Buyer Intent Data
Article | September 11, 2023
Buyer intent data is sourced from either internal or external parties. When combined, it provides a comprehensive picture of how your targets behave online. Internal marketing teams provide first-party intent data through your company's website, automation platforms like CRM, or other in-house applications. Third-party data is gathered from buyer intent data tools.
According to a Gartner study, more than 70% of B2B marketers will use third-party intent data to target prospects by the end of 2022.
In an interview with Media 7, Laura Goldstone, Director, Communications and Branding Strategy at AdDaptive Intelligence, talked about the importance of correct messaging in sales and marketing once you know your audience.
“I think the newest trends revolve around being a strategic resource, aligning marketing and sales, and using analytics to tailor messages to your audiences’ preferences or funnel stages.”
Buyer intent data tools provided by intent data providers like Bombora, Slintel, and ZoomInfo collect high-quality intent data to help you identify the accounts that show buyer intent, making it easier for you to understand their requirements and deliver solutions through effective content.
Let's find out how intent data can help your ABM strategy by making sales easier.
Buyer Intent Data: 5 Impactful Ways It Can Help You Boost Sales
Let us look at five benefits of buyer intent data that can help you boost sales:
Create Effective Content
In ABM marketing, the marketing team supports the sales team by generating qualified leads through effective content that addresses the prospects’ needs. There are more than a billion websites competing for a prospect’s attention. Focusing more on engaging your intended audience than on your search rankings could translate to more sales. This B2B intent data will allow your marketing team to analyze the volume and quality of responses to various online 'triggers' like keywords and social engagement. This way, the marketing team eliminates the guesswork in analytics and content research. B2B intent data can assist your marketing team in its intent-based marketing endeavors. The team can develop hyper-personalized, relevant, and timely content that can be used in your sales process to engage with new leads.
Identify Buyer Groups
In the B2B domain, multiple decision-makers sign off on purchase decisions. Your key accounts might have buyer groups, and this may pose a problem for your sales strategy. You will need to appeal to multiple personas who will then make unanimous decisions when purchasing your products or services. When combined with accurate, up-to-date contact information, intent data can assist in segmenting the purchasing process into relevant stages. Buying intent is useful not only for tracking and analyzing individual target prospects, but also for tracking and analyzing entire organizations. Overall, sales teams can craft perfect messages for any target persona that crosses their path, thanks to quality intent data.
Improve Lead Qualification
After your sales and marketing teams have developed an ideal lead generation strategy, you'll want to target leads with purchase intent. The majority of leads generated may not completely align with your ICP (ideal customer profile). If your product or service isn't even remotely relevant to what they're looking for, an automation system that is a part of your ABM services can remove them from your lead list. By delving into their product research activities, using intent data in lead management and outreach helps remove some of these roadblocks. It is critical to have a nurturing system in place and implement a lead scoring process. Intent data reveals where these leads fall within your segmentation, how interested they are in your solutions, and how their purchasing process works, so your effort or time is not wasted.
Increase Customer Retention
The same buyer intent technology that is used to find new prospects and customers can also be used for customer retention. According to Brain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can result in a more than 25% increase in profit. Monitoring intent signals can help you identify when a current customer interacts with a competitor or looks for alternatives to your product. It allows you to engage with them earlier and provides you with another opportunity to maintain your customer relationships.
Boost Team Productivity
According to HubSpot research, 40% of salespeople say prospecting is the most difficult part of their job. Buyer intent data eliminates prospecting (such as connecting on LinkedIn, getting past the gatekeeper, and sourcing emails), which results in more sales for your company. The most effective buyer intent software solutions can provide not only company-level intent information but also contact information for key decision-makers (all whilst complying with GDPR rules). This means your sales team can get right to the point and use the most up-to-date business intelligence to engage in more conversations with the right prospects. B2B intent data keeps your sales team on top of their game by allowing them to analyze and comprehend prospects on a more granular level.
Cloudera Generated over 30 Significant Business Deals Using Intent Data
Cloudera, an enterprise management company, harnessed intent data from Bombora and Just Global to run a hyper-targeted account-based marketing strategy across its sales, advertising, and marketing teams. As a result, it generated over thirty significant business deals.
Conclusion
B2B buyer intent data can help you boost sales by accurately identifying target accounts that show buyer intent. Using buyer intent tools that give clean intent data can help your sales team generate revenue and scale your business.
