10 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Help Grow Your Business

Buyer Intent Data

Article | March 6, 2023

Account-based marketing strategies prioritize intent data to maximize the effectiveness of their sales and marketing workflows. With the help of intent data, businesses can tailor their interactions with target accounts based on their needs and build valuable relationships with them. In an interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, the Founder and CEO of Metadata.io, talked about the use of intent data for lead generation. “Without the right tools, companies don’t realize what campaigns have zero traction and what campaigns are attracting the most potential buyers, therefore, money is wasted on leads that won’t lead to revenue.” Intent data aids in the prioritization of a list of target accounts to be pursued for conversion. Additionally, some businesses create specialized groups and targeted lists to hyper-personalize their content offerings and influence purchase decisions. Importance of Buyer Intent Data To make the most of intent data, companies engage B2B buyer intent data tools provided by exclusive intent data providers or account-based marketing software providers. They use these tools for effective lead generation. According to Insights on Professionals, almost 40% of businesses spend more than half of their marketing budget on intent data, and 70% plan to increase spending on intent data. Intent data plays a big role in enhancing an ABM strategy. Below are some ways: It helps with target account selection With the help of intent data, you can define your ICP, understand the ICP’s intent, and gather relevant data from multiple intent data tools or platforms and collate it to amplify your target list. As a bonus, you can also divide your target list based on their intent. Finally, you can target the accounts with the help of all the insights that you gained from the B2B intent data. You can zero-in on the best messaging High-quality B2B buyer intent data includes insights like a prospect’s research history. You can uncover actionable prospect trends that you would have otherwise missed. Using this crucial information, you can optimize your messaging because it plays an important role in content marketing. Buyer intent data can enhance sales pitches by shedding light on the buyer’s interests and needs. It improves your sales outreach Prospects are now focused on doing their own research based on the suggestions their friends or acquaintances provide. With the help of intent signals that the buyer intent tools record, the movement of the prospect is revealed. Once your sales team knows the position of a prospect in the sales funnel, they can decide when to get in touch and work towards a conversion. It helps you retain customers If your customers are looking at your competitor’s products or services, intent data signals will alert you. This kind of information indicates that you need to evaluate your offerings. You can set up triggers to gather such instances and seek feedback from customers to understand their expectations. You can reach out to these customers and provide them with support and attention so you do not lose them. You can amplify your content Content personalization is a crucial component of an effective ABM strategy. Using first and third-party data, you can create impactful blog content, email marketing campaigns, and other relevant content pieces to appeal to your leads. Buyer intent data can help you target your ideal customer profile (ICP). Your marketing team can create content on topics your prospects are looking at and revamp old content to make it more effective. Why Are B2B Marketers Intent on Using Buyer Intent Data? ABM marketing is B2B marketing on steroids. For B2B marketers who want to run intent-based marketing campaigns, buyer intent data has become a go-to tool because it helps them understand their target accounts better. Their approach is focused, tailored, and relevant. Such an approach leads to more conversions, shorter sales cycles, and clearer ROI. Let us look at why B2B marketers are making it a point to use account-based marketing software with buyer intent data tools. Increases brand exposure through customized websites, landing pages, and social media pages to cater to a specific audience Aligns sales and marketing teams by bridging the communication gap between them and establishing shared business goals Facilitates hyper-targeted advertising by providing information on search intent, online behaviour, main interests through keyword searches, and propensity to make purchase Accurately predicts buyer behavior with the help of comprehensive datasets to forecast the buying patterns of prospects Enhances customer experience by providing insights into the prospects’ needs and expectations so the curated content resonates with them 3 Best Buyer Intent Data Tools You Should Know About Here is a list of the three best buyer intent data tools that can help you improve your account-based marketing strategy: Demandbase Demandbase’s ABX Cloud uses account intelligence to help its customers orchestrate sales and marketing moves. With the help of reliable and high-quality insights, you can create relevant content for every stage of the B2B buyer’s journey. ABX Cloud has an engagement platform that shows all of the information your marketing and sales teams have gathered in one place. This way, your teams can find opportunities faster, engage with them smartly, and close deals quickly, which will help your business grow. ABX Cloud also uses predictive analysis so your sales team knows when to approach a lead. It conveniently aligns the efforts of both your sales and marketing teams to create an actionable, measurable, and focused ABM approach. