Have you ever wondered why only 3% of your website visitors end up sharing their email address or identify themselves otherwise? Making your website visitors convert is one of the biggest struggles marketers face nowadays. Audiences are holding back from identifying themselves to a company because they don’t feel personally addressed on the internet and don’t get the right incentives to make themselves known.

This unknown audience, however, is where a lot of opportunity lies for you as a marketer. They are the future leads and business opportunities your company needs. Tailoring your strategy to their behavior will bring you a lot closer to them which will improve their customer experience with your brand. Let’s be real though, it’s not that evident when the audience is in the learning stage and are browsing competitors as well, this is where they really prefer their anonymity. This doesn’t mean you have to neglect them, your biggest opportunity lies here and should really be nurtured. A few small tweaks will do wonders and increase your conversion rate in no time. 

Rethink your marketing budget

Most companies nowadays are investing their marketing budgets in ads to generate traffic at the top of the funnel. This is a costly marketing method that often doesn’t reach its full potential. Generating traffic is the first step towards creating new leads, but not interacting with these potential future customers correctly kind of beats the whole purpose. Advertising for the sake of advertising, bringing them to the right landing page and then doing very little to make them convert is the same as just burning your money. 

Another part of the marketing budget usually goes to the already known audience at the bottom of the funnel and keeping them engaged.  

The focus, however, should be on the middle of the funnel. This is the biggest part of your funnel where your new business opportunities lie and you have to really focus on getting the 97% of visitors that will leave your website and never come back to have some kind of conversion.

Introduce user profiles

You probably think that anonymous profile data blocks you from personalizing your experiences because you don’t have any insights in their prior interactions, interests, preferences or in what part of the customer cycle they currently are. Introducing user profiles will make it a lot easier for you to deliver tailor made experiences because it enables you to store this anonymous data and work with it. 

Anonymous visitors bring a lot of great insights and micro-actions with them. Their anonymous user profile can be very detailed and give you a lot of insights in their interests and intent through their browsing behavior. It shows you what they click on, their downloads and how long they stay on a certain page. All of this combined can accurately give you more info about details like their product preference, what part of the funnel they're in and how likely they are to convert. Other data points like location, what browser or device they use can be collected in user profiles while they remain ‘anonymous’ as well. 

Anonymous visitors are usually all treated the same nowadays, even though they only have one thing in common: they are all different and should be treated differently to make them convert.  

Engaging anonymous visitors in real time with a personalized experience tailored to their user profile will help you unleash the full potential of your audience while all the other channels are just a small step towards this. Don’t throw your traffic generating campaigns overboard just yet, but rather enforce them by using the right techniques to get valuable leads through them.

These user profiles furthermore aren’t only useful for anonymous profiles, it also helps you to keep track of your already known audience. This data is a lot richer and accurate than other data based only on email lists or profile logins for example. It helps you store and keep track of your audience’s interest, interactions and preferences. 

The right technology will help marketers understand their audiences better, even the anonymous ones. This technology will help you to segment the audience and build personalized customer experiences that adapt themselves to the individual website visitors. 

Make your content smart

Once you know your audience and have something to work with, it’s time to make sure they get to see the right content that aligns with their journey. 

Traditional content marketing usually focuses on generating traffic and educating visitors on the brand and what it has to offer. It, however, rarely focuses on the mid funnel. This is where your visitors are ‘stuck’ in between the time they find you and the time they become known to you. You on average lose 97% to 98% of your audience, and possible leads, here. 

With hyper personalized data driven platforms like Instagram, Netflix and Spotify audiences are getting used to seeing exactly what is relevant to them. These tailor made experiences are influencing customer behaviour, making content personalization the next step in content marketing. Companies need to battle the boredom of constantly showing the same messages or landing pages whenever someone visits their website and use smart content to make themselves future proof. 

Smart content is data driven content that learns from the user profiles and tailors itself to it. It knows what your visitors’ interests are and what part of the conversion process they’re in. It then adapts itself to it and keeps track of what they have been doing. Smart content works with all of this data to show the right content at the exactly right time to the right audience in order to be as relevant to them as possible. Some examples of smart content could be recommendation boxes, pop-ups or push notifications. 

It all sounds a lot more intense than it really is and doesn’t have to be a hassle for content marketers. Chances are very likely that you already have the right content, now you just have to show it to the right audience at the right time. The opportunities are endless since you can use a ton of parameters (visits, goals, purchases, keyword searches, stages in the sales process and so on) when building cases with smart content. 

It has a much stronger impact on your target audience that is consuming it, compared to static content that easily gets ignored, because the message aligns with their profile. 

More conversion from the same audience

Building on what your visitor has been doing on your website so far, results in higher conversion rates and better use of your resources. Investing in smart content is a more cost-friendly way of generating leads than simply driving more traffic. Let’s be real, traffic without conversion or qualified leads is just a useless number. Smart content will not just make you more relevant to your audience. It enables you to capture more and better data and gives you better insights into what works for them, compared to the typical ways of collecting data that everyone uses nowadays. 

Let your audience stay anonymous until the point in the customer journey where it is in the visitor’s interest to get in touch with you. This will not only generate more, but better qualified leads.