Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
B2B marketers use account-based marketing (ABM) to generate business because it allows them to drive focused account-level interactions. These interactions are a result of relevant and customized messaging. Today, the messaging focuses on not just one decision-maker but a group within the target account that green lights a buying decision. This natural evolution in ABM implementation is called buying group marketing (BGM). It isn’t a new concept but keeps evolving. B2B marketers are religiously implementing BGM in their ABM strategy to get a competitive edge and to keep up with the changing trends in the ABM industry.
Carefully created buyer personas are used to create hyper-personalized campaigns for buying group members. In this sense, BGM is a person-centric marketing approach, differentiating it from an account-based marketing approach.
While talking about buying group marketing, Dmitri Lisitski, CEO and Co-Founder, Influ2, a B2B targeted advertising solutions provider, said,
"Buying Group Marketing will empower B2B marketers to achieve greater precision by extending this approach more holistically across their programs."
How Does BGM Drive Revenue?
Revenue factors into every effort that aims to increase sales numbers, retain customers, and engage prospective customers. Let us look into how BGM drives revenue in the B2B domain.
Closing the Gap Between Sales and Marketing
Organizations struggle to bring sales and marketing teams together. They max out their budgets to make it happen, but more often than not, they do not get the expected results. Additionally, their marketing automation platform doesn’t make the connection between the multiple leads coming from the same account. This lack of insight can affect the performance of the entire demand management process, such as sales, revenue development, and customer organization.
Buying behaviors are constantly shifting. It is crucial to use a fresh approach that enables the teams to connect directly with the target accounts’ decision-makers, offering them just what they need through effective campaigns and driving revenue is crucial.
In the buying group framework, marketing and sales align their goals and operations, share important insights on buyer personas, orchestrate messaging for campaigns, and collate data from platforms such as CRM and sales engagement tools to successfully find common ground for approaching a buying group. They are no longer stuck on one side of the MQL wall but are involved in every stage of the conversion process. As a result, they guide specific buying group members to make a buying decision and generate revenue.
Putting Buyer Experience on Top
In a Forrester survey, 94% of respondents said they sold to buying groups that had three or more individuals, while 38% said that they sold to groups of 10 or more.
Purchase decisions in large enterprises are never restricted to one individual. The bigger the purchase decision, the bigger the buying committee. The bigger the buying committee, the larger the pool of buyer personas that need targeting.
For example, if the HR department of a growing organization realizes that it needs a new human capital resource management system (HCRM) to manage its HR-related processes, then a buying group is created to choose a new system. When this group goes to the market to find a solution, it becomes a potential lead for HCRM providers, and the lead is called a demand unit. Targeting this demand unit with not just the HCRM but also a travel and expense solution (T & E) is possible with BGM.
In BGM:
Every step in the buyer’s journey is based on buyer personas and presents value to the buying group.
Every demand management process focuses on the buying group.
Through this approach, multiple types of selling opportunities can be explored. All this effort appeals to different buying group members in different ways and will push them to get in touch with the sales team and make a purchase decision.
Offering Solutions to Pain Points
Information designed precisely to complete the purchase should be provided to every member of the buying group committee. Interestingly, before making a purchase decision, members of the buying group will explore the content of different solution providers. According to a recent study by Dimensional Research, 90% of buyers thought that positive online reviews of a product or service influenced their buying decision. This is just one type of information that the buying group members will consume before they make a buying decision.
With the help of real-time intent targeting or cognitive product targeting, it is easier to understand the customer’s intent through channels like websites, apps, and email. The terms searched, specific or broad, can point to the needs and requirements of a member of the committee. Once the intent is clear, buyer personas can be segmented and targeted with prescriptive content that talks about solutions to their pain points and how the expected results are achieved. For example, if a C-level buying committee member displays a high level of intent activity, then it is highly likely that he or she is looking to make a strategic investment. Such an opportunity will be ready for sales conversion in a couple of months.
How Should You Implement BGM on Sales Funnel?
We have already established the importance of buying group engagement in driving leads through the sales funnel. When sales and marketing teams share insights, marketing becomes effective and tangible. Now, let us take a look at BGM implementation in the sales funnel:
Top of the Funnel
While targeting a buying group at the top of the funnel, the focus should be on creating awareness and understanding the demand of the target account. Social media ads and relevant landing pages that act as lead magnets can help achieve this goal.
Middle of the Funnel
For buying groups in the middle of the funnel, engaging and educating the groups is imperative. Posting relevant content on social media handles can foster interaction with the members. LinkedIn messages from sales development representatives with ad and landing page support are effective.
Bottom of the Funnel
Conversations that lead to conversion start when the buying group is at the bottom of the funnel. In this stage, the account executives present members with compelling content that addresses their pain points and influences them enough to make a purchase decision.
While executing BGM, B2B marketers should begin by understanding the business needs of the target account and create a comprehensive marketing strategy to address these needs. Orchestrating a holistic experience for the buying committee through high-quality, relevant content is the next step. Achieving a strategic, operational and practical alignment with sales will ensure success and higher conversions.
