Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
Large companies in the B2B domain have adopted account-based marketing. They shook up their conventional content strategy to integrate an ABM-centric approach into client-facing content. Tailored content that caters to target accounts can help you achieve higher revenues. Here are five ways for you to fuse your ABM strategy with intelligent content marketing:
Deep-dive into Researching Your Target Account
Note positives about your target account, like high revenue, quick payment, hands-off implementation, etc. Find where your target accounts meet with similar industry profiles. Identify trends and conversations. Interact with these collectives and media outlets to identify pain points your product can solve.
Determine Key Decision-makers
Map the decision-makers' behaviors in the target account. Your content strategy should target vulnerable decision-makers. Find out about their lives, online habits, hobbies, professional philosophies, online communities, and social networks in real life.
Develop a Personalized Content Strategy
Create pillar content explaining how your product solves client problems. Link clustercontent to this pillar to explain its concepts. Each pillar of your pillar-and-cluster content strategy can target a different decision-maker persona. Personalized ABM increases deal closure by 2% and reduces marketing campaign costs by 40% (Source: Terminus)
Use Targeted Landing Pages to Capture Leads
Use pillar content to target ideal accounts. Targeted ad campaigns can drive prospects to lead-capture landing pages. Create landing pages where customers enter contact info for content. Sales and marketing teams can better target leads based on the landing page where they are captured.
Improve Your Content Process
Relevant content helps you reach your target account profile. You need to release content regularly and correctly. Many marketers use marketing automation content tools to achieve this.
Wrapping It Up
Supporting your ABM strategy with a robust content strategy tailored to target your key accounts can get you the conversions you expect.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | August 23, 2022
There is a New Marketing Landscape and it is critical for companies to rethink their marketing and sales strategy. This is a world of financial uncertainty for your prospects and customers, resulting in decreased budgets, longer sales cycles, and higher churn. It’s also a world of competing priorities. Key influencers and decision makers are drowning in priority issues, making it challenging to earn their attention. Given these new realities, Account Based Marketing/Sales/Customer Success (ABX) is top of mind for marketing and sales leaders given its proven efficiency and effectiveness in engaging and converting priority accounts.
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Account Based Data
Article | August 19, 2022
Harnessing the power of intent data to create effective account-based marketing strategies can help sales and marketing teams effectively achieve their goals. According to HubSpot, Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second. Of these queries, a significant few may be associated with your business. These web searches count as behavior, and they make up intent data. Intent data is of two types: internal (gathered from websites, automation systems, and other software like CRM) and external buyer intent data (review sites, competitor’s websites, forums).
Intent data is captured by buyer intent data tools. It provides insights into a customer’s behavior, interests, pain points, needs, and expectations. These insights can be leveraged to pinpoint users closest to making a purchase decision. You can then work to convert them into customers swiftly.
The Power of Intent Data
Intent data is the number one priority for account-based marketing strategies. Companies harness the power of intent data by integrating it into the workflows of their sales and marketing teams. With the help of intent data, they can tailor their interactions to the needs of their users and create valuable connections with them.
Primarily, intent data helps prioritize a list of target accounts that should be pursued for conversion. Furthermore, some companies also create specialized groups and targeted lists to hyper-personalize their content offerings to influence purchase decisions. Once the sales and marketing teams are aware of the position of a user in the sales cycle, they can focus on pushing them forward in the buying process with the help of personalized content.
Charles Crnoevich, Vice President of Partnerships & Business Development at Bombora defines intent data as:
“Intent data helps B2B teams better their prospect and customer experience at all stages of the buyer journey. From top-funnel ad messaging that meets prospective buyers in their initial research phase, to bottom-funnel sales messaging that includes context around specific product needs, intent insights give every touchpoint the ability to be backed by data. It eliminates room for human guessing and the risk of being irrelevant to your audience.”
Let us look at how intent data is transforming businesses and the importance of an intent data strategy to scale your business.
Target Account Selection
Relying only on basic firmographic data is a thing of the past when it comes to selecting a target account. Here are five steps that you can follow to create a target account selection based on the intent data you gather:
Defining Your ICP
Revenue should not be the only factor you consider while defining your ICP. Look at the cost to convert, lifetime value, and churn rate. Observe what your best customers have in common. Is it their company size, their domain, the challenges they face, or their growth rate? Once you know these details, consider finding a solution for their problems. You may have more than one ICP if you have multiple products, features, and services on offer.
Understanding the Intent
Based on the key signals like downloads, sign-ups, booked demos, or reading certain pages on your websites that buyer intent data tools record, you can understand the intent of the user. Once the intent is clear, you can gather your data with the help of buyer intent tools.