FAQ
How does intent data help with sales?
With the help of intent data, your sales team can target and qualify leads swiftly and accurately as it provides all the crucial background information on the leads. Accurate targeting translates to more conversions and sales.
Where does the intent data come from?
Intent data is usually provided by third-party data providers through buyer intent data tools. These tools collect intent data from data-sharing points like B2B websites, media publishers, and other relevant sources.
How is intent data beneficial for improving an account-based marketing strategy?
With the help of intent data, you can personalize your website, focus on your inbound leads with respect to their engagement with your content, nurture leads with email marketing, and identify prospective customers who haven’t engaged with you yet. These factors can enhance your ABM strategy.
Read More
Account Based Data
Article | August 19, 2022
Account-based marketing strategies prioritize intent data to maximize the effectiveness of their sales and marketing workflows. With the help of intent data, businesses can tailor their interactions with target accounts based on their needs and build valuable relationships with them.
In an interview with Media 7, Gil Allouche, the Founder and CEO of Metadata.io, talked about the use of intent data for lead generation.
“Without the right tools, companies don’t realize what campaigns have zero traction and what campaigns are attracting the most potential buyers, therefore, money is wasted on leads that won’t lead to revenue.”
Intent data aids in the prioritization of a list of target accounts to be pursued for conversion. Additionally, some businesses create specialized groups and targeted lists to hyper-personalize their content offerings and influence purchase decisions.
Importance of Buyer Intent Data
To make the most of intent data, companies engage B2B buyer intent data tools provided by exclusive intent data providers or account-based marketing software providers. They use these tools for effective lead generation.
According to Insights on Professionals, almost 40% of businesses spend more than half of their marketing budget on intent data, and 70% plan to increase spending on intent data.
Intent data plays a big role in enhancing an ABM strategy. Below are some ways:
It helps with target account selection
With the help of intent data, you can define your ICP, understand the ICP’s intent, and gather relevant data from multiple intent data tools or platforms and collate it to amplify your target list. As a bonus, you can also divide your target list based on their intent. Finally, you can target the accounts with the help of all the insights that you gained from the B2B intent data.
You can zero-in on the best messaging
High-quality B2B buyer intent data includes insights like a prospect’s research history. You can uncover actionable prospect trends that you would have otherwise missed. Using this crucial information, you can optimize your messaging because it plays an important role in content marketing. Buyer intent data can enhance sales pitches by shedding light on the buyer’s interests and needs.
It improves your sales outreach
Prospects are now focused on doing their own research based on the suggestions their friends or acquaintances provide. With the help of intent signals that the buyer intent tools record, the movement of the prospect is revealed. Once your sales team knows the position of a prospect in the sales funnel, they can decide when to get in touch and work towards a conversion.
It helps you retain customers
If your customers are looking at your competitor’s products or services, intent data signals will alert you. This kind of information indicates that you need to evaluate your offerings. You can set up triggers to gather such instances and seek feedback from customers to understand their expectations. You can reach out to these customers and provide them with support and attention so you do not lose them.
You can amplify your content
Content personalization is a crucial component of an effective ABM strategy. Using first and third-party data, you can create impactful blog content, email marketing campaigns, and other relevant content pieces to appeal to your leads. Buyer intent data can help you target your ideal customer profile (ICP). Your marketing team can create content on topics your prospects are looking at and revamp old content to make it more effective.
Why Are B2B Marketers Intent on Using Buyer Intent Data?
ABM marketing is B2B marketing on steroids. For B2B marketers who want to run intent-based marketing campaigns, buyer intent data has become a go-to tool because it helps them understand their target accounts better. Their approach is focused, tailored, and relevant. Such an approach leads to more conversions, shorter sales cycles, and clearer ROI.
Let us look at why B2B marketers are making it a point to use account-based marketing software with buyer intent data tools.
