Generate More Business Leads and Close More Deals with Real Time Intelligence – Part I

Why Real Time Intelligence?

As a part of real time marketing, real time intelligence works well to help you monitor your industry, brand, company, or product, as well as your competitors for both defensive and offensive purposes. If a customer sends a Tweet that disparages your company (say, “Comcast cable is too slow,”) you might want to catalogue such opinions or even take action on a customer level.

By monitoring real time data you can also react in real time and beat the competition to the punch. If you are able to match the state of mind of your customers, and match their location in the purchase cycle—the cycle from attention, to interest, to decision, to action (AIDA)—then you have a strong chance of meeting their needs and closing a deal. Real time Intelligence lets you reach out to prospects at the time they are most susceptible to information you provide. You may be able to help them with buying decisions. Reach out to prospects when you, or your product, is still fresh in their mind

A New Era of Real Time Intelligence

As an asset available to marketers, real time intelligence has grown dramatically in the last few years. For marketers, real time intelligence is data that can be accessed immediately to isolate information about trends, news, events, products, contacts, fans, and friends. Real time intelligence can also be about location (where people are via Google geotagging) and what people are doing (via Twitter and Google Buzz). The abundance of analytics tools on the web can show you who is on your web site, when they visit, and what they are looking at. It can also build your business lead generation.

Using real time intelligence can help you with business lead generation by identifying and leveraging trends and in closing more deals by allowing you to approach prospects with the right message at the right time. Real time intelligence helps in all stages of the purchase cycle both at an aggregate level (seeing trends, noting topics) and at the individual level (identifying specific website behavior and individual readiness to buy).

Leveraging Real Time Intelligence for Business Lead Generation

With a rise in the availability of real time data, there has been a related growth in trend and data monitoring tools. These include Twitter and its save-search function and analytics tools such as Google Analytics (free) and Omniture (paid) as well as other sentiment and trend monitoring tools including, among others, Nielsen, and Radian6. These tools let you to track real time data in a variety of forms—online, through both mobile and desktop applications, and with email alerts.

At the aggregate level, real time intelligence reveals trends and allows you to create and build you content and messaging to leverage these trends to generate more traffic to your site and to create more awareness to your brand and product, aiding you with the “attention” phase of the purchase cycle. If you sell golf equipment you might be able to leverage the recent Tiger Woods news by using keywords and content connected to that trend. Many of the people who are interested in Tiger Woods are probably also interested in golf, and getting them to your website will create better awareness to your business and help you get people on board in the “attention” phase of their purchase cycle.

On your website, real time data can also help you adapt to micro-trends affecting the conversion of anonymous visitors into leads. By knowing which pages visitors are visiting and which pages have better conversion rates (converting visitors into leads by getting anonymous visitors leave their contact information on your website) evidence to an effective evaluator of the “decision” phase of a buyer purchase cycle, you can change the lead path on your website. You can decide to emphasize a specific page by focusing more internal links to that page, or by sending more of your PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns to that page.

Another use of real time data in the process of generating more business leads is by understanding what companies, or verticals, are visiting your website, and furthermore, what pages on your website are most appealing to certain verticals and companies. By understanding these micro-trends on your website, in real time, you can leverage this data to maximize the potential of those trends for your business lead generation efforts, increasing your ROI and making the most of the “attention” and “decision” phases of your visitors and prospects.

You can also use real time data to close more deals, make your leads reach a decision that is in your favorite and help them take the action and close the deal.

Real Time Intelligence to Close More Deals

Optify and a host of other web-based applications can identify the companies visiting your website, and keep a record of the visits made to your website from those companies. Using this data you can approach companies who you know are interested in your business, or tailor your content to convey the message you think will help them become a lead (as we have covered before). Once an anonymous visitor becomes a lead, by associating him or her with the visit history of his company, you can approach a ready-to-buy prospect with a tailored message and offering you believe will be appealing to him or her, based on the real time data you collected.

Knowing when to call a lead can make the difference between a successful and a failed deal. Real time intelligence tells you when your lead is ready to move from Decision to Action, and combined with real time alerts, you won’t have to guess when to call your lead or wait until he calls you. If you consider a certain webpage on your website as an indication to a lead readiness to buy, you can set your alerts to notify you when a specific lead hits that page. Getting that notification in real time will enable you to call that lead in the appropriate time to talk about your product – when he’s thinking about your product and is ready to discuss it!

Next up, the purchase-cycle process checklist.