Buyer Intent Data
Article | October 7, 2022
Introduction
The application of AI marketing technology is picking up pace because of its many advantages. According to a 2020 Deloitte survey, 74% of AI adopters agree that AI will be a part of all their enterprise applications by 2023.
What does an AI-based marketing strategy look like, and how do you make the most of it? This article gets into the nitty-gritty of AI marketing technology and how to implement it in ABM so you can maximize your business performance and outputs.
AI’s Role in Marketing
Thanks to its accuracy, B2C businesses use AI marketing technology to target their customers with product or service recommendations. The following are some use cases of AI-based B2C marketing:
Personalization
AI helps businesses with their 1-to-1 marketing strategies by personalizing their content to cater to every segment.
Event Communication
Emails informing customers of upcoming sales, special access, or exciting offers are sent out via AI technology. Weekend offer emailers, special discount codes, and new product updates are a result of event communication automation so that customers can be informed before time about upcoming events.
Real-time Content
Trending topics, investments, event promotions, webinars, customer feedback, product availability, bestselling combo, weather reports, and new blog post updates are provided in real-time to maintain an active connection with customers.
Businesses do this by using the ‘open time content’ AI technology. Manually executing 1-to-1 marketing strategies is nearly impossible, impractical, and does not see much success. AI helps streamline these strategies and executes them effortlessly.
What Goes into Creating an Effective ABM Strategy?
For an ABM strategy to work, businesses need to follow these steps:
Preparing for the ABM Strategy
Organizational readiness is crucial for implementing ABM. Make sure you have a budget and an achievable timeline to execute the strategy, team members who can anchor it, and an understanding of ABM metrics so you can make the most of it.
Synergy Between Marketing and Sales Teams
Your sales and marketing teams should be in sync and not at loggerheads due to account-level communication issues. Discussing the benefits of ABM with both the teams beforehand and coming to a strategic agreement to implement ABM can help them align their goals while executing the ABM strategy.
Identifying Target Segments
Your ABM strategy can do wonders for your business only if you have a precise segmentation of data. Use dimensions like business size, annual revenue, current spending, projected spending, targeted products, geography, open opportunities, closed opportunities, etc., to identify your target segments.
Zeroing-in on a Priority
Having a clear priority helps you streamline your ABM strategy. It should either be acquisition (acquiring new accounts), retention (retaining existing accounts), or expansion (expanding the scope of accounts). Without a clear priority, any ABM strategy may not yield expected results because the efforts won’t be concentrated towards a single goal.
Leveraging AI in ABM Strategy
In an interview with Media 7, Daniel Englebretson, founder of Khronos, spoke about AI’s impact on the future of ABM.
“From my perspective, B2B marketers have faced countless challenges that have formed the basis of new technology – problem brings a solution. I expect AI will solve identity resolution, resolve data challenges, and enhance targeting. I expect AI will address 1:1 content at scale, unlocking the rapid deployment of 1:1 brand experiences.”
Introducing AI into your ABM strategy can help you in the following way:
Content Personalization
Once you know your customer’s pain points and interests, you can focus on providing them personalized solutions, products, or services they desire. Of course, personalizing content is complex, but AI makes it easier by offering the technological capacity to deliver what your customer wants.
Efficient Resource Management
Without customer profiling, an ABM strategy cannot achieve the expected output. AI can assist with data crawling the internet to find out important customer information. Also, it segments data acquired from CRM, which gives you more information about a customer than any other generic data. This data is helpful for lead qualification and creating heavily personalized content for a customer.
Since AI does all the heavy lifting, you can allocate your resources to building and nurturing a relationship with the customer.
Automation
AI-based marketing in ABM generates automated insights for lead generation. It also highlights campaign performance related to specific, high-value accounts and suggests steps to engage a prospect.
Digital marketing and automation are a dynamic duo where AI brings about intelligent marketing automation. Efficient email campaigns are run when executed by automation. Email marketing companies like MailChimp target customers based on insights to achieve more conversions. When AI and big data use CRM data, large chunks of user information can be collected from different platforms. This information can help with formulating a successful ABM strategy.
ABM Optimization and Predictive Insights
To analyze intent, AI processes data in real-time and gives predictive insights to help with ABM optimization. As a result, it is easier to merge data from different sources with AI-enabled tools, achieve predictive analysis, manage recommendations in real-time, and understand competitor strategies through social media. AI can also interpret images correctly.
Enhancing Communications
Use AI for building a strong relationship with your customer. Personalizing communication by using customer data can be easily achieved with AI.
What Is the Future of AI-enabled ABM Strategy?