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) for account selection. As a result, your target list is based on intent signals, CRM data, and others, which will help you know your target accounts well enough to create effective messaging. ABX’s account-based analytics measure engagement across each account and track progress throughout pre-defined, unique account journeys. This is how Demandbase uses intent data for lead generation. Demandbase was named a leader in the first-ever 2022 Magic Quadrant for Account-based Marketing Platforms. It is the only company to get the best scores for all three use cases in the accompanying 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Account-based Marketing Platforms report. Demandbase Success Story: SilkRoad Technology, Inc. is a human resource capital management software company. It used Demandbase's ABM platform, which was equipped with intent data, and saw activity and engagement from their top accounts go from 20%–30% to 80%+ in just six months. Bombora Bombora proudly markets itself as a market leader in B2B intent data. It is one of the most popular intent-based marketing facilitators. It has the most comprehensive and privacy-compliant data cooperative on the web. In short, it provides clean, risk-free intent data. It collects data consensually from its proprietary data source that comprises of 4000+ top B2B sites on the internet. It provides the most accurate data on a buyer’s digital journey so you can understand their intent. It has named its intent data solution ‘Company Surge.’ Bombora’s data can be integrated with all major platforms across the ad, sales, and martech ecosystems. This added convenience means you do not have to onboard a new system to access Bombora’s data. You can set it up in your current workflow. Privacy compliance and ethically sourced intent data make Bombora a great choice amongst the tools. It gathers data from websites that are exclusive to Bombora. It has implemented industry-standard consent mechanisms so that all the data is compliant. Company Surge uses BERT-based machine learning to understand the intent behind the words on a webpage and gives you an accurate picture of your buyer’s interest, pain points, requirements, and intent. It also helps with resolving pre-purchase signals of buyers to 2.8 million businesses by using its patented method that fuses behavioral and IP2C (Internet Protocol to Company) data. This data is then amplified by firmographic and demographic data. Bombora detects how many users from a specific organization are researching particular topics, how frequently they visit certain webpages, and how deep their research goes as compared to their usual web activity. Based on this information, it can tell when an organization wants to make a purchase. Bombora Success Story: Hornbill, a global leader of cloud-based workflow application software for IT, HR, security, and customer service teams, integrated Bombora with its HubSpot database. It got net-new in-market accounts every week, which Hornbill prioritized for sales and marketing. In six months, Hornbill found 900+ new accounts that were already in the market, which led to new active sales opportunities. ZoomInfo ZoomInfo Intent helps identify and engage buyers in real-time when they research solutions that your company offers. You can discover ready-to-buy prospects, connect with ideal buyers, and integrate the data with the tools that are already a part of your platform. It is simple to map an ideal customer profile using the buying signals collected by ZoomInfo's database. You can uncover sales-ready leads that are looking at the products or solutions that your company offers. The intent engine triggers signals that are tracked by a network of 300,000 publisher domains. One trillion new keyword-to-device pairs are added to ZoomInfo every month from more than 90% of all the devices in the United States, which is a lot of devices. ZoomInfo can help you identify and understand entire buying teams based on what they research. You can reach decision makers over the phone, through digital marketing channels, and by email to start a meaningful conversation. You can create automated workflows to close more deals by incorporating contact and intent data into your CRM, marketing, and sales software. ZoomInfo Success Story: Speakap, an internal communications app, used ZoomInfo Intent and DiscoverOrg’s combined platform. Their bounce rates fell below 1%, their engagement rate increased by 25%, and their pipeline growth increased by more than 50%. Summing It Up Buyer intent data tools can enhance the way you do business, how efficiently your sales and marketing teams function, and how effectively you can run your ABM marketing campaigns. Choose your buyer intent data tools from trusted intent data providers based on their offerings, their privacy compliance, integration capabilities, transparent metrics, and overall functionality so that you can make the most of your account-based marketing strategy. This way, you can make the most of your marketing efforts. FAQ How can you get buyer intent data? Buyer intent data is collected by buyer intent data tools, which may be a part of your ABM platform or which you can integrate with your platform. They collect the data from website visits, CRM, social media data, content consumption and off-site activity. What are the benefits of buyer intent data tools? Buyer intent data tools provide insights on a customer’s intent to purchase. They do this by mapping the customer journey, performing predictive analysis, behavioral analysis, and tracking competitor data. How can you use buyer intent data to scale your business? By using buyer intent data, you can personalize your website, prioritize your inbound leads, nurture your leads, personalize your emails and identify potential customers who haven’t engaged with you yet. So, you can convert the leads into customers by offering them just what they want.

