In today’s world of new media, search engine marketing is perceived as a necessary tactic in the B2B world. The challenge with online advertising is that we, as B2B marketers, take a B2C approach. We build PPC ads under the guise of “if we’re out there they will come”. The problem is that B2B buyers are different from B2C buyers. When you are shopping for new tennis shoes, you search in Google for “red nike running shoes”. Various sponsored and organic results appear, you click through and pull out your credit card.

B2B sales cycles are measured in months not minutes, so why are we trying to use the same tactics? B2B marketers instead need to do whatever they can to drive leads to their website, be that SEO, PPC, links from blogs, etc. but because their business is less transactional they must capture those visitors so that they can control the marketing messages and proactively target interested buyers throughout the buying cycle.

You may be thinking, “Well I capture web visitors through landing pages and forms.” The thing is that only 3% of web visitors fill out a form and according to MarketingSherpa, only 50% of those fill it out completely and accurately. The #1 name filled in on forms is Mickey Mouse (although cute, I don’t think he is the buyer you are looking for). Also, did you capture contact info for the right buying roles? How many college interns did you have filling out information?

You know there are unannounced visitors on your website, the challenge is to identify those visitors so that you can turn a passive visitor into an actionable lead. There are several web analytics tools out there that can help you on your way to identifying these unknown visitors. You should look for a tool that:

• Identifies the companies visiting your website
• Offers data services to find the right buying roles within those companies
• Analyzes those visiting companies to determine trends in the industries and sizes of visiting companies
• Allows you to set up business rules to score visitors based on pages visited and time on site

Also, be sure to ask for a free trial so you can test the power of the tool and see results before you have to buy.