Buyer Intent Data
Article | August 23, 2022
Account-based marketing has been around since the early 2000s, but only recently have businesses started to implement it widely in their marketing strategies. By focusing on ideal customer profiles (ICP), businesses shortlist key accounts and target them with customized content campaigns to convert them from marketing-qualified leads to buyers. An account-based marketing strategy uses sales and marketing orchestration to transform the way key accounts are approached.
ABM marketing contributed to a 70 percent increase in the number of opportunities created. (Source: Gartner)
Nash Haywood, Global Director-Digital Conversion & Paid Media, Genesys, talked about ABM’s impact on how sales and marketing teams function.
“We wanted to have more control of the entire (marketing and sales) process, and an ABM approach allowed us to do that.”
B2B account-based marketing drives valuable engagement and leads to higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies.
Benefits of Account-based Marketing
Account-based marketing benefits range from increased marketing efficiency and higher ROI to higher engagement and retention. Let us take a look at them in detail:
ABM Enhances Your Marketing Efforts
ABM marketing is data-driven. Account-based management becomes easy with crucial data like role, industry, and buyer journey stage. Based on this data, appealing personalized content campaigns are created to target key accounts. These campaigns optimize your marketing efforts. They also give insights on which channels and messages appeal to your targeted key accounts so that you can refine your account-based marketing strategy. According to Emarketer, 46 percent of marketers are benefitting from real-time optimization to accelerate their pipeline revenue.
Sales and Marketing Teams Synchronize
An account-based marketing campaign aligns the goals of the sales and marketing teams. It also brings other important stakeholders, like the IT team and the executive team, together to create an effective strategy for achieving goals.
Sales and marketing orchestration can lead to a massive increase in marketing revenue (up to 208 percent as stated by MarketingProfs).
ABM Improves Marketing Efficiency
Account-based marketing automation technology helps streamline marketing processes and scale ABM implementation across different marketing campaigns. Activities like ad targeting, modelling, upselling media buying, and executing lead nurturing campaigns can be done efficiently using account-based marketing software. You can cease marketing to accounts that do not respond to your campaigns and focus on the ones that do. This can help you save your money and allocate your time and resources better.
You Retain Customers Better
ABM uses hyper-personalized content to pursue higher customer engagement and retention. By showing key accounts the content they want to see, brand awareness and trust are increased. An account-based marketing campaign, especially one created to engage target accounts, contributes to an enhanced customer experience that makes B2B marketing significantly impactful. It translates to long-term associations and bigger deal sizes.
You Close Deals Faster
You can move key accounts through the sales funnel swiftly and close deals faster by identifying decision-makers of your key accounts. B2B account-based marketing saves time and resources, which can be used to generate new leads. That is why this is one of the most important account-based marketing benefits.
ABM Improves Deal Sizes
Account-based B2B marketing targets only key accounts with buyer intent. It is about quality more than quantity, and this makes a whole lot of difference in how you approach accounts and strike deals. A shorter sales cycle through account-based marketing means landing a big account that signs away more money than many small accounts would.
You Get a Higher ROI
According to a report by ITSMA, 87 percent of marketers stated that ABM delivered a higher ROI as compared to other marketing strategies. Since account-based marketing is a data-driven strategy that uses personalized content to target accounts, this approach is easier and more cost-effective as it saves time and resources because of its precision.
ABM Performance Is Measurable
Account-based reporting is a key account-based marketing benefit. Using metrics like engagement, brand awareness, target account reach, retention, ROI, and influence helps you understand how well your ABM strategy is working. You can optimize your strategy to make it perform better.
ABM Makes You the Expert
While implementing account-based B2B marketing, you gain deep insights into the conversion behaviours, preferences, challenges, and needs of your target accounts. This knowledge makes you an expert in offering solutions that your target accounts crave. It also helps with new service or product design ideas that can cater to customers in a more personal way.
