Marketing Strategy Blog

The Ultimate Guide to Using IP Detection for Turbocharged Lead Generation

IP detection for lead generation

Imagine someone comes to your B2B website. They really like what they see. They check out your home page, some of your blog posts, your company overview page, and finally, your services page.

It’s clear that they’re really into your company. They like what you stand for, and they really should be your next client. They’re a better fit than your best pair of skinny jeans.

But then something distracts them.

They receive a text and need to respond right away.

Then they have to run to a planning meeting.

Then they desperately need coffee because it’s 2 PM and they binged a little too much Netflix the night before.

tired employee drinking coffee

Then, for the rest of the day, they’re immersed in Slack and email and a thousand other interruptions.

They forget to go back to your site. They forget about what you offer. And if something doesn’t change, they’ll never become your client.

You could say that you’ve been digitally…ghosted.

Thankfully, there is a way to change this scenario. It’s called IP detection.

What Is IP Detection?

First things first: let’s make sure we’re all clear on how IP detection works.

In a nutshell, IP detection software can identify which businesses visit your site and which actions they take even if they never fill out a contact form.

Without IP detection, you don’t know who is visiting your site. They remain anonymous. A faceless visitor that you have no way of contacting. A lead left on the table.

With IP detection, you can immediately identify which companies (and in certain cases individuals) are visiting your site, as well as what pages they’re most interested in.

Why Is IP Detection So Important?

Think about all the money B2B marketers invest in creating lead magnets and forms and CTAs and surveys, all in an effort to collect information about potential leads. This is all good and necessary.

The problem, however, is that B2B marketers are still losing a significant number of leads. You’re missing out on those website visitors who never fill out any sort of contact form, which is typically over 95% of your site visitors!

Imagine you owned a restaurant. Every day, you have dozens of people come in, sit at a table, look at your menu, and then leave without ever ordering from you. You wouldn’t let this go on for very long. You’d want to know who they were, whether they were actually interested in ordering from you, and why they ended up leaving. In other words, you wouldn’t let all those potential customers get away from you.

Unfortunately, many B2B marketers do let a large number of potential customers get away from them. Many are allowing massive amounts of potential revenue to slip through the cracks.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

For example, using IP detection, Stratabeat once noticed that a particular company visited our website over 20 times without ever submitting a form or giving an email address. Because we were using IP detection, this didn’t matter. We were still able to identify which business it was, then engage them in a conversation, and finally convert them into a paying client.

uncovering website insights with ip detection

To this day, they still have never filled out a form on our website. But that doesn’t matter. IP detection gave us all the information we needed.

See, here’s the thing.

Your best leads are the ones who are already in your funnel. And who is already in your funnel that you’re not converting? That 95% of people who visit your site but don’t submit their contact information. They’re clearly already interested in you and the services you offer. Shouldn’t you do everything you can to capture their information?

Consider this. You’re already spending significant money and resources on getting people to come to your site. You’re investing in SEO, content creation, social media marketing, email marketing, and numerous other tactics. You should capitalize on that investment and start generating a higher ROI.

In order to do that, however, you need to know who those website visitors are. That’s where IP detection comes into place.


Uncover Who is On Your Website

Ready to use IP detection to gain next-level insights? Let’s Talk!


Trace The Path Of Your Visitors

Using IP detection tools like Leadfeeder, Lead Forensics, Albacross or WhoIsVisiting, you can see precisely which businesses are visiting your site and which pages they’re interacting with the most.

It should be noted that there are some marketing automation tools, such as HubSpot, Act-On, Demandbase, etc., which offer some form of IP detection. The challenge with these tools is that the quality of detection tends not to be as strong as tools like Lead Forensics or LeadFeeder. Marketing automation tools are at their strongest when a person has already opted into your funnel and you have their contact information.

Additionally, tools like HubSpot don’t show you the full scope of a website visitor’s activity if the individual is not in the database. They don’t reveal the full navigational path a visitor has followed or the time spent on a particular page. This is where IP detection tools add value over marketing automation tools. They allow you to gather highly specific information about visitors who are not yet in your CRM system so that you can then offer the most relevant, useful information to those visitors.

Once you’ve identified the businesses that seem the most interested in what you have to offer, you can contact them and get a conversation going. From there, you have the opportunity to convert them into a client.

Using easy research platforms like LinkedIn or DiscoverOrg, you can determine the best person at a business to contact via email or an ABM campaign. Or, if it seems that the visitor is a little further down your funnel, you can send them personalized insights.

person digging with shovel

For example, if you’re a B2B company that specializes in HR software and you see that someone from a nationwide restaurant chain has visited your page that’s dedicated to payroll management tools, you could look up the head of HR on LinkedIn. From there, you could start an ABM campaign that focuses heavily on your payroll management tools.