Account Based Data

Article | June 29, 2023

Intent data is a modern sales intelligence tool that helps you capture a prospect’s buying signals. By using an effective intent data strategy, you can be the first to reach out to a prospect and aim for a conversion. In an interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, CEO of Metadata.io, talked about the importance of data in converting leads. “With access to valuable data, marketers are focused on leads that are more likely to become buyers. They can also work on targeting their messaging towards these potential buyers.” According to SalesIntel, 97% of B2B marketers agree that intent data will give brands a competitive edge. Intent data collects signals that come from consumption of content like: Blogs and infographics Product comparisons Product reviews Message boards Case studies News However, it can be challenging to incorporate intent data into marketing and sales initiatives. Regardless of whether you're working with first-party, second-party, or third-party intent data, it can have multiple applications across a range of systems and workflows and may overwhelm your team. An excellent B2B intent data approach can ease the process and use of intent data. Motivate your team to harness the power of intent data to drive business growth. 5 Essential Elements of an Intent Data Strategy 52% of B2B tech companies implement an intent data strategy in their account-based marketing program. (Source: SalesIntel) This statistic shows that more and more B2B marketers are seeking the help of intent data to make their account targeting more effective. Let us look at what essential steps you should take while integrating B2B intent data into your account-based marketing program. Alignment: Your Intent Data Strategy Should Line up with Your ABM Strategy To get the results you expect, synchronize it with your ABM marketing strategy. You can use intent data in different ways to optimize your account-based marketing. Here are two of the many ways it can help you with target account prioritization: Bind the intent data to your ICP criteria. Which ones show buyer intent out of the accounts that match your ICP? This information can help your marketing team push these accounts further into the funnel. Your sales reps will have meaningful communication with these target accounts. Overall, the chances of conversion will go up because you know the intent of your ICP-based target accounts. There may be net new accounts showing buyer intent but they fall outside your pre-defined ICP. Segment these accounts and increase your sales pipeline. If your company doesn't have a lot of data, this use case can help you change or define your ICP criteria and help your sales pipeline. Buy-In: Bring Your Teams Together For all the teams to come together and work towards the same business goals and objectives, you need to get buy-in from the C-suite of your company. Only your leadership can drive your sales and teams to break silos and work with the mindset of establishing processes and using tactics that can create harmony between them. Ensure that the teams understand what you want to achieve with intent data for ABM. Share it with them and align on a follow-up strategy, metrics, and key accounts. Set up training programs so that your teams understand the newness and precision that intent data will bring to account-based marketing. Testing: Begin with a Small Pilot Apply your strategy to a small set of accounts. Involve limited sales team members within your company, probably a team you are closely associated with, to oversee the use of intent data in B2B marketing through your ABM program. This can help you understand where the strategy needs to be tweaked and what approach you need to use while using intent data. Pilot testing is an effective way of streamlining and recording your processes. It can be the foundation for implementing all your intent data initiatives for other sales teams over time. Get everyone on board to analyze the results of your pilot test and then decide on the best way to integrate intent data into your account-based marketing program. Analysis: Examine the Performance Metrics To gauge the impact of intent data on your account-based marketing program, you must collect conversion rates before the pilot test. This way, you can compare the before and after rates and examine how intent data helps ABM. Marketing and sales teams can look at what works and eliminate what doesn’t. This learning curve is crucial before you use intent data companywide. Integration: Collate Your Systems with Intent Data You can amplify the impact of your data strategy by integrating it with your systems like CRM, marketing automation software, and ABM platform. Through intent-based marketing, you can increase the performance and visibility of your brand throughout the sales funnel. Integration can also spearhead landing deals and expand your account-based strategy across different domains. Implementing an intent data strategy step-by-step can lead to success and benefit all teams across all departments, increase customer satisfaction, and enable you to scale your business. Kazoo Saw a 2-3x Increase in Reply Rates after Using Bombora’s Company Surge Kazoo, an employee experience platform, integrated data from Bombora’s Company Surge buyer intent data tool with its 6sense account engagement platform data. It saw a 2-3x increase in reply rates. Conclusion When combined with additional data, B2B intent data can help you develop a scoring model that considers fit and engagement, making it more effective. If you use intent data in B2B marketing correctly, it can be a great way to improve your ABM strategy. FAQ How can an intent data strategy enhance ABM? It can help in ABM marketing by indicating early buyer interest, facilitating content personalization, and helping with creating targeted account lists and lead scoring. How can sales and marketing teams benefit from intent data? Sales and marketing teams can use intent data for ABM to create effective go-to-market strategies, accurate target account segmentation, and personalized outreach. What does intent data do to improve lead scoring? Intent data provides predictive purchase insights. With the help of this information, you can approach the accounts close to making purchase decisions.

Core ABM

Article | June 20, 2023

Empathy is an emotion that many marketers invoke when they are developing their positioning and messaging for various campaigns. They consider questions such as: “If I put myself in the buyers’ shoes, what do I think they think or feel about this particular pain point?” “Do I understand the challenges they are facing?” “How can I help them overcome this issue and provide long-term value?” Over the last few years, many B2B marketers have leveraged account-based marketing (ABM) to address these questions with specific use cases and examples tailored to their target accounts, in order to boost engagement and drive high-value conversions.

Article | April 15, 2020

Understanding how a B2B buyer’s journey naturally progresses is key to designing a digital marketing program that works in any economic climate. When we do this with our clients, it allows us to see their marketing as a whole, rather than looking at isolated marketing tactics and getting overly focused on minor issues. Once we understand what’s already working for a client, we can then apply an informed strategy to amplify their successes. Occasionally, we may also recommend that a client step back from a few marketing tactics that might not be working well enough.