Creating an ABM Strategy That Works
To create an account-based marketing program that works, follow these steps:
1. Define the key accounts you want to target.
2. Identify the decision-makers for these accounts.
3. Create hyper-personalized content for them.
4. Zero in on appropriate channels to get maximum impact.
5. Create impressive content campaigns to increase engagement.
6. Measure the success of your campaigns using the correct metrics.
Account-based Marketing Services to Scale Your ABM Strategy
To adopt ABM at scale for exponential business growth, you need to evaluate your target accounts and then expand your ABM strategy from a small scale to a full-blown ABM. Your expansion can also be across new segments or businesses based on industry or company size. Artificial intelligence and marketing automation make it easier to implement ABM at scale.
Account-based marketing services offered by companies that specialize in ABM and marketing like Marketo, Terminus, Demandbase, Optimizely, and Oracle make it easier to implement an ABM strategy at scale. These companies offer services to attract and convert prospects, scale up your marketing, and grow customer relationships through up-selling and cross-selling.
Account-based marketing automation, email marketing, lead management, account-based management, social marketing, digital advertising, mobile marketing, multi-channel marketing, account-based reporting using ABM metrics and optimization along with account-based marketing software can help you scale your ABM strategy without breaking a sweat.
How SAP Created New Pipeline Opportunities Using ABM
SAP launched an account-based marketing program to target the company's top 10% of key accounts. These accounts were responsible for a third of their revenue in America. Through their ABM program, they offered specialized marketing plans for these accounts. SAP gained new pipeline opportunities and moved $57 million down the pipeline because of the benefits of account-based marketing.
Summing It Up
The time to implement ABM in your marketing strategy is now. Adopting it into your marketing strategy can help scale your business and achieve your business goals.
FAQ
What are the benefits of account-based marketing?
Some noteworthy account-based marketing benefits are: higher ROI, sales and marketing alignment, customer retention, and a shorter sales cycle.
Which metrics measure ABM performance?
Metrics like engagement, ROI, customer churn rate, content engagement, conversion rate, and average deal size are used to measure the performance of an ABM program.
Why is ABM more efficient compared to other marketing strategies?
ABM targets accounts with buyer intent, helps with better resource allocation and is cost effective. These factors contribute to a higher ROI and bring great results.
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Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 2022
As Account-Based Marketing (ABM) continues to grow and develop into a powerful marketing strategy, the conventional question remains: How to prove and measure my results?
Diving into your account-based marketing metrics to understand your results is all about asking the right questions. The metrics focus on quality over quantity. This means that looking at engagement levels above traffic volume and opportunities over leads have a close association with sales. Thus, it summarizes activity metrics and outcome metrics together.
If you implement a new sales methodology without adopting new sales metrics, you’ll have a much harder time tracking the progress of your marketing efforts. That’s why the companies, shifting to an account-based framework, should update their KPIs, as these are the leading indicators of success.
So, the account-based marketing metrics highly focus on the activity of an individual lead and look at crucial accounts that would likely drive the most revenue for your organization.
How are Account-Based Marketing Metrics Different?
The rate at which digital marketers have moved towards the ABM model by creating successful ABM campaigns is quite surprising. While many thought, ‘Will this thing stick?’ or ‘Is this just a whim that will go away in the future?’
But it’s 2021, and ABM has become even more popular in the B2B world as marketers see value in targeting accounts and not only leads.
Recent research from SiriusDecisions states that 93% of marketers consider ABM extremely important to their overall organizational success. With any marketing strategy, you are going to be asked whether your campaign is performing well or not. It indeed takes time for the programs to run for any marketer who has built an ABM strategy. So, what should you consider more in creating an ABM strategy?
Think quality, not quantity
A team working on the ABM model understands the priority—influencing customers who matter as crucial accounts. So instead of focusing on new lead creation, ABM focuses on activating and engaging the right leads (even if it’s smaller in number).
Similarly, your ABM team needs to focus on growing revenue from every single account. This means what would your team value more: ten random marketing professionals downloading a whitepaper or having a meaningful conversation with a decision-maker?
It’s About Engagement
SiriusDecisions states that there has been a 24% increase in the average B2B sales cycle length since 2019. It means that the larger the deal size, the longer the cycle. With such a lengthy process, you need to measure what’s happening during the progressing phase.
So, how do you do that?
It is engagement on which you need to focus on. Track how deeply the right account gets engaged with your brand. This way, you’ll have a measurable way of showing development in your business.