Gathering Relevant Data
Lead generation platforms like Leedfeeder, email marketing platforms like MailChimp, CRM platforms like HubSpot CRM, and marketing automation platforms like WebEngage are your sources of intent data. How you gather data depends on the platforms you are using. Most lead generation platforms will allow you to download the data in an Excel sheet or a CSV file. What is great about this kind of data is that you can always combine the spreadsheets from all these sources and clean up the inconsistencies.
Segmenting the Target List
Segmenting your target list is very important to understand which accounts are high intent. The other categories can be of medium or low intent. Filter out the low intent accounts first. These accounts aren’t quite ready to make any purchase decisions. Add them to your remarketing list or your account development team can nurture them. The medium and high-intent accounts can stay on your list so your sales and marketing can focus on them.
Targeting Key Accounts
Once your teams have the list of key accounts they need to target, they can create an effective strategy to approach these accounts and push them towards conversion. They can accelerate their conversion efforts with the help of email marketing, content marketing, advertising, and direct mail. Finding the right leads at the right time can help a great deal with targeting. With the help of B2B intent data, everything functions smoothly once you find the right key accounts.
Message Selection
The best part about B2B intent data is that it doesn’t miss any important information about the account, so your messaging strategy is based on facts and not speculation. Quality intent data will provide the prospect’s research history, going as far as including searched products and companies. The otherwise invisible, actionable prospect trends can thus come to light, and you can create messaging that can help you beat your competition.
According to a Gartner research study, more than 70 percent of B2B marketers will utilize third-party intent data to target their prospects or initiate engagement with buyer groups in selected accounts by the end of 2022.
Message optimization may not be at the top of the chart for the most impactful uses of intent data, but it does play an important role in helping content marketers be successful. Buyer intent data enables them to better align their sales pitches to accommodate the buyers’ interests and needs that they discover using the third-party site buyer signals.
Decreasing Churn Rate
By monitoring the intent data signals of clients who search your competitor’s website to find alternatives to the products or services you provide, you can know which clients need more attention and support. This information indicates that these clients do not find your product or services up to the mark or are not fulfilling their needs and expectations. You can set up triggers for such clients and ask for feedback from them to find out the shortcomings of your product or service. You can use the feedback as a guide for future product development and reduce your churn rate by retaining clients. Another interesting approach would be to provide your team access to reliable and clean intent data so they can make decisions to enhance the sales strategy.
Image Source: Orbitmedia
Sales Outreach
According to Gartner research, prospects spend about 50% of their time trying to find information from third-party sources. Usually, the sales team has to wait for a buyer to either fill out a form or perform a trigger action to be classified as a prospect. However, with buyer intent signals, prospect movement is revealed. The prospect’s intent indicators help the sales team decide when to outreach.
Enhancing Content Personalization
Use third and first-party data to create informed blog content, email marketing campaigns, and other content marketing initiatives to appeal to your prospects. By leveraging the intent data at hand, you can offer what the clients want in an appealing way. You can target their entire buyer persona by creating a more effective content strategy. Your content marketing team can know the topics they need to cover in their marketing efforts. It can also improve the existing content to make it more impactful.
Discovering New Leads
Whenever a customer searches for products or services that you offer or topics relevant to them, third-party intent data aggregators can track them and notify you about this customer. If this customer hasn’t already interacted with your business, then these are new leads your teams can pursue with appropriate messaging and tailored content.
Enabling ABM Strategy
In ABM marketing, knowing which accounts to target is the most crucial step. With the help of data insights on specific accounts, you can build a focused ABM strategy. You can analyse their research data and interpret their buying intent, and based on that, you can add them to your target list. Measure and test the content they interact with and what makes them move further along the sales funnel. You can find the content that isn’t creating any impact and replace it. Adapting an ABM strategy in real time becomes easy, so you are more customer-centric than ever before.
Improving Marketing Automation
Intent data tells you exactly where your prospects are in the sales funnel. Use this information to trigger certain actions to nurture these prospects. For example, once you find that a certain prospect has stopped consuming the awareness-stage content on your website and starts devoting time to consideration or conversion-stage content, you can trigger a change in the kind of marketing content you send out.
Targeting Keywords Effectively
Search engine marketers find long-tail keywords important because they are descriptive, relevant, and do a great job of implying the buyer’s intent. However, it is challenging for advertisers to target long-tail keywords because they do not have enough search volume. This affects ad visibility as compared to when high volume keywords are used. To get the same results with the long tail keywords, companies need to optimize many long tail keywords.
Automated bidding technologies can easily carry out this task. By using your third-party intent data, you can know the kind of long-tail keywords your audience is searching for. Use your website analytics to discover fresh information on keywords and then use it to target keywords or create relevant ads.
