The marketing world of today is quite demanding. Due to digitalization, customers’ habits have been irreversibly altered, forcing businesses with just one option: adapt. Customers want personalized experiences suited to their unique demands and simplified services that they can get from anywhere in the digital era.
Intent data is one of the most important monitoring tools businesses use to optimize their marketing operations. Although exploiting this powerful tool has previously proved to speed prospective deals significantly, some marketers are still not maximizing the value of their intent data measures.
Wouldn’t you like to identify the exact prospects and accounts in-market for your product and then target them with the proper messaging to meet their individual purchasing stage, difficulties, and interests?
As B2B marketers find it challenging to obtain and relate better with the appropriate audience in an ocean of competitive noise, B2B intent data identifying when someone is in-market or considering a specific solution – provides a reliable and realistic solution.
In brief, B2B buyer intent data enables you to determine whether or not a B2B prospect is actively contemplating or searching to acquire your product or solution, allowing you to make educated and timely campaign decisions.
In greater depth, intent data is gathered about a business’s digital activities in order to give insight into its purchasing intent and online research behavior. One such insight allows business owners to gain a better understanding of a target’s obstacles in terms of sales volume, topic search queries, intent acceleration (how active they are around that topic), and other account intelligence by combining insight from a variety of third-party data sources over time and modelling to the buyer’s journey.
Because only a tiny portion of any prospective market is actively buying at any given moment – especially for high-investment items like B2B technology solutions – it can be challenging to optimize the value of sales and marketing effort without buyer intent intelligence. No marketer wants to waste their entire money on someone who’s not interested or won’t be able to buy for a lot longer!
However, by adding intent data into sales and marketing initiatives, you can discover buying intent at precisely the right time and focus your interaction correctly for optimum results.
So, how exactly does intent data ‘work’? Where could we obtain it, and how can it be a quick, valuable, and actionable component of marketing and sales campaigns?
There are a variety of intent data platforms and services available today that may assist B2B marketers in understanding, accessing, and acting on intent.
You’re undoubtedly aware that when we use the web, we all leave digital footprints – signals that represent our interests, challenges, and, in many cases, desire to purchase a particular sort of goods or interest in a related issue. Intelligent intent platforms analyze and store such information from the web, ad networks, and social media in order to develop prediction layers from billions of behavior signals collected from thousands of sites.
When examined along with your specific marketing emphasis, this knowledge may be utilized to identify which firms are most likely to purchase from you.
Visitors’ actions are regarded as “anonymous” when they visit your website before filling out a form. This word is a little deceptive since the visitor is not fully anonymous. With correct technology, you can determine the firm and/or industry a visitor represents based just on their IP address. On a personal level, that visitor is still regarded as “anonymous.” You have no idea who they are or where they belong in their company or sector.
After determining “anonymously” identified visitors on your website and tracking the pages they view, you can use web personalization to serve personalized experiences to help encourage them to take some kind of action.
With the widespread adoption of marketing automation, many businesses are already utilizing first-party behavioral data (i.e. the individual’s context) to enhance their lead credit scoring. This scoring methodology seeks to assess the visitor’s purpose based on a series of behaviors. When leads visit your product summary page, for example, their lead score rises by 5.
If they browse your business website again, suggesting a stronger desire to purchase, it will rise by 10, and so on. When a lead’s score hits a certain level determined by marketing, an alert is issued to sales to contact that client.
To effectively categorize customers and place them in the appropriate nurturing campaigns, you must integrate their known first and third-party behavioral data to determine the backdrop of who they are and their function within the business and the topics they are passionate about.
Your prospects ‘ purchase decisions are heavily affected before they ever contact you or visit your website. Third-party behavioral data is highly unstructured and huge in volume. To evaluate the chance of purchase in prospective accounts, anonymous third-party topic data may be included in predictive account scoring algorithms.
Nevertheless, 2022 has emerged as businesses shift their focus to digital conversations: people are becoming overwhelmed by the volume of communications they receive. As a result, response rates are declining, and businesses are confronted with ballooning expenditures as costs to sustain past levels of involvement climb.
Companies that can gather and use online intent data may engage buyers far early in the cycle, influencing their decision-making before a competition is even aware of the prospect’s interest.
And, in most cases, the very first marketer in the door gets the deal. For forward-thinking businesses, buying intent indicators provide a big potential.
High-quality intent data can help marketing departments concentrate on top-funnel activities by better aligning educational content with audiences, sending more personalized emails to target accounts, using social media to focus and build audiences of potential prospects, and even sending targeted messages direct mail or live broadcasts.
To increase their capacity to provide quality leads to sales, some teams have connected intent data with their marketing automation technology and/or their CRM (such as Salesforce). Nevertheless, many people lack the finances, sophistication (or genuine need) to go the extra mile.
You may find out which sectors are increasing in their online find solutions that you provide if you know which industry each target prospect works in. If your company offers products or services to various sectors, you may be able to utilize this data to target the top one or two industries that need your attention.
As well as it’s not just the marketing team that stands to gain. Intent data enables the sales team to focus more on bottom-of-the-funnel actions where the customer is able to open their gate and buy. The ability to foresee the point of purchase more precisely allows the sales staff to meet the moment and send the appropriate message (one that strikes) to the correct target company at the right time.
If you want to use intent data to educate campaigns, target new firms, reach prospects with intent, personalize content messaging, improve ad targeting, or help the sales team, you should go with a bespoke method geared to your specific company objectives.
Several intent data suppliers are more significant than others at determining whether a target’s real behavior converts into genuine intent. However, it has been my experience that far too many providers give aged (ancient) data or cannot clearly distinguish between online behavioral intent and a real target firm willing to buy.
Obtaining reliable data is a significant difficulty in this field, and there are a few roadblocks to overcome before just purchasing and utilizing purpose data.
If your vendor is unable to meet the requirements mentioned above, it will be difficult for you to fully utilize intent data. Instead, you risk putting yourself and your organization at risk by purchasing a solution that does not help you reach your business goals.
Experience the power of intent-based marketing as we decode signals, turning curiosity into captivating connections for your brand’s success.