IP detection also enables you to strengthen your ABM campaigns. The reality is that sometimes your ABM targets leapfrog over the information and links you provide them and head directly to your website. In other words, they don’t come to your site through a campaign tracking link.

This is not a problem if you’re using IP detection. You can see when they visited your site and exactly what they did when they were on your site. You can track their behavior and then respond appropriately once the course of action is clear.

For example, for one client, we were conducting an ABM campaign. In the midst of this, we decided to forego a direct mail initiative aimed at one of our client’s target companies. Why? Because their onsite behavior was expressing significant buyer signals. Clearly, we needed to move faster and engage them while our client was still top of mind. In response, we opted for an immediate email campaign that would quickly engage the company.

If we hadn’t been using IP detection tools, we wouldn’t have known that they were diving deep in our client’s website. We may have waited to run the direct mail campaign even though they were already spending a good amount of time on our client’s website. If we had delayed the outreach, our client may have then missed out on the more timely engagement.

More Leads, Better Leads

Some IP detection tools will take things a step further and actually organize your site visitors for you. They will show you not only which businesses visited your site, but will also allow you to filter and tag them, attempt to find contact information for the company, and enable you to assign the company to an internal team member.

The tools can also show you what industry each visitor is in, how big the company is, as well as the visitor’s actual on-site navigational flow. They can reveal how much time a visitor spent on each individual page so that you can prioritize who to reach out to first and how to customize your communications.

By knowing who to reach out to, as well as being able to see which pages they visited the most and which pages they engaged with most deeply, you can focus on the highest quality site visitors instead of taking random shots in the dark.


Transform Your Site into a Lead Generation Machine

Ready to use IP detection to gain next-level insights? Let’s Talk!


Not only does IP detection allow you to engage with more prospective leads, but it also can result in better leads. Additionally, because you know which information they’ve already interacted with, you can have more effective conversations that will resonate more directly with potential clients. If Stratabeat notices that a site visitor is diving deep into our brand strategy content, you can bet that our outreach is going to focus heavily on brand strategy, which in turn makes it more likely that the outreach will resonate with that particular person.

And you can do all this at the precise time they’re most interested in your services.

Ensuring Timely Outreach

If you know someone worth talking with was on your website, you need to take action in a timely manner.

To that end, IP detection tools enable you to define behavioral triggers that release real-time alerts to your team. For example, maybe you want to be alerted when there’s someone checking out your product or service pages. Or when someone visits your Contact Us page. Or, maybe when they visit more than three pages during their site session. Or, perhaps when they start down a particular conversion path.

The more timely your outreach, the more likely the individual is to respond and engage in a discussion with you.

If you do not set up automated alerts, at the very least set up a daily check in your calendar to ensure your outreach is timely and that more recipients are receptive to your message.

Saving Time and Increasing Efficiency

IP detection helps you know where to spend time on your outreach efforts, but it also saves you both time and effort. Let’s say you notice a specific company on your site and they’re only viewing a blog post that, historically, has not resulted in many leads. Because you’re using IP detection, you can know that they’re probably not going to become a lead. You don’t need to waste precious time and money trying to reach out to that company.

For example, Stratabeat has a blog post about mind-mapping tools. This post has generated 83,000 page views, which sounds great. But we don’t consider that post to be a win because it doesn’t tend to produce many leads. The simple truth is that most people reading that post aren’t particularly interested in our services.

So if we see someone read that post and then immediately leave the site, we don’t spend any time trying to engage them. We know that they probably won’t convert into a lead. This saves us a huge amount of time and ensures that we spend our time only on visitors who are genuinely interested in our services (based on their digital body language).

Use IP Detection To Evaluate Your Content

IP detection is also incredibly helpful in gauging whether the content you produce is effective. If your content is attracting the right audience and that audience is converting into clients, then you’re clearly creating the right kind of content.

On the flip side, if the content you’re creating is generating traffic from the wrong kinds of companies, then it’s time to change directions. IP detection can help you determine if you’re attracting the wrong traffic and then help steer you in a more effective direction – a direction that will produce a higher ROI. In this way, you can use IP detection as an input for your content strategy and calendars.

Bringing It All Together

When you combine all the information that IP detection provides, you can take your lead generation to the next level by reaching out to people who are already interested in you and are much more likely to convert/purchase from you. You can see that their minds are already open and you can literally guide them through your funnel.

So how does IP detection enable you to supercharge your lead generation and follow up?

It…

  • Allows you to see who is visiting your website, even if they never fill out a contact form.
  • Enables you to track the behavior of your website visitors and see which ones demonstrate the right “digital body language”.
  • Helps you identify the site visitors with the greatest likelihood of becoming a qualified lead. .
  • Allows you to evaluate the quality of your content and determine whether you’re attracting the kind of traffic that ultimately converts.

IP detection is a hugely powerful tool. Don’t wait to start using it. If you do, you’re neglecting up to 95% of your web traffic. That’s a lot of leads left on the table.