You can also automate ad personalization with the help of intent data aggregators that identify qualified leads based on information like domain and device advertisement. You can then place the right ads on your audience’s devices.
Now that we know how intent data helps with account-based marketing, intent based marketing, and other marketing endeavors, let us look at the key elements of an intent data strategy and how to make the most of it.
8 Key Elements of an Effective Intent Data Strategy
We have already established how important intent data is in B2B marketing in improving targeting, lead generation, lead nurturing, and overall customer experience. When it comes to creating an effective intent data strategy, you should follow these guidelines:
Align ABM Initiatives & Intent Data Strategy
In an ABM strategy, you can deploy intent data for account prioritization in the following ways:
Fuse intent data with your defined ICP
Identify your target accounts and check which of these are showing buyer intent. Your sales team can have relevant information to talk to these accounts and convince them to make a purchase.
Segment accounts showing intent but don’t align with your ICP
You can increase your sales pipeline by segmenting the new accounts by showing buyer intent but not aligning them with your ICP. This is especially useful for companies with a smaller database.
Define Your Goals and Strategies
Break silos and work towards the same goals. Get a buy-in from the higher-ups in the company and let the teams know what to achieve with the intent data. Share the intent data strategy with every team member, align the goals and metrics, and train those who need to know more about intent data.
Integrate the Data from Different Systems
Increase the efficiency of your intent data strategy by integrating systems like CRM to improve the visibility and performance of the funnel. A step-by-step approach goes a long way when it comes to an intent data strategy.
Start with a Small Pilot
Trial and tweaking your intent data strategy can be a good idea. Create an intent data framework for a small set of accounts and share it with a limited group of sales team members at your company. Streamline your processes through this pilot test. Once you know the intricacies of what works and what doesn’t, you can launch intent data strategies with other sales teams.
Collect Performance Metrics
Ensure you collect your conversion rate before rolling out a pilot program for testing. This way, you can compare the before and after. Monitor the performance metrics throughout the program. Your marketing and sales teams can go over the metrics together to see what tweaks are needed to the intent data strategy before multiple teams adopt one.
Gather Buyer Journey Intelligence
Identify trends through specific search terms, topics, asset types, features or product interests so you can create topic clusters for specific content that can be distributed throughout the funnel. You can do this by gathering first-party data from your marketing automation software, CRM, and other customer-data platforms. You can also interview customers to get any other useful information to understand a buyer’s journey better. You can also engage intent data providers to find out more about historical buyer journey analysis.
Monitor Important Topics
Select the right topics to monitor. The intent data will only work if you know which specific topic or clusters of topics will determine the status of a prospect. Choose the topics that are critical for success. Remember, the higher the use cases in a fuller, the lower the number of topics you should monitor. As you move down the funnel, be more specific about the topics you want to monitor.
Explore Potential Integrations
By integrating your intent data with the right platform, you can amplify the results of your intent data strategy. Since intent data supports the complete customer lifecycle and increases the value of your other martech software or sales-tech investments, it is important to explore integrations that may enhance your sales and marketing strategy. When used wisely, intent data can transform your business, one department at a time. It can also ensure customers’ satisfaction and help you scale your business faster than you ever imagined.
Ultima Generated ROI in Eight Weeks Through Cognism
Ultima, a UK-based infotech company led an example by generating ROI in just eight weeks using intent data provided by Cognism. "Our sales cycle is typically 6-8 months long. At Cognism, we saw ROI in 8 weeks from intent data and direct dials. One deal pays for a year’s Cognism subscription." - George Mckenna, Head of Cloud Sales at Ultima.
Conclusion
Creating an effective intent data strategy can be a game-changing factor for your business. With its implementation, not only will you be able to connect with your customers on a deeper level, but you will also be able to get higher win rates than your competitors that practice manual prospecting.
FAQ
How can you collect intent data?
You can collect intent data through signals like website clicks, social media ad clicks, length of time spent on a website, email newsletter subscription behavior, or frequent website visits.
What are the benefits of intent data in B2B marketing?
With the help of a good intent data strategy, you can find new potential leads, focus on companies already a part of your sales funnel, promote yourself to your customers early on in their decision-making process, prioritize your leads, and personalize your outreach. These benefits can drive your sales growth.
How does intent data help in ABM marketing?
ABM marketing is also intent-based marketing. Intent data for ABM is an asset as it helps with account prioritization (lowering the scale of the program to focus better on key accounts) and account activation through personalized and specific marketing messaging.
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ABM Accounts
Article | November 20, 2021
The pandemic has changed the marketing world to a great extent. Customers have tremendously adapted to online buying.