ABM, with an AI marketing strategy, has a bright future ahead of it. Demandbase recently conducted a survey in which they found that 80% of marketers had plans to integrate AI into their ABM marketing strategy. Another survey conducted by MarketingProfs concluded that businesses that used AI in their ABM strategies had 59% higher closing rates as compared to others. They saw a 58% increase in their revenue and a 52% increase in their conversions.
Ways Salesforce's AI Einstein Aided U.S. Bank in Growing Revenue
The U.S. bank used Salesforce’s sales cloud AI, Einstein, to boost their revenue. Their lead conversion rate increased 2.35 times after implementing Einstein. They were able to create a model to predict lead conversion. They did this by using Einstein to search through customized historical lead data.
“We work to build high-quality, personalized relationships between our customers and their financial advisors or commercial bankers. There is nothing that replaces that person-to-person interaction. What AI allows us to do is augment that relationship. We can provide our teams with better data and smarter insights, which helps them establish stronger relationships.”
– Srini Nallasivan, Chief Analytics Officer, U.S. Bank
Summing It Up
AI-based marketing can enhance your ABM strategy only if qualitative data is available. Therefore, businesses will need to have clear marketing goals and turn data into an asset.
FAQs
What are the challenges in the AI-based ABM strategy?
Managing, protecting, and enriching data obtained from CRM and other customer support systems can be challenging.
How can AI help in strengthening your ABM strategy?
AI helps with personalizing content, automation, ABM optimization, and providing predictive insights for lead conversion.
What does a strong AI-based ABM strategy do for your business?
A strong AI-based ABM strategy helps with account profiling, analytics, reporting and hyper-individualized content, which leads to increased lead conversion.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
If you are a seasoned marketer, you must be aware of how hard it is to find highly qualified leads. Wouldn’t it be convenient to have an intent data strategy that helps you identify companies that are looking for a product or service you offer by tracking their internet activity? If you are an IT service provider, some businesses must be looking to rope in a company like yours to help with their IT needs. If you find these businesses in time, you could clinch a deal with them.
Your sales and marketing teams will be able to work efficiently, your company will get more conversions, and your revenue will grow. This is what buyer intent data tools do.
What is Buyer Intent Data?
In the B2B domain, knowing what your target accounts want and need plays a big part in creating and executing ABM marketing. B2B buyer intent data indicates companies that are actively a part of your buying cycle. It allows marketers to understand what buyers are interested in, what kind of solutions they are looking for, what content appeals to them, and which topics they are stuck on. This data can be acquired from buyer intent data tools that measure buyer intent signals. They are generally a part of account-based marketing software.
Some of the buyer intent signals measured by buyer intent data tools are:
Subscription behavior
Clicks on social media ads
Website visits
Length of time spent on the website
People from the same company visiting your website
What the numbers say:
According to a SiriusDecisions study, a B2B prospect is already 67 percent into the purchasing journey.
73 percent of B2B marketers use buyer intent data in their email marketing.
62 percent of B2B marketers agree that B2B intent data improves their nurturing and personalization workflows.
It is no wonder that buyer intent data tools have created a buzz in the world of B2B marketing. Platforms that provide account-based marketing services have solutions that offer intent data for lead generation and intent-based marketing.
Types of Buyer Intent Data
There are two broad types of buyer intent data: internal buyer intent data and external buyer intent data. These can be used in any intent data strategy.
Internal Buyer Intent Data
This type of data is called first-party data, and it is gathered from your website, automation systems, or from within the account-based marketing software that you use. It is further classified into data you submit manually and data that your CRM perceptively creates. Some examples of this data are: website visits, time on page, lead information submitted, job title, downloads of the bottom of the funnel content like case studies, and viewing bottom-of-the-funnel pages like product comparison pages.
External Buyer Intent Data
B2B processes and sales cycles are often complex. Tracking customers on your website may not be enough. You need to widen your net and go above and beyond your website tracking software. You need to take a look at the off-site behavior of your customers by using buyer intent data tools. This will help you understand what prospective buyers are searching for on the web and not just on your website. Could it be that they are checking some review sites, or your competitor’s website, or possibly finding answers to their queries somewhere else but not on your website?
Understanding this B2B intent data will help you expand your sales funnel accordingly. You cannot control buyer behavior, but you can definitely decide strategically how you will respond to the buyer intent data.
Leveraging Buyer Intent Data in ABM Marketing
An effective account-based marketing strategy is a data-driven marketing strategy that targets key accounts with buyer intent. This laser-focused approach to targeting makes it more successful as compared to other marketing strategies.
Here is how buyer intent data can help you enhance your account-based marketing strategy:
Enhances Demand Generation
Buyer intent data enriches the demand generation process by assisting marketing teams in identifying and planning campaigns for prospective accounts. Email marketing and personalized ads can speed up outreach and conversion.
