Ok hotshot, so what is web intelligence?

Well, I position it like this:

There are two routes to making more money out of the web (for our target market which is companies providing b2b ie business to business solutions). They are:

Route 1 - The Traditional Route

Speak to lots of agencies and come up with a plethora of options around:

- new website, new search engine optimisation campaign, cpc campaigns, web analytics, lots of content, email marketing, twitter, linked in..etc etc

You’ve all had lots of those conversations right? Well, clearly they do work and are a very well trodden path.

However, from our perspective, those are hard yards and expensive as there is a lot to do there. We advocate Route 2 which seems much simpler…

Route 2 - The enlightened Route

You already have a website right and traffic coming to it? If you don’t, then most likely you need to do Route 1 to get in the game at least.

Assuming you do have a site, the powerful value is harnessing the intelligence of it - to us this means building the profiles of the companies visiting your website, making sure this information gets to the right people (marketing, sales, account managers etc) inside your company. You then need to show your people how to use this information…the Gold Dust as one of our clients referred to it and make sure you drive Revenues from it.

It doesnt involve, building new sites or lots more campaigns - its working with all the data that your marketing activities up to this point have achieved, but you were most likely completely unaware of.

We’d love to have a chat if you have views on web intelligence and how it might benefit you…please feel free to get in touch at…http://www.trovus.co.uk/contact.php

1) We provide a Solution, not just Software

If over the last 12 months, Google Analytics and their consultants have helped you increase you to increase your revenues by 4-5% and taken out unproductive marketing cost, then Google Analytics is probably the solution for you.

If on the other hand, it has produced some interesting information such as the number of visitors to your site, the keywords sending you traffic and the some conversions data linking into Google Adwords you may be asking the question ..”so what”.

This is where we come in to answer the so what question and help you to commercialise the value of your information - to make all your marketing and business development activities accountable so you are driving real commercial value from your marketing activities.

2) Our Software is Built to Answer the Question - Who and Why - not how many

One of our clients Phillip Woodgate from Goodman Jones Chartered Accountants - a firm who have consistently won Accountancy Age awards for their use of the Internet (Phillip also sits on the Institute of Chartered Accountants Committee advising on IT Strategy) has this to say about our Revelations software:

In the past we’ve used Google Analytics or similar to analyse out our web data. The information they provide tends not focus on what is actually of most value to us. For example, we may have 10,000 visitors, but we are only really interested in those visitors that are relevant to our organisation. For example, large global companies and educational establishments look at our site, but neither of these groups is unlikely to generate leads and business.Trovus Revelations provides us with far more information on who is looking at our site and why. In particular, they have designed it so it is simple to use and easy to understand. We can therefore review the information and get a better understanding of visitors that are relevant to our organisation. Based on the information I can then ensure that our site delivers in the areas for these visitors to assist in generating additional relevant visitors and leads. This leads to more feedback from Trovus Revelations and us evolving our site to maximise our objective i.e. lead generation.

This enables us to look at a relevant visitor and understand what they have found interesting in our site and the level of interest. For example, our client base is mid-sized companies so I was able to see a mid-sized company that has been actively looking at our site and finding out about us. Taking this data gives a good overview of possible warm leads and their areas of interest.

The best way to understand the above is to have your data loaded into Trovus and review it for yourself. In my case I instantly saw it was giving valuable information I just wasn’t getting before. For us the benefit easily outweighs the cost.

1) Company Profiling - the ability to browse the entire history of the organisation (we aggregate this data on an organisation by organisation basis) - from what we have seen from Google Analytics they don’t show this overall history which is what is so powerful in providing an entire view of that organisation

2) Watch List Alerts - the ability to add the Watch List which delivers the automatic email alerts on specific companies

3) ISP List Filtering - the global ISP list which we maintain and continue to “clean up” so that the user only gets shown the company traffic and not the whole volumes of ISP traffic which means the user can go straight to the relevant information;

4) Individual Page Drill Downs - the ability to identify every single page on the website and then to drill down and see every organisation who has looked at that page.

5) Searchable Database - we build a searchable database of companies which you categorise, tag and export to integrate with your existing internal systems (CRM, Marketing Databases etc)

There are more differences but for the clients we work with our processes coupled with these differences are the key differences between the information being interesting and the information translating into tangible value.

The next word goes to another one of our clients who very kindly responded to a Twitter question - is Trovus Revelations any good with the following response:

Hi, further to your request on Twitter.

 Not sure I can add much to that - if you’d like to speak with us and understand what the Trovus Solution (our Listening process and software to support this) could do for you, we’d love to chat. We love Google Analytics and use it ourselves, but one of the most important things remains the difference between buying software and buying a solution

Talk to us if you’d like to know more : )

1)  Too smart  - someone might accuse me of being smart and trying to track what my customers and prospects are doing. By doing so it may give me an insight into what my customers and prospects are doing, that my colleagues might think is too much business intelligence.

2)  No measurement - I find my marketing spend works better when I don’t know who is responding to my marketing messages and looking at my website. The marketing spend we have does not need to be measured in detail to understand who it is actually reaching and driving to your website.

3)  Doesnt matter - new website will resolve  - I’m not worried about who is using my website - we are going to do a website re-design and so long as it looks ok, that works for me - I’m not too worried if my prospects and customers are or aren’t using it

4) Too many other things - I can see it’s interesting, but I only want to know in 6-12 months time because I’ve got too many other things to do. Your business is too busy with other initiatives to worry about who is using your website and why, even if you acknowledge it is interesting information and you are working hard to generate all that business intelligence.