Engagement in ABM results in immense benefits for most businesses. Here is a list of the latest ABM statistics that shows companies that utilized the strategy saw incredible results, such:
200% rise in ROI
50% of sales teams were more productive and able to optimize qualified leads
30% boost in revenue
66% augmented the number of leads generated
83% saw amplified engagement from targeted leads
Shorter sales cycles grew by 27% and more
However, such benefits of implementing an ABM strategy are only the results of a successful ABM approach, as it’s not an easy task for every organization. The only way to ensure that your business’s ABM efforts are successful is by meticulously monitoring the most important metrics.
The 4 Crucial Metrics to Track
Reading further, you will come across the six crucial types of account-based marketing metrics.
Engagement
How are your prospects get interested and engaged?
The more attention they pay to your company, the more committed they tend to be. Measure the time they spend with your brand or on your website. Monitor when they respond to your marketing programs socially or when they use your product and connect with your sales team.
As one of the account-based marketing metrics, the amount of engagement will be the closest and essential. Therefore, your focus should be to measure how contacts are involved with your content, including the type of content. The following areas will help you understand it deeply:
Email metrics: Track the activities of your audience with your email marketing campaigns. You will want to know the open and click-through rates and look at the number of responses received from each email. Also, how email recipients are sharing your messages with others.
Social metrics: You can check with contacts from your targeted accounts if they have liked, shared, or commented on your posts. Are they following your business page and social accounts?
Consumption rates: Similarly, you can look at how contacts from your targeted accounts consume your online content, specifically information provided on your website and blogs. This shows several page views, average page time, and specific content being viewed and downloaded.
Offline Activity metrics: Beyond your digital information, track your targeted accounts engaging with you offline. Are they attending events you sponsor, readily contacting, and responding to direct mail?
Therefore, these account-based marketing metrics' primary goal is to know where your contacts are in their buying journey. In fact, through these metrics, you can uncover what information (content) your website lacks to support communications in their research.
Awareness
Do your prospects are aware of your company’s name and offerings? Web traffic is an ethical reflection of keeping prospects aware, specifically, traffic coming from within your target accounts. You should also track whether your contacts are opening your emails, attending your events, and contacting through calls, or using any other medium you provided.
Target-Account Reach
Are you able to reach specific target accounts in the right way? Where do you lack in your efforts?
These account-based metrics help you to track success by channel. In case of point, in a webinar campaign, you would measure its success by analyzing event attendance. So, track the percent of target accounts that have successfully enrolled in each program as well. And, finally, track your focus. What is the percentage of all program successes coming from key accounts? This will help you understand how many target accounts reach you through your ABM campaigns, ABM strategies, and other marketing functionalities.
Influence
Your marketing strategy’s influence on a targeted account will be measured mainly by your interactions with each account. However, some of the account-based marketing metrics mentioned above will help check your ABM strategy's influence metrics. But the big question is whether your efforts are working or not. To understand this, you need to evaluate some parameters such as:
The conversion rate for contacts in your targeted accounts
Converting of your targeted accounts in the marketing funnel
Frequency and volume of meetings or calls with each account
With whom you have the discussions— account influencers or final decision-makers
Finally, the results of your meetings
These parameters will divulge what efforts are working and where you need to change your approach or the information you provide to make your business successful.
Types of Account-Based Sales Metrics
Marketing and sales often measure success differently. Account-based metrics can help bring these closer by aligning their focus on a specific list of target accounts.
With an Account-Based Sales Development (ABSD) strategy, there are two types of metrics. These would help you understand whether your sales team is performing well in an account-based sales plan or not.
Activity-based sales metrics
You need to check and understand whether your sales team is doing various marketing activities in the right way or not. This will be specific for each account to be targeted and includes activities like task completion, emails, contacts per day, account coverage, meaningful conversations, and appointments.
Outcome-based sales metrics
It is generally considered under post-sale account-based marketing metrics. Now the time is to track the result of the activities mentioned above. Also, include the rate of accounts accepted from the pipeline created and revenue generated.
