5 October 2011 – London, UK – Trovus, the provider in customer intelligence services built on understanding organisational behaviour through detailed profiling, has revealed the results of its latest benchmarking research into how organisations drive value from the profiles of their web site visitors. Looking at traffic from hundreds of organisations across the websites of a technology company and legal firm, the research concludes that many companies are data rich but insight poor. It finds that companies want better understanding of client and prospect behaviour to improve client engagement and long term relationships; and that only innovators are exploiting the value of this customer intelligence to develop their businesses.
The research, which draws on unique datasets from real life case studies, includes trends analysis over the last eight months across a technology company website in the areas of ‘cloud computing’ and ‘web security’. Addressing a wide range of organisations in several different vertical markets, the research clearly shows falling interest levels in cloud among Financial Services and Education verticals due to redundancies and the summer months, respectively. At the same time the results indicate an increasing interest among Financial Services and Healthcare/Pharmaceutical verticals in web security.
“Our research highlights that analyses of customer intelligence from their web site profiles reveal who is interested in what and when,” said Caspar Craven, Co-Founder of Trovus. “This is a powerful weapon. It tells you which clients and prospects to engage now. The most innovative companies use this customer intelligence to understand vertical market trends and client needs, gaining insights into interests and behaviours and targeting engagement activity and messages appropriately.”
Focusing on the Legal market, the research reveals insightful trends in how market sectors have reacted to announcements around changes to the legislation on the agency worker directive. By sector it shows a 100% increase in interest in this area for Technology and Telecoms organisations over the summer months (June/July) compared to the start of the year, as well as a five times increase with Financial Services. Engineering and Construction shows a 50% increase, while the public sector interest fell significantly over the same period.
According to the research, acting on trends with a targeted approach will increase the effectiveness and timeliness of client engagement, based on hearing the true ‘voice of the customer’ and on choosing the right channel to begin business development activity. In fact, channels are shown to be all important. In a stark message, the research warns that companies ignoring social media channels do so at their peril. “We would ask whether it’s time to stop questioning the value of social media,” says Trovus’s Craven. “Our research highlights an unmistakably powerful correlation between exploitation of social media and number of referrals to a company’s website … referrals that can be seized upon with further personalised business development activity.”
Comparing an innovative benchmark company with four other companies using social media the research shows that despite having a large number of followers on LinkedIn, the four companies without dedicated resource for social media exhibited a poor conversation rate to referrals on their websites.
“Looking at the most successful client Trovus has in terms of the ratio of followers on LinkedIn to relevant organisation referrals onto their site, the power of social media when engaged with is clear,” says Craven. “The analysis shows our client with a dedicated social media employee converted 5332 of its 5495 followers to referrals, versus the benchmark of 167 conversions from 4493 followers.”
The research also contrasts company referrals from corporate LinkedIn profiles with email marketing, unveiling startling results. It highlights a major difference of 5332 versus 2553 referrals respectively over 12 months to June 2011, the over-riding message being that engaging in personalised relationships via social media promises far superior returns in developing the business.
“This information is invaluable to our clients,” concludes Craven. “They can create fresh opportunities in terms of marketing and business development. Their business development initiatives reach only a small segment of the full target audience, so the potential market to exploit opportunities with more targeted marketing campaigns is massive.”
Kaynak : 