Optimizes Content Strategies
It improves content marketing strategies through insights into prospect behavior. It becomes easier to tailor a content strategy to target a prospect once you know what your prospect thinks about a solution or product you offer.
Improves Lead Generation
Your prospect’s online behavioral data can drive your lead generation strategy. You can target specific accounts based on their intent. Your cost-per-head (CPL) will go down significantly once you generate more interest in your sales pipeline.
Strengthens ABM Partnerships
ABM implementation also involves channel marketing solutions that are complex. Intent data can make the process manageable and bring clarity to the intentions and objectives of the marketing strategy. You can easily prioritize your ABM partners’ leads for higher revenue. It guarantees the success of your ABM group channel program.
Reduces the Churn Rate
You can reduce the churn rate by monitoring the research activity of your target accounts. You can easily identify the likelihood of churn. To tackle this problem, you can create personalized offerings for prospects who are checking out your competitor’s offerings.
Helps You Tweak Your Solutions
With the help of buyer intent data, you can understand your prospects’ pain points better. Tweak your solutions, design products or services based on the trends you see or the patterns you notice in your target audience’s behavior.
13 Best Buyer Intent Data Tools for B2B Marketers
Here are thirteen game-changing buyer intent tools for B2B marketers that can help you with your intent-based marketing plan:
1. Terminus
Terminus was named a ‘Leader’ in the 2020 New Wave of ABM platforms and has more than 1,000 customers trusting its account-based marketing strategies. Its account-based marketing tools help marketers analyze how their marketing strategies fare in terms of sales. Its deep B2B account database has over 70 million businesses. Its tools can sync easily with CRM and MAP data and deliver immediately marketable segments.
2. Bombora
Bombora provides risk-free intent data that is not only comprehensive, but also privacy-compliant. It can be integrated with multiple platforms across sales, martech, and B2B advertising. Its data comes from fully consented B2B publishers. The Bombora Data Co-op captures the buying signals of nearly 3.3 million unique domains through 20.1 billion interactions a month, across more than 4000 sites.
3. ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo has an impressive and comprehensive business database that can help you run B2B intent-based marketing campaigns. Its solutions bring together your sales and marketing teams. Its buyer intent data tools have features like lead scoring, sales prospecting, territory planning, and targeted outreach.
4. Demandbase
Demandbase’s platform, Demandbase One, is a great go-to-market solution. Its buyer intent data tools use data built around data privacy and security best practices. It has cloud solutions for advertising, account-based experience, sales intelligence, and data. With this single platform, you can orchestrate and automate your buyer journeys easily.
5. Slintel
Slintel, a 6sense company, analyzes buying behavior, patterns, sales intelligence, and digital footprints of your key accounts. It has a database of more than 15 million organizations. It helps marketers understand buyer behavior and pain points using buyer journeys and keyword insights. It evaluates over 100 billion data points to identify 3% of prospects with high buyer intent.
6. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder features a variety of filters, both basic and customizable, that allow users to segment companies based on company demographics, location, behavior, location, and more. In addition, it integrates tools like Zapier, CRMs, and other email marketing tools which help provide insights on accounts. It has a responsive support team and is easy to use.
7. KickFire
KickFire provides first-party intent data by identifying anonymous website visitors through visitors’ IP addresses. This crucial data can be used by sales and marketing teams to create personalized content and increase sales outreach. There are different tool versions like LIVE Leads and KickFire for Google.
8. DemandJump
DemandJump provides insights into the customer journey and helps analyze your competitors. You can get information on what your prospects are doing, like which websites they are visiting and what things they are searching for. You can also find out what your competition ranks for, what kind of content they publish, and what kind of ads they use to attract traffic.
9. TechTarget Priority Engine
Priority Engine gives real-time access to leads that are ranked based on their engagement level and their purchase intent. You can use this information to enhance your ABM strategy, sales outreach, and lead generation. This tool also shows the topics which interest prospects, the kind of technology the prospects use and also provides contact information for leads whenever it is available.
10. Lead Forensics
With the help of Lead Forensics, you can engage with your prospects and customers swiftly. By using the valuable data that this tool provides, you can start useful conversations with the visitors to your website. You can also identify visitors, location, demographic information, and how much time they spend on your website.
11. Pure B2B
Pure B2B is a web-based demand generation tool designed to supplement businesses with their B2B content syndication. It helps in displaying ads, developing outbound leads with the help of predictive analytics and multi-source intent data. If you want to generate high-quality leads, you should consider using this tool.
12. Triblio
Tribilo allows you to combine account-based ads, web personalization, and sales activation through a single platform. You can easily engage with your customers, grow their awareness, and get in touch with your target accounts.