In short, the goal is to measure the monetary value of each transaction and to track your performance and successes over time in business. This information is also helpful in identifying new accounts to target.
To know how read through in the next!
Value
Measuring value is more important than your total sales volume, as it is a part of ABM metrics. The goal is to understand the worth of each account to your bottom line—how they compare to other accounts and see the performance of each sales representative. In this context, your account-based marketing metrics should uncover the following:
What is your average selling point value?
What is the average account sales volume?
What is the swelling value of each account?
What is the total sales volume?
How much revenue generated?
What is the value of each deal?
Having a clear answer to these aspects reveals the most tangible insights into your results. By looking at specific accounts, you can measure where you are growing, where opportunities exist and show underperforming accounts. Thus, it will make your work accordingly.
Retention
As account-based marketing metrics measure quality over quantity, retention is one part where this comes into play. In addition, it measures the possibility of a targeted account and their satisfaction level.
Measuring retention is a decent indication of the strength of your account relationships. Accounts that stay for a long term are generally satisfied. Thus, they provide the most value to your business.
On the flip side, dissatisfied accounts won’t stay with you very long. But they are virtuous indicators of areas you need to change and improve — either with the process, products, or account types.
ROI
The most crucial account-based marketing metrics is your return on investment (ROI). Eventually, you measure your ABM campaigns and marketing strategies—if they are effective. So, ROI is the percentage of your investment to earnings.
What makes these account-based marketing metrics so challenging in reality? Several factors influence each transaction or sale. Take a step back and consider these questions:
Has your closure rate improved over the past month, quarter, or year?
On average, how long does it take to close a sale?
What was your ROI for each campaign you launched?
The purpose behind considering these aspects is to know what marketing campaigns were successful and better understand inclusive marketing and sales effectiveness.
Putting all ABM Metric to Work Together
A successful ABM strategy requires various activities, technologies, and outlooks for B2B marketing or demand generation. Here, the use of ABM metrics becomes important for measuring pre-sale success and revenue potential. For this, B2B marketing organizations should monitor post-sale metrics to track client satisfaction.
Therefore, by monitoring the entire ABM funnel, you can incessantly optimize marketing activities and improve customer relationships for your business.
Conclusively, account-based strategies present an incredible opportunity for organizations to make marketing and sales more relevant, focused, and effective. However, to apprehend the benefits, it’s important to measure what matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is account-based marketing success measured?
To measure account-based marketing success, here are some important ways:
Understand targeted accounts and needs
Regularly check content analytics statistics
Account engagement
Rate of interactions
Amount of in-depth conversations
Conversion metrics
Sales cycle lengths
What are excellent ABM metrics?
Awareness, engagement, conversion, and outcome are some of the excellent ABM metrics. Putting them together, a business can arrive at a complete set of elementary account-based marketing metrics and attracts more customers.
How are ABM campaigns measured?
The value of your ABM campaigns is scaled by the lifetime value of each targeted accounts. When measuring these, elements such as customer retention, awareness, reach, pipeline velocity, and influence are responsible for making an ABM program successful.
What are key metrics in marketing?
The various key metrics in marketing are:
Viewership metrics
Lead-based metrics
Engagement metrics
Pre-sales metrics
Post-sales metrics
Conversion metrics
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
Getting the attention of the target audience at the right time is the aim of every B2B marketing strategy. Most consumers research products and services before making a purchasing decision. B2B companies are no different. This means potential accounts are always on the lookout for a solution to a problem they are facing in their business. These are prospects that will convert into approachable leads and eventually customers if you offer them just what they are looking for, just when they are looking for it.
To find these lucrative prospects, marketers like you need to harness B2B buyer intent data. B2B intent data gives you deep insights into your marketing ICP’s behaviour, pain points, and requirements. With this important data, you can give your sales team promising leads they can follow up on.
In an interview with Media 7, Marc Laplante, CEO and Co-founder of Intentsify emphasized the importance of intent data.
“In B2B marketing and sales, intent data is typically understood as a tool to identify or prioritize which accounts we should target for advertising, lead generation, and sales follow-up. These are undoubtedly powerful use cases. But they represent only part of the intent data’s value. You should also use intent data to convert those accounts down the funnel into customers and revenue. Intent data, if granular enough, will highlight your target accounts’ problems, interests, research into competitors, geographic location, and buying stage.”