Amplitude Drives 5.6x ROI on Ad Spend with Influ2’s Help
With Influ2’s person-based advertising, Amplitude, a digital optimization system provider, focused 100% on advertising to key decision-makers within its target accounts. Influ2 used engagement insights to create and execute personalized and attributable B2B marketing. The result was a 5.6x ROI on ad spend.
Last Word
ABM marketing has evolved with the help of buying group marketing. Implementing BGM with an account-based marketing strategy can create lasting relationships with target accounts, retain existing clients and bring new leads.
FAQ
What are the three important tenets of buying group marketing?
The three important tenets of buying group marketing are understanding the needs of the target account, attaining sales and marketing alignment, and creating a holistic marketing strategy that addresses the pain points of the target account.
How is buyer experience different than customer experience?
Customer experience focuses on the existing customers in the pipeline, while buyer experience focuses on the prospective customers’ complete buyer journey.
How can you engage top-of-the-funnel audiences in buying group marketing?
You can engage top-of-the-funnel audiences through social media ads and relevant landing pages that display content relevant to the needs of the target account.
Read More
Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 6, 2023
ABM influences key accounts that show buyer intent. This influence is internal (B2B through personalized content) and aims to sway decision-makers who green-light a purchase.
In an interview with Media 7, Mark Emond, Founder & President of Demand Spring, talked about the importance of content in marketing.
“Content is at the heart of great marketing today. It needs to educate, inspire, and convert. It must be tied to the unique rational and emotional needs of each target persona.”
ABM’s focused approach leads to faster lead conversions and a higher ROI. However, B2B marketers still face the following challenges in their marketing strategy:
Maximizing Marketing Efficiency
B2B marketers must consistently drive higher ROI on their efforts while working within a limited budget.
Improving Customer Experience
Cutting through the noise of thousands of competitors and delivering an enhanced customer experience is challenging.
Generating Trust in Customers
Marketers need to humanize their approach and reach a level of undeniable authenticity to generate trust in the minds of customers.
Why Should You Use Influencer Marketing in ABM?
According to a CSO Insights report from Marketing Charts, brands fail to incite enough trust in their target audience. Interestingly, it is what the subject matter experts and third-party influencers from the industry say that counts. So, external influence is driving purchase decisions. Internal influence, though crucial, cannot sideline external influence and how it impacts sales and key decisions.
When you integrate ABM with influencer marketing, you co-create relatable, impactful content with relevant influencers to encourage your target accounts to move ahead in the sales funnel. An influencer becomes a credible touch point, powerful enough to convert a lead. The influencer’s performance-oriented content resonates with the target audience, engages, educates, and informs them of the strong points of your business, creating a strong foundation for lead conversion.
Here is how it can help strengthen ABM strategy:
Increases Content Authenticity
The words of a trusted subject matter expert or third-party niche content creator hold more weight than static website content or brand ads. Their followers trust them and consider their views authentic. If such relevant influencers create content with you, your target audience is bound to be positively influenced. This leads to higher conversions and ROI, qualitative reach, and better engagement.
Attracts New Audiences
Influencers attract new audiences that are similar to your ideal customer profile (ICP). Interactions, content promotions, and publicity can create brand awareness generate more interest in your brand.
Encourages Brand Advocacy
Positive reviews, customer success stories (voice of customer), testimonials, and word-of-mouth publicity that comes from influencers and their followers promote brand advocacy. Influencers also create incentives for referrals, thus bringing in better engagement.
Humanizes the Buyer Experiences
B2B storytelling is the key to conversions. It has more impact than any other form of advertising. Influencers humanize the buyer experience by sharing their opinions, reviews from other businesses, and highlighting success stories through their content. This content is impressive as compared to any other content the brand hosts and promotes.
B2B Influencer Content is Priceless
B2B influencer content has high value because it has third-party credibility that attracts trust across all brand channels. Another advantage is that you can easily access the creativity of the influencer without having to hire someone. All the content that influencers publish on their platforms is brand content, highlighted with the voice of the customer. Influencer marketing generates traction and engagement for businesses.
Integrated Influence
Influence can be integrated through social media marketing, content marketing, PR, SEO, branding, and ABM.
How to Create a Powerful, Influencer-based ABM Marketing Strategy?
Brainstorm a Strategy
To make the most of influencer-based ABM marketing, you need to streamline a process and strategy. Find the answers to these two crucial questions:
1. Who influences your target audience?
2. Which topics interest your target audience?
Once you find the answers to these questions, you can zero in on a relevant influencer and approach them to participate in creating/co-creating high-quality marketing content (text, podcast, video, interactive). Integrate the content and publish it on brand channels, and influencer channels. Promote the content via blogs, ads, other influencers, and brand sites to target your key accounts. Monitor the promotions (URLs, engagement) and adjust the campaign for maximum output. Most importantly, create and nurture relationships with industry influencers for future campaigns.