5) Not on the list - why should I add to my list of things to do - my marketing director or CEO has never said this is important

6) How would I use it? - I wouldn’t know what to do with this information, even though I can see that its potentially valuable.

If on other hand, you think a solution that is adding 5% of annual revenues for some companies and saving them significant marketing spend might be of interest, then we’d love to have a conversation and share our process and software product insights with you. Our main site on driving business intelligence from web insights is at Trovus.co.uk

What do we mean by this?

Well, we are often asked why companies can’t buy our solution/ product for free or tens of pounds a month. For us, the question can simply be answered by what are you trying to achieve by understanding which companies are visiting your website, and what the value of that is.

People interested in the Product

If the key area of interest is just identifying company names visiting your website, we would encourage you to ask the following questions:

1) How much net new revenue has been generated that can be attributed to this information
2) How much marketing spend has been saved by evaluating which marketing activity works best for you
3) What’s the suggested process to use the information
4) How can you improve your overall search marketing as a result of this
5) How does the information integrate with your CRM process
6) How does the system ensure the relevant information reaches the relevant Sales and Account Managers.

 People interested in the solution

This where Trovus works best - working and developing relationships with companies to add new revenues (for some clients growing annnual revenues by 4-5%), to save marketing costs which are generating the wrong type of responses and working with companies to maximise the revenues and value of their marketing activities.

Clearly, there is a price difference between the two! We’d love to have a conversation if you are interested in growing revenues, saving costs and making more value from all your marketing activities. Speak to the revenue generation specialists at Trovus for more info.

Often this is borne out of a number of things such as:

1) Frustration that after having spent many 000’s on a website that hasn’t yet delivered

2) Feedback and a general view that the website doesn’t look very good and doesn’t represent us appropriately in the market

3) We need to do more content …everyone says content is king and we need more of it…right?

4) A new website just has to work better - the marketing team and the design agency are excited about it and its creating lots of energy talking about a fresh new site. A new site must be the right answer.

Overlay this with the fact that everyone knows the web is huge and you should be getting your slice of the action.

Result: my website isn’t delivering and I will pull the only lever I know - lets go and build a new one.

Hooray!! That will be the answer to all our problems.

What do you believe? In our experience, this always seems to fall short on expectations…a new badge/ look and feel isn’t the answer. The key question [in my view] is one of listening to your website and understanding who is using it and why they are using it.

Your website isn’t about you. Its about your customers and prospects and what do they want from it. Are any of your prospects or customers using it and what are they using it for …what are they looking for, what problems do they have and how can your web presence help those people. If you can help them and answer THEIR questions, you will start to engage them…the start of the sales process.

Our software, Revelations, is geared at exactly this listening to your website - who are the companies using your website, how did they find it, what pages have they looked at , how often did they look and how many other people from that organisation looked at your site. Our process then works to generate revenue from your website by using the powerful information (we regularly get amazing case studies from clients saying things like our software and process is now generating them addditional revenues of £30-40k a month.

Take this information and start to build on it …focus on your customers and what they want. If you launch a new website build without doing this, you are flying blind. You need to stop, listen and then act. Obvious right? So many times, I have spoken to clients and they said let me do my website and I will then put in Revelations. They do and that and the first thing they say once they have the new website and then look at Revelations: ” if I knew that before, I would have done things differently!” The moral, do the Listening and Planning first; do the implementation second.

It will be interesting to see how they embrace the blogosphere and the inherent accountability that it brings - will this bring about the demise of the culture of spin - everything on the web is clearly there to be held up against and held accountable.

I think this is just the start of political parties trying to take the high ground on the web … i am sure the web itself will be a great decider of what is genuine, true and lasting.

*********    Update   ***********

just googled labour list ..some smart conservative supporter is bidding on google adwords and redirecting traffic to the youtube link for webcameronuk with the title …Labours Debt Crisis…let the online battle for mindshare in the build up to the next election commence…

********        Second update      ************

Channel 4 have just announced they couldnt get the site showing the news as the site has gone down…i wonder if DOS attacks and worse might be a feature of political battles to come..

********   Third update      *************

Managed to get through to the website, although they could do with some useful tools to let them know that they have some 404 errors on their site..:

One of our blogs has been profiles in Growing Business magazine at:

http://www.growingbusiness.co.uk/06959143453129056451/being-online-it-s-all-about-your-bottom-line.html

and I was interviewed for a podcast in association with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising - podcast at:

http://www.redskyvision.com/inside-online/

Back to work again (2 days out means weekend working to catch up) and working hard to drive more web marketing intelligence for our Alcohol Help client. Another busy week ahead - things seem to accelerating well in the run up to Christmas - goal posts for a weeks holiday firmly in the sights!

Just also been pinged a note to say that one of my blog entries has been covered in Precision Marketing magazine - focused on why web analytics isnt enough - you need web intelligence - details at Precision Marketing online.

Final thing to mention - one of my big passions in life, sailing… the Vendee race is on at the moment - we are just over a week into it and actively following the race on the Vendee website. Key mention for Jonny Malbon who I know from Global Challenge days is skippering Artemis and is very impressively twittering on a regular basis from mid Atlantic - is there no end to where the web gets now!

http://www.brandrepublic.com/MarketingDirect/Features/857871/cookies-custome

always nice to get the references..