Let us take a look at what buyer intent data can do to bring you the sales numbers you want and how it can enhance your B2B account-based marketing strategy.
Buyer Intent Data Brings You Ready-to-buy Customers
Every user has a unique online behaviour, which can be distinguished using behavioral signals that uncovers the topic, product, or service the person needs. This information gives insight into the perceived intent of your marketing ICP. As a marketer, this information will help you plan effective advertising campaigns. The sales team can use this data to design the right pitch tracks, demos, and collateral to convert members from your targeted buying group. Additionally, this data can also help your customer success teams identify existing accounts that showcase a churn risk or an upsell opportunity. It’s a win-win for three teams at once.
B2B intent data uses website data, off-site activity, CRMs, social media data, and content consumption data from online content like infographics, blogs, product comparisons and reviews, discussion boards, case studies, and news to pinpoint buyer insights.
Intent Data Improves the B2B Buyer Journey
The B2B buyer journey is a combination of accounts navigating through early stage (awareness content to identify the problem), middle stage (exploring solutions), late stage (comparing vendors that offer solutions) and finally the last stage (purchase/upsell/churn). Between exploring solutions and comparing vendors, lie hidden opportunities that haven’t reached you. Intent data can bridge this gap for you.
Intent data providers give you data that is tailored to keywords that are relevant to your business and use case. This data targets buying locations at the website level and aggregates signals across a corporate family. Deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) are used to screen the content to achieve relevancy and to map billions of unique online engagement events every week. Analytics pinpoint the accounts that are showing any kind of buying activity and correspond to your targeted keywords. All this actionable data can shorten your buyer’s journey towards conversion.
Identifying early-stage prospects
At this stage, intent data signals surge around the keywords or topics that relate to the general challenges and pain points of your prospects because they are looking at the cause of their problem. They will try to find a elementary solution and get to know more about the products and services different brands are offering.
Identifying middle-stage prospects
The intent data signals at this stage will show a higher level of activity around topics or keywords related to a precise product or service category because the prospects have already identified the root of their problem and the options they have to address it.
Identifying prospects ready to purchase
At this stage, the signals are mostly focused on topics related to your brand, your specific product names and features, and your competitors’ product names. These prospects are ready to spend and should be approached at the earliest to achieve conversion.
Sources of Buyer Intent Data
Intent data providers offer two types of intent data:
1. Internal Intent Data (First-party Data)
This data is collected in-house through a marketing automation platform or through application logs if you have a web-based app. You can control what you collect and how you collect it and act on the data instantly. You can customize the purchase intent to your liking.
2. External Intent Data
External intent data is third-party intent data and is collected outside of your business. It is sourced via IP lookups, cookies or specific websites. However, third-party cookies will be phased out soon. So, B2B marketers need to rely on first-party cookies, data points, contextual advertising, and tracking technologies to get information on their prospects. Read more about cookie-less ABM here.
B2B Buyer Intent Behavioral Indicators
Actions that prospects carry out on your website or the internet are compared with the behavioral data of prospects that become SQLs (sales qualified leads). Here are some behavioral indicators that show purchase intent:
High intensity engagement with your brand’s social media posts
Exploring your product or pricing pages
Exploring product or service customer review page
Reading articles about your product’s features on your blog
The frequency of prospects’ website visits and the actions they take
Content consumption, like downloading e-books, templates, or any other resources
What Does Buyer Intent Data Do for You?
While implementing account-based marketing techniques, you should prioritize intent data above everything else. Capitalize on the potential of intent data by incorporating it into your sales and marketing workflows. Adjust your interactions to match your prospects’ demands and establish meaningful connections with them.
