing pages. Landing page A has the CTA in the middle of the page. Landing page B places the CTA at the bottom of the page. You split your incoming traffic so that 50% is directed to landing page A and 50% to landing page B. After monitoring the results, you will find that landing page A has a 30% higher conversion rate.
Behavioral analytics can further enhance your A/B testing. You can look at how customers behave on web pages in more detail.
Perhaps landing page A has a higher conversion rate, but the video on landing page B has a higher play rate. You can use insights from both pages to create a more favorable overall experience.
4. Optimize your website to acquire more leads
Employ inbound marketing strategies to further enhance your website’s capability to acquire more leads. Traditional analytics tools can tell you a lot about ‘what’ is wrong with a website. Your bounce rate might be too high, or your conversion rate too low. It’s less effective, though, for telling you ‘why’ these problems are occurring. In these situations, it’s very easy to jump to the wrong conclusions.
A high bounce rate might suggest that a blog post isn’t very interesting. Thanks to behavioral analytics, though, you discover that users’ pages are crashing when interacting with an image. After replacing the image, you find that the bounce rate reduces significantly.
Similarly, behavioral analytics can help determine the impact of interstitial ads on user engagement and retention. By analyzing user behavior before, during, and after encountering these ads, you can assess whether they are effectively capturing interest or if they might be causing users to leave your site prematurely. This insight allows you to make data-driven decisions on how to deploy these ads strategically without disrupting the user journey.
Without this additional insight, it’s easy to make the wrong decisions. Instead of correcting errors, you might harm your lead generation strategy. You can correct these issues and optimize the overall user experience. With fewer obstacles, more users are likely to convert.
However, given that the complexity and scope of data is continually increasing, organizations are also looking to new technology to harness this data.
One example is Large Language Models (LLMs). If you’re wondering how LLMs work, these use machine learning to interpret complex data and can be used in many fields. Using behavioral analytics alongside technology such as this can be very powerful.
5. Identify high-value leads with lead scoring
Not every lead is necessarily worth chasing. Some ‘low-value’ leads will buy an item and never visit your business again. In the case of B2B business, users might subscribe to your product for a month and then go elsewhere.
Unfortunately, it’s very easy to put too many resources into chasing these types of customers. It’s far better to focus on ‘high-value’ leads who will foster long-term relationships with your business. The challenge, of course, is identifying these customers.
The latest behavioral analytics tools utilize AI to assist with lead scoring. By examining historical trends and current patterns of user behavior, they assess the value of each lead. This allows you to focus your resources more efficiently and boost long-term revenue.
Of course, to effectively train AI, you need massive data sets and access to tools such as the Hadoop distributed file system. For this reason, AI-powered might not be an effective solution for smaller organizations.
6. Improve retention rates
There’s a reason so many modern marketing strategies focus on retention. Customers leaving your brand in droves represents a significant problem. It means you are constantly paying for advertising to replace customers that you’ve lost.
Your growth will be stunted due to a lack of consistent sales. Poor retention also suggests that customers are unhappy with your brand. They’re likely to leave poor reviews, further harming your reputation.
Poor retention can also be a major issue for your long-term lead-generation efforts. If fewer customers are sticking around, you’re getting fewer referrals. If low retention is due to poor user experience, your search engine results ranking may also be harmed. This means that fewer leads will be finding your brand organically.
The only way to address the issue of poor user retention is to become hyper-focused on customer experience. With the help of behavioral analytics, you can answer the following questions:
- How could my offering be improved to stop customers from going elsewhere?
- How can content on my site be improved to entice users to return?
- Does my site address the needs of website users?
- What performance issues are customers facing on my site?
7. Track your progress
Having goals is useful in lead generation. It’s equally important, however, to know how close you are to reaching them. Behavioral analytics tools provide you with easy access to a variety of metrics.
A few examples are listed below.
- Average session duration: The length of time that the average user spends on your site. A longer session duration indicates that a user is engaged, increasing the likelihood of them becoming a lead.
- Click-through rate: A useful metric for email campaign management. You can monitor the number of people coming to your site from your email campaigns.
- Exit rate: The percentage of users that end their session on a particular page. A high exit rate can mean users aren’t interested in the content of a page, or that it is suffering from performance issues.
- Rage clicks: When a user clicks on a certain page element multiple times. This usually occurs because a user is frustrated when an element is unresponsive.
- Scrolls depth: Measures the amount of a page that a user has viewed. This is useful for measuring the popularity of blogs and other long-form content.
Most analytics tools also allow you to create customized dashboards. You can gain access to the key performance indicators that matter most to you. You can also build reports around your KPIs to track progress toward your lead generation goals in more detail.
8. Find the most engaging website content
Engagement is highly important for lead generation. Engaged users are more likely to stay on your site and convert. Of course, levels of engagement won’t be the same across your site. Some pages will perform better than others. By identifying areas of high engagement, you gain a blueprint that can be replicated for other content on your site.
Behavioral analytics tools can help you to monitor engagement on different pages. Alongside an effective content intelligence tool, they can provide many useful insights into web page performance. Some platforms even allow you to monitor users in ‘real-time.’ You can watch as they navigate your content and see which pages draw their attention.
Tools such as heatmaps can also help you optimize existing content. Perhaps a certain paragraph or heading of a blog is receiving more attention? You could restructure an article to focus more on this section, potentially improving overall engagement.
Different types of behavioral analytics tools
‘Behavioral analytics’ is actually a blanket term for many different types of analytics tools. Each helps you monitor user behavior in different ways.
Below are examples of different tools that can support your lead-generation efforts. Be selective and avoid encumbering yourself with too many tools.
- Heat mapping tools: These tools provide an overview of how users interact with different pages on your site. They provide a color-coded overview of different pages of individual pages. Areas with high interaction are highlighted in red, and areas with low interaction are in blue.
- Session replay tools: These offer a reconstruction of a user’s session. You watch a user’s journey as they navigate across your site and spot any roadblocks or pain points that they might encounter.
- Form analysis tools: Form analysis gives insight into how users interact with forms on your site. Are they able to submit information successfully? Are there too many fields in your form, causing users to leave mid-sign-up? These insights can help you optimize your form pages so that more users submit.
- Customer feedback tools: Old-fashioned surveys are still extremely effective sources of data. Feedback tools enable customers to share their thoughts about your business and website. You use this information to build more pleasant customer experiences and boost lead generation.
Key takeaways
In today’s business world, data is king. Even if you’ve yet to adopt behavioral analytics for lead generation, it’s a sure bet that your competitors will be utilizing the tool. To stay up to date and have the best understanding of your customers, it’s crucial to ‘get with the times’.
Throughout this article, we’ve explored the many benefits of behavioral analytics. It can help you with:
- Understanding different audience segments.
- Providing greater personalization on your site.
- Spotting errors and removing roadblocks
- A/B testing and finding optimal designs for web pages.
The process should begin with finding the best tools to support your lead generation. If you’re unsure where to start, why not try Breadcrumbs? We offer Enterprise-grade lead-scoring software to help optimize your entire funnel. We’ll analyze your data and suggest a model with just a few simple clicks.
What to see for yourself? Why not book a demo today?
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