The success of marketing is heavily reliant on data, but nowadays relying on customer data alone is not enough. This is where intent data comes in. The combination of customer signals and intent data can create a better bird’s eye view to help leverage customer insights to companies advantage.
But even with the rise of intent data, many marketers are still left in the dark about the value of intent data because of its complexity. It is important to learn and understand the buyer journey and their purchase decisions to implement better lead generation strategies, intent data makes this process more efficient.
What is Intent Data?
In essence, intent data is information collected about a company or a person’s activities. Capturing internal intent data can help marketers by getting information in its website from its applications. This information helps B2B marketers gain more insight on customers, making it easier for companies to personalize the buyers journey.
The data you gather from contact forms, and customer data on your CRM platform, can help you work successfully to convert leads into sales ready customers.
Gathering basic information from your customers, allows you to start tracking their intent of your products and services. These insights can help you gain more qualified leads and potentially increase ROI. When looking to get the intent data you need focus on these key points of research:
- Search – The keywords and search terms your customers research says a lot about who your customers are. Tracking your customers’ searches helps you narrow what information should be broadcasted to them. Marketers should consider informational, navigational, and internal site search queries.
- Browser – Knowing what specific content the user has viewed provides marketers understanding of their audience by tracking their cookies and browsing history. Providing insight on the user language and their research behaviors, helps B2B marketers personalize messaging to their intended audience.
- Action – How users interact with your brand through different channels gives marketers an opportunity to see what user experiences prompt them to go to, or buy from your company. With the right experiences, you can generate leads that are more highly qualified even before they come to your website to buy.
- Firmographic – As your marketing efforts try to segment people, your marketing team should also be focusing on segmenting the organizations that interact with you. By matching a person’s intent information with an organizational account, you will be able to develop a better understanding on what organizations are looking for, and what they’re interested in.
- Predictive – Aggregating the first four sources of data, your marketing team will perceive intents of the company by analyzing patterns and similarities that affect their future trends, actions, and behaviors. Use these data point, not only for selling in the present, but also to sell in the future.
As useful as intent data is, it is also important to note that the data collected should be verified before it can be used by marketing. Parameters, such as time and incomplete data, should be taken into consideration. These lapses could prove to be costly to companies as 70% of CRM data becomes obsolete within a year.
However, when preformed at standard and with verified information, marketers can benefit from the wealth of information intent data yields; significantly helping the overall buyers journey. Sufficient intent data can improve these three things:
- Efficiency in helping your marketers discover and propose solutions your users need.
- Improving the quality of leads in the pipeline, by keeping track of various activities to see the actual buying intent and behavior of the prospect.
- Increasing customer win-rates through engagement with active users, turning them into customers.
But with all great advances, comes challenges in the use of intent data technologies and strategies. Overcoming some of the most common problems can help marketers maneuver smoothly and gain traction in B2B marketing. These challenges include:
- Understanding your buyers
- Ensuring Data Quality
- Managing and Modeling Data
- Aligning Sales and Marketing
- Managing your Timing
Why Intent Data is the Future of B2B Marketing
With marketers always looking for ways to get ahead, knowing the intent of the buyers is a must for any marketer gaining a higher success rate. Knowing prospects behaviors and triggers helps marketers understand the baseline for companies and what causes them to buy and when. With this knowledge, marketers can target a specific profile, and create personalized advertising for them on demand to increase likelihood of a purchase decision.
With all the information flowing, prospects become more informed of the decisions they make. More information means the more prospects discover about your product or service. When addressed conveniently at the right time and manner, prospects have more intent to buy therefor increasing ROI for the company.
With numerous data aggregated, it will be easy to create a baseline and learn potential clients’ behaviors and help marketers look for, “ready to buy” signals. Intent data can be used for future prospecting as they reveal patterns, helping you preempt your prospects’ purchase decisions in their buyer journey. You can use tools like Demandbase and Leadspace to combine first party data and intent data, run it by AI-driven algorithms, create better customer profiles, and personalize content for targeted segments accordingly.
In Conclusion
Data is currently the lifeblood of all marketing efforts and strategies, assets such as demographics alone will no longer suffice like in the old days. Leveraging intent data with a myriad of other buyer signals can help marketers be more effective at what they do best: convincing their B2B customers to buy. And while learning intent data may be complex, it pays off when applied.
As big data grows more and more relevant in today’s highly competitive world, intent data becomes a valuable tool that helps marketers by giving them clear patterns from billions of data. Allowing B2B marketers to effectively and efficiently target the right customers at the right time. Intent data provides all the information marketers need to generate personalized marketing strategies and optimize revenue, therefor being the future of B2B marketing efforts.