The pandemic has forced B2B customers to adapt to new ways of buying and selling. Customers are ready for online meetings and connecting digitally as far as the buying approach is concerned. The only thing that matters to them is that the solutions should answer their hurdles or challenges like personalization and strategizing marketing so
But for the selling process, B2B marketing strategies needed creativity. Companies had to put their heads together to convince a buyer through conversations on digital platforms. It was not easy. But B2B companies have taken up the challenge and managed to come out with flying colors.
Let us look at the changed scenario of B2B marketing.
The Changed Scenario for B2B Marketing
In 2020, when the world came to a standstill, people expected it was just a break, and they might return to their lives in no time. But this myth was busted when people had to adopt the new normal instead of going back to normal.
Every industry faced challenges, including the B2B industry. Imagine the industry, which had the habit of meeting decision-makers and convincing them with presentations, had to do all the work digitally.
But they found solutions after some months of struggles, and the businesses were back on track. Of course, there were difficulties on the way, but they answered every obstacle with time.
B2B marketing best ideas include account-based marketing, conversational ABM, personalized campaigns, correct use of data, and more. These paved a path for successful B2B marketing amidst the pandemic.
Thus, learning from them, we have curated a list of tips for successful B2B marketing.
Tips for Successful B2B Marketing
These best ways to market B2B are listed after diving deep into the struggles of B2B marketing. The experts of this area have experienced hurdles and implemented these solutions.
Have a Buyer-centric Approach
In an interview with Media7, Dmitry Chervonyi, Chief Marketing Officer at Belkins, stated that,
“If you don't solve your customers' problems and make their lives better, then it is a waste of time to do this kind of business.”
So, you understand how essential the customer is! These days it is more about the customer than about sales. Therefore, you must have a 360-degree alignment with the customer’s needs and preferences. Through this, you have better chances of conversion.
Take Risks
The market is very unpredictable post the pandemic. The companies that you thought may not require your service can be the ones changing the game. So, do not refrain from taking risks. First, of course, calculate the risks, but they take them.
For example, before the pandemic, some businesses may have invested massive resources in digital marketing. As a result, they might not see the results immediately. But meanwhile, the pandemic erupted, and Boom! They were the only ones who survived in the market.
Thus, the results of a calculated risk may be harmful or positive, but you either earn profits or learn something valuable from it!
Implement ABM
If you are a B2B marketer and have not implemented ABM in your marketing strategy, you need to do it immediately. Account-based marketing has the best conversion rate compared to the traditional methods.
And this is the best strategy to be implemented post the pandemic. The reason is that companies have various challenges and need immediate solutions. Thus, if you filter the best clients, address their struggles, and target them, they will waste no time in approaching your sales team.
But this is possible only when you design the best ABM strategy. Click here to know more about account-based marketing for B2B.
Have an Agile Approach
Clive Armitage, CEO at Agent3, believes that,
“We have to act as the eyes and ears of marketing innovation for our clients; they trust us to help them navigate the pace of change in the way that the process of marketing is evolving.”
It means that Agent3 changes its strategies and services as per the clients and market demands. They also keep the clients in the loop of the changes and innovations happening in the market.
Thus, have an agile approach. Be ready to change your marketing growth strategies and plans according to the conditions around you.
Be Future Ready
The example set by the rental car company Hertz shows how future-ready they are with their latest investment. Despite their business being affected by the pandemic, it resurfaced itself through trusted investors. But instead of following the age-old techniques of rental cars, they ordered 100,000 Teslas to electrify its fleet.
Not only did Tesla’s shares hit sky-high but, Hertz was all over the news. This critical investment defines how Hertz is making itself future-ready as it knows the future is electric cars.
This example explains how important it is to invest for the future, considering the changing customer demands. Hence, implementing the latest technologies like AI and machine learning in marketing campaigns can make you future-ready. Plus they also create a great impression in the mind of the customers.
And We Conclude
Remember, marketing is all about understanding your customers and delivering what they want. Once you know your customers, you have hit the bull’s eye. So hit targets by taking risks, investing in technology, and developing a personalized approach.
And most importantly, adapt to the changing world to thrive in it!
Frequently Asked Questions
How to identify a successful B2B marketing plan?
Analyze your marketing performance
Perform competitor analysis
Define your marketing goals
Identify your marketing budget
Implement the latest B2B marketing trends
How successful is ABM strategy in B2B marketing?
Account-based marketing guarantees a better conversion than traditional marketing methods. Plus, it is one of the most trending strategies in B2B marketing. As a result, companies have saved many resources and fulfilled their sales targets by incorporating account-based marketing.
Does ABM guarantee a 100% success rate?
Well, ABM guarantees a success rate that may be not 100% but surely more than any other marketing strategy. The success of account-based marketing depends on the personalized content and the tailored approach you provide to your clients.
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