What Is Intent Data And How To Use It For Your Business
09 Nov 2021 |
B2B sales and marketing success depends heavily on data. However, it is not enough to use the data only for reaching your prospects. Every good marketer and sales professional knows the potential value of B2B data and its power to help achieve comprehensive business objectives. A good understanding of the customer needs armed with data intelligence will not only give a competitive edge, but it will also help you build a strong and consistent pipeline for the sales team to take over.
However, only a few marketers and sales professionals know how to make smart use of the data to truly take advantage of the vast array of customer insights it offers. And one of the most important types of data for driving sales and marketing insights is Intent Data.
What is Intent Data?
In simple words, Intent Data is the set of behavioral signals that helps you to understand the intention of your prospects to purchase a product or service.
Your prospects are out there, looking for a solution to a problem you might fix. They search online, consume content, look for solutions, and learn ways to ease their pain.
According to studies, before engaging with a salesperson, an average B2B prospect is already 67% of the way into the purchasing journey. Combining prospect signals with buyer Intent Data provides a clearer bird’s eye view to help leverage customer insights to the company’s advantage. This means prospects have an intention to buy a product or services and a sales rep has to focus on the remaining 33% to close the deal.
Here is how intent data can make a difference in your marketing efforts:
Types of Intent Data
First-Party Intent Data is the data you collect about your own users. This includes data collected about visitors on your website using web analytics software like Google Analytics. First-party intent data also includes data collected by your CRM, your marketing automation platform, and any other technology you use on the website and marketing efforts. This is the information you directly track and record from user interaction on your website, email, social, and other digital properties.
Second Party Intent Data is something about you but not on your website. This includes data collected by review sites and publishing networks. It also includes survey responses collected by another organization about you. You can purchase or access your data from the company that owns it.
Third-Party Intent Data is the data collected external to your organization. These are all digital touchpoints that are not on your website and include external websites, social media, content platforms, etc. This is all the activities your prospect is reading or searching on the web outside of your own website. Once collected, this dataset is stitched together.
Intent Data is the Future of B2B Marketing & Sales!?
Understanding buyers’ intent is a must for any marketer or salesperson looking for a higher success rate and for those who are constantly searching for ways to get ahead. Understanding prospects’ behavior and triggers help businesses to understand what makes them buy and when. Marketing and sales teams can target a specific profile with this knowledge and take a personalized approach for them on demand to increase the likelihood of a purchase decision.
With numerous aggregated intent signals, businesses can identify “ready to buy” prospects and fine-tune their campaigns accordingly. Intent Data can be used for future prospecting as they reveal certain patterns, helping you to boost the purchase decisions of your prospects on their buyer journey.
Given that, it is important for you to know that if your competitor doesn’t already use the Intent Data, they might soon start using it. The report shows that 25% of B2B businesses are currently using intent data, while another 35% are preparing to use it within a year.
Why Do Your Business Need this Data?
Intent data allows marketers to know what prospects need as a next step to bring them closer to purchasing. It also provides insights into the prospect’s pain points, what solution they are searching for, hence tailoring the offer that speaks to those needs. Which in turn increases the likelihood of the prospect converting into a customer.
With intent data, you can reach out to prospects who are already looking for a similar solution like yours and can provide them with relevant content. You can form a relationship with your prospects much before your competition knows they are looking for a similar solution.
It is not just about finding which companies are showing intent, it is also about finding who is the decision-maker and the influencer within those companies.
How to Use Intent Data for Your Business?
Here we will break down how you can make the Intent Data work for you and your campaigns. To remain competitive, the use of buyer Intent Data is increasingly important. There are many areas where it can make a huge impact. Here are the key ways you can take advantage of Intent Data.
1. Identifying Early Opportunities
The most obvious use of intent data is tapping prospects earlier in the buying process. One of the best ways to get a leg up on the competition is to get in contact with prospects before other salespeople do. Research shows that in 70% of cases, companies prefer a salesperson for offering the business who communicates with them first.
When you approach prospects through marketing campaigns, there is a good chance that one segment of the audience is not in the correct buying phase to connect with your content. You are too late to reach out, or you are reaching them at the same time as the rest of your rivals. This is why B2B marketers are beginning to recognize the value of employing Intent Data to improve the success of marketing initiatives.
2. Lead Scoring
Buyer Intent Data can help to distinguish between who is actively researching a pain point and who is simply reading about a particular topic without any intention to make a purchase. This information highlights whether a lead fits your ideal customer profile or not and makes prioritization easy.
A lead scoring model requires time, brainstorming, and effort. As a result, it frequently takes a long while to set up, monitor, and enhance the process.
3. Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing is all about relationships. Intent Data can become the most important contributor to engaging and building relationships with the right prospects.
Intent Data not only helps you expand your reach, but it also gives you data that you might not be able to collect yourself. This data helps you to find more in-market customers, score leads with greater precision, and re-shapes your ABM campaign with customized messaging.
Research shows about 10% of buyers are actively buying or want to buy at any given time. If you have a target list of 100 accounts, 10 of them represent immediate opportunities. The question is, which 10? This is where intent data comes into play.
You can reasonably forecast what a company wants to buy if you know what they are actively looking for. That is precisely what intent data provides. Thousands of subjects about various products and services are continually tracked to see which companies are interested in specific themes. The more a prospect examines a topic, the more likely they are to purchase in that category.
4. Refining Your Content Strategy
Intent Data helps you create a content strategy that matches what your ideal customers want to see. While several SEO tools can help you find the top keywords, and trending topics, incorporating Intent Data will give you a whole new layer of information to strengthen your content marketing strategy.
5. Targeted Advertising
Make your advertising campaigns even more granular by capitalizing on leads that exhibit certain signals using buyer Intent Data. That way, you don’t waste any of your advertising dollars on people who have only a passing interest and don’t intend to buy your product.
Once you are able to connect the dots between what your B2B buyers need and their buying signals, then you can start sharing specific content that will help them meet their objectives and opens-up an opportunity for you.
6. Fuel Your Sales Pipeline
Driving company results demands more than simply following an end-to-end plan. You must go beyond only identifying and engaging demand in your marketing funnel.
It is no longer enough to create innovative lead generation campaigns. It is necessary to research your target market, understand their behavior, and approach them with unique content. Personalizing your marketing plan has gone beyond demographic and firmographic data on your target audience.
In a world where sales must do more with less – time, money, and attention – intent data provides insight into where to concentrate effort and engage in activities. To maximize your sales pipeline, you should focus on intent data. Intent data is used by B2B marketers to create effective and personalized campaigns.
7. Send Effective Direct Emails
Intent data can and should influence all aspects of your prospect marketing, including direct mail.
Once you can connect the dots between what your B2B buyers need and their buying signals, then you can start sharing specific content that will help them meet their objectives and opens-up an opportunity for you.
Start Incorporating Buyer Intent Data in Your Prospecting
Intent data can be incredibly valuable on its own, however, it works best when paired with other data points such as firmographic, technographic and engagement metrics to create a holistic scoring model that also reflects qualifying criteria and engagement. If used in the right combination, Intent Data can be a powerful predictor of which accounts have the highest chances of buying your product or service.
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