We live in the data-driven age, where consumers expect relevant information and value-filled personalized offers while complying with data protection laws. To generate such offers, you need a comprehensive understanding of various factors such as your clientele’s behavioral, geographic, purchasing, psychographic, and demographic patterns.
The collection of such data helps build a database of personas that allow you to plan and execute effective selling strategies based on a solid model. However, people worry about data protection and the security risk or threat of sharing their personal information on the internet or on random websites.
That’s where technology profiling comes in. It’s a systematic way of collecting critical information about leads through iterative forms intended to advance the sales cycle. With the right tools, you can use the internet and search data to come up with a database of prospects that you can look up without breaching internet data security protocols.
This article discusses technology profiling and what makes it incredibly useful in lead prospecting or generation. But first, we can begin with the basics.
A lead is an individual or group that shows an interest in a company’s product or service. Leads typically hear from an organization or business after opening communication (by submitting personal information for a trial, offer, or subscription) rather than getting a cold call from someone who purchased their contact information from a data mining vendor.
Leads are part of the lifecycle consumers follow when they transition from web visitor to customer. However, leads differ, and marketers don’t qualify them the same.
Lead generation refers to the process of attracting prospective clients to your business and nurturing them, with the intention of converting them into customers and improving your market share.
Technology profiling is a method of collecting internet and search intelligence about a person or client in a step-by-step manner. The process allows the digital marketing team to gather increasingly specific and accurate data about a person to streamline the lead nurturing process.
The process involves using dynamic web form questions that become more in-depth each time a lead visits a site, allowing you to gain incremental information on prospects and clients.
One of the best things about the new technology profiling tools is that the website visitor won’t have to answer the same question twice. For instance, if the lead already gave their name, email address, and phone number, they won’t be asked for it again.
Instead, when the lead arrives on the landing page for a second or third time, they will encounter different questions like their home address, company name, and more. That way, marketing teams can obtain sales intelligence about users without overwhelming or annoying them with lengthy forms in their first interaction.
While the specific setup process largely depends on the software’s features and capabilities, it typically involves specifying which questions you want to include in your profiling queue and in what order they should appear to your leads.
Let’s face it; nobody wants to fill out a long questionnaire each time they visit a website. Technology profiling allows you to collect sales intelligence progressively using short and sweet questions. Rather than asking a lead for their information all at once, you can iteratively ask different questions during successive interactions.
Because of this, our progressive profiling technology makes it easier for anyone with reservations about completing lengthy forms. Technology profilers can help you boost your market share and free up resources.
If you’ve already established your business and have a reputation for providing valuable content, the chances are that you have repeat clients who you have in your contacts database filling out forms to redeem your offers. You don’t want them to answer the same set of questions every time they visit your website.
Asking new questions every time a lead converts allows you to collect more in-depth information about your prospects and customers.
While sophisticated data mining software can free up your employees or human resources by helping you capture behavioral data about your leads, sometimes asking questions directly proves more effective at helping you learn more about your leads.
However, asking for the information you need all at once can lead to pretty lengthy forms, which will lower your conversion rates, leaving you with no information or failed projects. With progressive profiling technology, you can spread out your questions over time and align them with the lead’s stage in the sales cycle.
Progressive profiling can even help you shorten your sales cycle, as you have an easier time pinpointing leads ready to convert. Overall, you want to ask the right questions at the right time as you build a complete profile for each lead and get a better idea of their behaviors.
Profiling tools save you the trouble of creating separate forms tailored to different landing pages on your website. For example, you might assume that someone who landed on your price page is further along the sales cycle, and because of that, you might want to display a form that asks more sales-specific questions.
With the profiling tool, you can reuse the same forms across various landing pages to make sure you’re asking the right questions at the right time. You can also look up information about your past clients.
There are computer profiling tools that provide all the benefits mentioned above without the additional cost of expensive software. You can get alternative software and services, free up resources, and save time on your project.
Profiling technologies can help you improve your lead prospecting in the following ways:
Secondary CTAs make it easier to reconvert and nurture leads, especially if they progress the lead through the sales funnel based on their previous conversion. Since you already converted a lead, our profiling technologies enable you to optimize your forms for the second conversion.
That means you can capture additional information to better segment prospects into categories, nurture them and resell to them in the future.
Since business blogs typically attract repeat web visitors, consider including a profiling survey on your blog’s sidebar, asking readers about your blogs, such as the type of content or services they like or other types of feedback that can help you boost your blog’s strategy and performance. You want iterative questions to avoid repetition.
A thorough analysis of answers can help you understand the characteristics of web visitors. Our systems have plenty of features you can leverage to learn more about your competitors, their websites, and any other significant data you need to stay informed. Get your software from a publisher you can trust. If your competitors or companies in your location take advantage of survey systems to stay ahead, so should you.
Since our profiling tool will show a broad set of questions to new web visitors and more targeted questions to visitors already familiar with your company and content, you can optimize your campaigns for lead quality for known contacts and high conversion rates for new visitors.
This comes in handy when driving traffic from alternative sources such as social media sites, organic search, and pay-per-click (PPC).
Our profiling technologies make it easy to surface different categories for leads in your lead nurturing workflows based on their varying stages in the sales cycle. That means you can get more lead intelligence out of your nurturing campaigns, which can come in handy for your sales team.
Think of all the data and how you can use it to create better-targeted strategies with higher conversion rates for your target audience. There are many BuiltWith alternatives that make it easy for you to access or look up free reports, search data, location data, and any other useful data about your prospects.
The first step of a progressive profiling strategy is to create an irresistible offer. To do that, you need to understand your buyer’s journey and what they want to know before they convert. Nobody wants a lead magnet that sparks zero interest.
As you have a discussion about the order of your profiling fields, start with broader questions, then get to the more detailed ones later when you’ve already established a relationship with the lead. You wouldn’t get into budget details before even determining if your product meets their needs or expectations.
While short and sweet forms carry the day, make sure the questions ask for crucial information you need to contact, categorize, and nurture that lead in the future. You still want to be able to send them relevant content even if they never visit your website or websites again organically.
Consider crafting varying profiling questions for different segments of your leads. You can then add these forms to the landing pages you use for your lead nurturing workflows or on your website or websites. That way, you can capture the lead intelligence that benefits that specific audience, making future analysis and follow-ups a breeze.
As you order your questions, think about what stage in the sales cycle a lead would typically be at each conversion. Conduct some research into your client base to establish the average length of the sales cycle and the number of conversion events before closing. This can help you find the right questions for particular points along the conversion path.
Profiling helps you collect useful data on your leads without overwhelming them. While this data comes in useful for closing more sales, there’s more to the entire ordeal than closing sales.
As we mentioned, you can collect and gain data in various ways, including social media, questionnaires, and tracking the customer’s digital footprints. Technology profiling offers an effective way to cement the trust gap created between your company and its clients by forming evergreen client relationships.
Now that you know what technology profiling is, make sure to only ask your leads what’s truly important and personalize your marketing using the best profiling technologies, and always meet them with the right question at the right time in their buyer’s journey.