Understand the Demand
Understanding the demand of the target audience through keyword research and data analysis can boost the results of an influencer marketing campaign. Offering audiences solutions to their problems or information that will help them scale their business assist in lead nurturing and conversions.
Identify Ideal Influencers
Choosing a suitable influencer can help kick start your influencer campaign powerfully. An ideal influencer should be proficient in their domain, passionate about content creation, capable of publishing content across platforms, popular in the industry with keen followers, and knowledgeable and eager to promote content across different channels in different formats.
You can employ software to identify and qualify relevant influencers who create credible, high-quality content on the topic you want to promote. Filter influencers based on how much they charge and how well they align with your company values and brand voice. Focus on creating a long term association.
Shuffle the Content Formats
By shuffling between marketing content formats like blog articles, live video, third party analyst reports, videos, case studies, webinars, podcasts, industry presentations, infographics, and interactive content, the target audience can be engaged on multiple channels, and data can be collected to analyze which formats work best.
Remain Connected with Influencers
As a B2B marketer, you should connect one-on-one through email, phone, or in-person meetings with influencers frequently. You should monitor and engage with influencers on social media when they mention your brand.
By interacting with and sharing relevant influencer content on social channels, you can build a community and promote advocacy through continued partnership and engagement. Additionally, you can recycle content made by influencers to show you value the association.
Sixty-three percent of marketers believe they would have better marketing results with an influencer marketing program, while seventy-four percent of marketers agree that it improves customer and prospect experience with the brand.
How Cherwell Software Witnessed a 437% Year-over-year Increase in Content Shares?
Colorado-based Cherwell Software is an IT Service Management (ITSM) company. It engaged TopRankMarketing to create an influencer marketing campaign with the aim of increasing brand awareness, targeting CIOs, CTOs, and IT Directors of companies for business, and increasing sales and revenue.
With the help of the content 15 ITSM thought leaders created and amplified across five channels, Cherwell Software saw a 170% growth in their audience views and a 437% year-over-year increase in their content shares.
Key Takeaways
In B2B marketing and ABM, influencer marketing can help reach customers you would have otherwise missed. Engaging in an influencer marketing platform to maximize ABM strategy outputs is crucial to remaining ahead in the race.
FAQ
What characteristics should a good B2B influencer have?
A good B2B influencer should be proficient, passionate, popular, a dedicated content promoter and creator.
How does influencer marketing help B2B marketers?
Influencer marketing can help B2B marketers target key accounts by leveraging content created by industry experts.
Read More
Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 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.
Read More
ABM Accounts
Article | February 2, 2021
The Pareto Principle is introduced by an Italian economist - Vilfredo Pareto. According to this principle, for several results, 80% of the outcomes arise from 20% of the cause. Other variations of the Pareto principle states: 80% of the sales come from 20% of customers or 80% of marketing engagement comes from 20% of accounts.
Many researchers believe that ABM is a descendent of the 80/20 rule. By following this rule, businesses can spend the bulk on creating personalized marketing campaigns for the 20% of customers who spent the most on the product or services of their company.
How the Pareto Rule Brings Sales Growth?
In ABM, the Pareto principle can be used as a guide to overcoming the business growth obstacle and acquiring extremely productive business solutions. So here are a few strategies that will assist in bringing the resources and attention to the top 20% of customers.
1. Identify Best Customers
Companies might have hundreds or thousands of customers or prospect lists either from email, social media, or by the website. To ensure making a wise choice, it is a must to have a glance at the historical data of every account, then compare it with the ideal customer profile and determine which makes it to the list of the best customers. After finding the top customers for the business, assure to mark them as a top priority.
2. Locating Their Area
An important factor is to check the Point-of-Sale platform and find the area from where the highest number of best customers belongs to. It will lead to determining the most suitable sales or marketing strategies that can boost the growth of the organization.
3. Rank The Need Of Customers
After creating the list of best accounts or customers, try to dig a bit deeper and discover the want, need, or problems each customer has. If in case, the insight is not up to the mark, a company will have to form a team that can gather some information, by:
Tracking customer’s social media
Having a conversation with the customer
Purchasing Insights from vendors.
After finalizing the need list make sure to mark each with their importance and address them accordingly.
4. Offer Personalization Across Different Platform
Marketing according to the way that connects with each customer deeply without engulfing the resource and budget can be achieved by making the process as automated as possible through hiring developers. Some of how businesses can personalize their channels are:
Using images that shows the customer’s interested area
Addressing each customer by their name
Sharing related case studies with the customers
Including a personalized note
Remember to keep a track of the progress you made through these steps and modify your list and strategies based on them.
Take Away!
If used properly, the Pareto rule in account-based marketing helps a business in keeping the focus on what matters the most. It stops enterprises from multi-tasking all the time. With the help of the 80/20 rule, businesses can properly allocate time and resources to the areas that produce the best results. That being said, relocating the budget while cultivating time for referrals from the customers who generate long-term advantages is the core to sustainable growth.
Read More