13. HappierLeads
Easily reach out to companies that show buyer intent but are not converting into customers with the help of HappierLeads. This tool accurately tracks website visitors and allows you to identify anonymous website visitors, connect with decision markets, and segment traffic.
By using account-based marketing services that offer the best buyer intent data tools, you can enhance your account-based marketing strategy. These intent data providers will highlight you in front of the buyers when they are in their decision-making process. Not only will it give you an upper hand in account-based marketing, but it will also help you proactively intercept prospects without having to wait for them to land on your website.
How Daniel Englesbretson, Founder of Khronos, leveraged Terminus to run successful ABM campaigns for clients
“What I have found is that, especially leveraging technology like Terminus, the data you get from the start speeds you up substantially, and gives you a lot more perspective that you couldn’t have had or wouldn’t have had before.” – Daniel Englesbretson.
ABM has become a mindset for Daniel. Read his full interview with Media 7 where he talks about the impact of AI on the ABM landscape.
Terminus’ account-based marketing software has shown tremendous results because it has one of the best buyer intent data tools in the market. Companies saw a 30 percent increase in opportunity size for the enterprise segment and a 2X increase in the probability of an account moving to opportunity.
Summing It Up
B2B buyer intent data tools can be a great addition to your arsenal of account-based marketing solutions. They can help you with swifter lead generation, boost your sales and save costs on pursuing qualified leads. Roping in a good-intent data provider will enhance your account-based marketing strategy.
FAQ
What information does buyer intent data reveal when a qualified lead comes to your website?
Buyer intent data reveals qualified leads’ areas of interest, referral sites, and pages visited. This data can be used to personalize outreach and contact prospects.
How can you leverage buyer intent data to achieve higher close rates?
You can use intent data for lead generation. You can appeal to a lead throughout the awareness, consideration, and decision-making phases. Buyer intent data positions you in front of the prospects early on in the buyer’s journey, and that is how you get higher close rates.
What are some examples of internal buyer intent data?
Website visits, lead information submitted, time on page, job title, downloads of bottom-of-the-content, and viewing bottom-of-the-funnel pages are some examples of internal buyer intent data.
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Account Based Data
Article | August 19, 2022
Account-based marketing brings in a higher ROI compared to other marketing activities. It targets key accounts, but not always at the right time. The buyer experience gets compromised if the strategy does not align with the account’s buyer journey.
Demandbase CMO John Miller paints an interesting picture of what ABM is.
“The analogy that I've always used to describe ABM was fishing with spears, which was an effective analogy. But at the same time, it doesn't feel very good to get poked by a spear.”
-Demandbase CMO John Miller
If ABM pokes accounts without respecting them or creating an emotional connection with them, customer success cannot be guaranteed. This is where ABX comes in. It’s a GTM strategy that puts the value of customer experience above the value of key accounts.
ABM ››› ABX: Why Are B2B Marketers Adopting ABX?
B2B marketers clearly understand how effective the ABX strategy is compared to good old ABM.
Here are the reasons why:
Buyer groups are the stars of the show.
AI insights provide accurate information on which accounts exhibit buyer intent and what they are looking for. These accounts are engaged through hyper-personalized campaigns only when they are in the buying phase.
Marketing, sales, and customer success teams ensure every touchpoint consistently delivers value to the customer.
ABX execution involves being agile enough to adapt to the ever-changing behavior and needs of the customer.
Every customer is nurtured to deepen loyalty for a long-term business relationship.
Why Does ABX Matter?
Upgrading your plain old ABM strategy to an ABX strategy simply means applying customer experience best practices to your marketing processes. Consequently, your campaigns are trustworthy, impactful, empathetic, and relevant to every stage of your customer’s journey. Targeted messaging that appeals to every member of the customer’s buying team influences the buying decision of the account. The strategy brings sales, marketing, SDR, and customer-facing teams together so they work towards creating a wholesome customer experience consistently across all the touchpoints.
Conclusion
In a world where there is a continuous influx of information and a scarcity of attention, any kind of interruptive marketing may be ineffective and off-putting. Companies should focus on ABX to build trust with key accounts and create engagement that isn’t forced through perfectly orchestrated interactions across a project or management lifecycle.
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ABM Accounts
Article | June 2, 2021
The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies is inevitable and necessary to achieve the potential of account-based marketing (ABM). However, I consider technology to be more of an enabler of ABM, while the driver always remains the same – enhancing the customer experience by helping clients sustain and grow their business in this dynamic digital era. The goal is not for AI to make marketing decisions but to enable marketers to make better decisions by leveraging the strength of AI in analyzing a large amount of data quickly to share action-oriented insights.
AI can be a friend or foe, depending on what decisions we make while evaluating and implementing AI. Following are key questions organizations should answer before deploying an AI-based marketing strategy.
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