Digital body language is a set of behaviors of Internet users or other digital resources. Thanks to analytical and marketing tools, we can observe them and adapt the way we communicate to them in order to generate sales leads more effectively.
In traditional communication, we convey a lot of content nonverbally. By analyzing body language, we can obtain much more information than what we hear from the other person. Also in digital communication, analyzing the "nonverbal" behavior of potential customers can significantly expand our knowledge of their needs, preferences, or how they make purchasing decisions.
In this article, you will learn how to gain valuable information about your customers by observing their behavior on your website, reactions to emails, and other digital assets.
What is digital body language?
In B2B marketing, the ability to observe and respond to digital body language messages allows you to move a potential customer from the initial research phase to a purchasing decision much more effectively and quickly.
Changes in B2B decision-making processes
The most complete concept of digital body language was designed dominica business email list for the needs of business marketers. It was described in the book "Digital Body Language" by Steven Woods - founder of Eloqua (now part of Oracle Marketing Cloud) - one of the first and most advanced Marketing Automation tools .
He noticed a few years ago that the B2B purchasing process has become much more complicated. It involves several to a dozen or so decision-makers who are actively looking for information on how to solve a given problem or business challenge. Each of them has a different perspective – the CFO will think about costs, the CEO about the overall impact on the business, and the Manager initiating the purchasing process will take care of solving a specific business problem. Each of the decision-makers will search for information using different phrases, will visit different websites or forums for exchanging information on the web.
Forrester claims that about 70% of product knowledge is acquired by the customer before they contact the salesperson. Google believes it is about 50%. Regardless of the differences, the fact is that the Internet is the first source of information for B2B decision makers.
B2B product providers need a tool that will allow them to respond to the information needs of diverse decision makers and learn about their needs and preferences. In the early stages of a decision, when needs are not yet even defined, the only way to start an effective “digital dialogue” is to observe digital body language.
Complete customer profile
The purpose of observing a potential customer’s digital body language is to build a profile of them. This profile consists of information provided “nonverbally” (observing digital body language) and “verbally” e.g. in the form of email communication, data from forms, requests for quotes, etc.
Marketers should conduct a process of evaluating each of these interactions when creating a customer profile. This allows them to identify valuable prospects. “Verbal” messages will provide answers to questions about who the prospect is (name, company, job title, industry, etc.) – this allows us to estimate their position in the decision-making process and assign an appropriate score. However, we will not learn much about their level of interest. Of course, we can ask about this, but in the early stages of the buying process it will be difficult and ineffective. This is where digital body language analysis comes into play.
So let's build an example customer profile
The customer has a problem
User X types the phrase "phone theft - data" into a search engine. He comes across several useful articles. One of them provides the procedure for reporting theft and information on how to remotely erase data from such a phone. The information turned out to be useful. At the end of the article there is a link to an e-book on how to secure a phone so that in the event of theft the data is impossible to read by unauthorized persons. X downloads the e-book, providing his e-mail address and name.
The customer provides information
In this way, X turns into Mrs. Katarzyna. We already have some basic verbal information (query, i.e. keywords, name and e-mail address) and non-verbal information (interest in the subject of the article and the desire to protect oneself from similar incidents in the future). An experienced marketer using marketing automation has programmed a sequence of actions for Mrs. Katarzyna, which will identify in the first stage whether she is an individual user or a business decision-maker. By interacting with the appropriate content, the prospect completes his profile.
It turned out that Ms. Katarzyna works in the IT department of a medium-sized company and received an urgent request to "extract data" from a phone stolen from a company employee. Since she was unable to recover the data, and thanks to our article she was only able to remotely delete it, she began looking for information on how to prepare for such situations in the future. She downloaded a few more e-books and participated in a webinar on tools and processes for managing and securing data in company smartphones. After the webinar, she agreed to commercial contact, because she decided that it was time to implement the solution presented during this online lecture. Each of these activities was carefully assessed in the customer profile. Each download of an e-book, opening another email, clicking on links or participating in a webinar allowed for automatic assessment.
Ms. Katarzyna’s digital body language clearly indicated that she was interested in detailed information (downloading several technical e-books and participating in a webinar and agreeing to be contacted by a consultant) and that she was in a hurry – quick responses to emails and an immediate response to the webinar.
That was enough to qualify her for a sales call. Needless to say, the consultant will have a full profile of the prospect at the first call.
Access to this information is possible thanks to Oracle Profiler – a tool from the Oracle Marketing Cloud family . Thanks to this, a consultant, preparing for a sales conversation, can trace the history of a potential customer's interactions with the content on the website, emails or data that they provided us with in forms. We can also define the potential customer's actions, about which we will be notified via email – for example, if they register for a webinar. Such information can help in better understanding the information needs of a potential customer.
