Understand Your Prospects Needs & Demographics Using Your Own Website

Everyone talks about interactive websites from the perspective of user experience and there is no question they bring a lot to the usability of a website.  But there’s another angle on the same approach: learning more about your prospects.  Interactive websites are a “gold mine” for gathering visitor behaviour data and turning it into deep understanding of your prospects.

What’s An Interactive Website?

One way to classify websites is the degree to which a visitor can affect the content which is presented to them.  Those websites which ask for a higher number of visitor clicks (interactions) are termed to be more interactive.  Just like a conversation, when a salesperson talks at a prospect nonstop and hardly takes a second to understand what the person is looking for, that can be a described as a non interactive conversation.  The same applies to a website.  An interactive website is like a good sales call where the salesperson starts with some qualification questions for the prospect and continues to seek some feedback throughout the conversation.

The Ultimate Data Opportunity

Interactive websites represent the ultimate opportunity to generate valuable data about your visitors.  By taking full advantage of the click activity required on an interactive website, a company can create an environment which simultaneously delivers more targeted information to a visitor while capture the behaviour to build profiles of visitors to the website.

Websites are often built with design and messaging in mind first and then analytics is added at the tail end to allow for site performance data to be captured.  In our client projects, we bring the analytics decision making into the earliest stages of the website design to incorporate the needs of our clients for data about prospects.  Client actions can then be added into key content areas to create more data points for analysis.

This data is useful beyond just website fine tuning — its usefulness extends to all areas of your marketing decision making where a lack of data can make meetings painful and driven off of perceptions rather than fact.  One of our clients recently said that he looks forward to our regular analytics reports more than his management meetings now for getting a pulse on the state and direction of his business.