Intent Data Shows The 'Content Marketing' Rules in an Always-On World: Bombora Company Surge(R) Spots Trend

This week's intent data serves as a timely reminder: content reigns high! As calculated by Bombora Company Surge, “demand generation” and “content marketing” remain high areas of focus for brands, maintaining their upward trend since January (R). B2B International's recent report backs this up, showing that demand generation is the top marketing priority for B2B companies.

Intent data for retargeting – in this case, "social retargeting" – regularly ranks among brands' top ten ways to turn up in our customers' lives anywhere they are in the buying process. With more options than ever before and an “always-on” environment, it can be difficult for brands to determine which customers are ready to buy.

Intent data for "direct response" (DR) has seen a substantial increase for the first time this year. It is described as a "type of marketing that elicits a particular, measured response as a result of a consumer's direct response to a marketer" in this case. With a rising focus on ROI and outcomes, it's becoming increasingly important for marketing to implement response-driven strategies. Direct response, when done correctly, neatly blends the value proposition with a call to action, allowing a prospect to move from consideration to decision more quickly. This saves marketers time, effort, and resources by reducing the amount of time, effort, and resources spent on low-quality leads.

Interestingly, there is a misalignment between brands and agencies when it comes to “social analytics,” which is the collecting and analysis of statistical data about how users interact with a company, particularly online. Based on data from May 9th, this topic seems to be of little or no concern to agencies in comparison to their brand counterparts. We've also heard how many businesses claim to have a lot of data to help them with their marketing campaigns, but don't have the resources to properly analyze it. Herein lies a golden opportunity for brands to collaborate with their agency partners to master constantly evolving approaches to the acquisition, management, and mining of valuable data that informs customer experiences – in real-time and with privacy in consideration.