Primarily, intent data helps prioritize a list of target accounts that need to be pursued. Once the sales and marketing teams are aware of a user's location in the sales cycle, they may focus on moving them along in the purchasing process with customized content. Let us look into what intent data can do for your business in detail:
Efficient Prospecting
According to a survey by HubSpot, 75% of businesses ranked being able to close more deals as their top sales priority. With intent data, a prospect that is in the market to buy is easier to find because of predictive analytics. You already have your ICP in marketing in place and when prospects match this list and are in the market to buy, buying intent data efficiently puts your brand in front of these leads. Apart from this, buyer intent also helps segment your target list based on the intensity of the purchase intent. Targeting accounts with high intent through email marketing, content marketing, advertising and direct mail becomes easier.
Enhances Outbound Sales
The higher the quality of leads, the easier it becomes for your sales team to convert them. Buyer intent data lets your sales team know the exact position of a lead in the buying cycle. Instead of wasting time emailing unqualified leads, your team can approach these prospects which match your ICP in marketing and start a meaningful conversation. Intent data also increases the ROI of your B2B content syndication efforts.
Superior Lead Scoring
Your marketing team can predict prospects’ purchase intent based on what they are researching. They can do lead scoring with precision and supplement your sales team’s efforts. They don’t have to rely on traditional lead scoring methods where they add points to a lead’s score when certain actions are performed. Intent data uncovers possible paths that your leads can take even when they are not on your website.
Personalized and Targeted ABM campaigns
Personalization is key for any B2B account-based marketing campaign to bring the results you expect. The most effective method to enhance your ABM strategy is to map out your buyer journey and sprinkle it with relevant content to influence leads. You can also use intent data to strategically personalize and rank your ABM demand generation campaigns, so that every touch point of your ABM campaign meets your prospects' expectations.
Relevant Content
Creating content that can catch the attention of your prospects while offering solutions and value is crucial to get the conversions you expect. Intent data will help you see the correlation between topics and the context of those topics with the solutions your prospects are looking for. If you are aware of the questions that your prospects have before they go to market, you can answer them through your content. Buying intent data offers you just that. Let intent data drive your content strategy to give your prospects just what they want.
Intent Marketing
Intent-based marketing is when you know just where to spend your time and budget. In intent marketing, the focus lies on analyzing the intent of your prospects and strategizing how to meet them. Spending less time trying to target and rank keywords with low or irrelevant intent can help you increase your ROI, make an ironclad content strategy and a streamlined lead generation process that results in conversion and revenue.
Assessing Buyer Intent
Understanding and calculating buyer intent is not an easy task. It depends on these three factors:
Recency
Buyer intent that reports how recently a prospect engaged with your content is valuable so that your sales team can approach leads who have visited your website.
Frequency
Frequency indicates the intensity of your prospects’ intent to buy a product or service to solve their problems. If they visit key pages that have information on pricing, case studies, customer stories, etc., your sales team can reach out to them immediately.
Engagement
When your sales and marketing teams score leads, one of the most important parameters on their scale is engagement. If a prospect is engaging with the content on your website, through a chatbot, or as a result of an email campaign, you know it’s a great time to reach out to them.
Apart from these factors, buyer intent data tools also use variables like firmographics, technographics, account size, and job titles for accurate buyer intent mapping so that you can reach out to your marketing ICP with a personalized message in your intent-based marketing strategy.
Metadata Sees 42% Dip in CPL with G2 Buyer Intent
Metadata, a demand generation platform that runs paid campaign experiments and self-optimizes them to generate revenue, invested in G2 buyer intent. Their cost per lead (CPL) dipped 42%, their click-to-open rate for ads increased 114%, and their average deal size for ads spiked by 18%.
Final Thoughts
Buyer intent data changes the way you interact with your prospects and leads. Harness buyer intent data tools to have an edge over your competitors and get more conversions.
FAQ
What are the essential elements of an intent data strategy?
Align your intent data strategy with your ABM strategy, get buy-in from the C-suite, begin with a small pilot, analyze performance metrics, and integrate your systems with intent data.
How are B2B marketers leveraging B2B buyer intent data to boost revenue?
B2B marketers use intent data to create effective content, identify buyer groups, improve lead qualification, boost team productivity, and increase customer retention to boost revenue.
How does intent data enhance your lead scoring process?
Predictive purchasing insights help you find prospects in the market so you can make a list of accounts that are close to making a purchase decision. This makes your lead scoring process easier and better.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | February 23, 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.
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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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