Increases brand exposure through customized websites, landing pages, and social media pages to cater to a specific audience
Aligns sales and marketing teams by bridging the communication gap between them and establishing shared business goals
Facilitates hyper-targeted advertising by providing information on search intent, online behaviour, main interests through keyword searches, and propensity to make purchase
Accurately predicts buyer behavior with the help of comprehensive datasets to forecast the buying patterns of prospects
Enhances customer experience by providing insights into the prospects’ needs and expectations so the curated content resonates with them
3 Best Buyer Intent Data Tools You Should Know About
Here is a list of the three best buyer intent data tools that can help you improve your account-based marketing strategy:
Demandbase
Demandbase’s ABX Cloud uses account intelligence to help its customers orchestrate sales and marketing moves. With the help of reliable and high-quality insights, you can create relevant content for every stage of the B2B buyer’s journey. ABX Cloud has an engagement platform that shows all of the information your marketing and sales teams have gathered in one place. This way, your teams can find opportunities faster, engage with them smartly, and close deals quickly, which will help your business grow.
ABX Cloud also uses predictive analysis so your sales team knows when to approach a lead. It conveniently aligns the efforts of both your sales and marketing teams to create an actionable, measurable, and focused ABM approach. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) for account selection. As a result, your target list is based on intent signals, CRM data, and others, which will help you know your target accounts well enough to create effective messaging. ABX’s account-based analytics measure engagement across each account and track progress throughout pre-defined, unique account journeys. This is how Demandbase uses intent data for lead generation.
Demandbase was named a leader in the first-ever 2022 Magic Quadrant for Account-based Marketing Platforms. It is the only company to get the best scores for all three use cases in the accompanying 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Account-based Marketing Platforms report.
Demandbase Success Story: SilkRoad Technology, Inc. is a human resource capital management software company. It used Demandbase's ABM platform, which was equipped with intent data, and saw activity and engagement from their top accounts go from 20%–30% to 80%+ in just six months.
Bombora
Bombora proudly markets itself as a market leader in B2B intent data. It is one of the most popular intent-based marketing facilitators. It has the most comprehensive and privacy-compliant data cooperative on the web. In short, it provides clean, risk-free intent data. It collects data consensually from its proprietary data source that comprises of 4000+ top B2B sites on the internet. It provides the most accurate data on a buyer’s digital journey so you can understand their intent. It has named its intent data solution ‘Company Surge.’
Bombora’s data can be integrated with all major platforms across the ad, sales, and martech ecosystems. This added convenience means you do not have to onboard a new system to access Bombora’s data. You can set it up in your current workflow.
Privacy compliance and ethically sourced intent data make Bombora a great choice amongst the tools. It gathers data from websites that are exclusive to Bombora. It has implemented industry-standard consent mechanisms so that all the data is compliant.
Company Surge uses BERT-based machine learning to understand the intent behind the words on a webpage and gives you an accurate picture of your buyer’s interest, pain points, requirements, and intent. It also helps with resolving pre-purchase signals of buyers to 2.8 million businesses by using its patented method that fuses behavioral and IP2C (Internet Protocol to Company) data. This data is then amplified by firmographic and demographic data.
Bombora detects how many users from a specific organization are researching particular topics, how frequently they visit certain webpages, and how deep their research goes as compared to their usual web activity. Based on this information, it can tell when an organization wants to make a purchase.
Bombora Success Story: Hornbill, a global leader of cloud-based workflow application software for IT, HR, security, and customer service teams, integrated Bombora with its HubSpot database. It got net-new in-market accounts every week, which Hornbill prioritized for sales and marketing. In six months, Hornbill found 900+ new accounts that were already in the market, which led to new active sales opportunities.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo Intent helps identify and engage buyers in real-time when they research solutions that your company offers. You can discover ready-to-buy prospects, connect with ideal buyers, and integrate the data with the tools that are already a part of your platform. It is simple to map an ideal customer profile using the buying signals collected by ZoomInfo's database.
You can uncover sales-ready leads that are looking at the products or solutions that your company offers. The intent engine triggers signals that are tracked by a network of 300,000 publisher domains. One trillion new keyword-to-device pairs are added to ZoomInfo every month from more than 90% of all the devices in the United States, which is a lot of devices.
ZoomInfo can help you identify and understand entire buying teams based on what they research. You can reach decision makers over the phone, through digital marketing channels, and by email to start a meaningful conversation. You can create automated workflows to close more deals by incorporating contact and intent data into your CRM, marketing, and sales software.
ZoomInfo Success Story: Speakap, an internal communications app, used ZoomInfo Intent and DiscoverOrg’s combined platform. Their bounce rates fell below 1%, their engagement rate increased by 25%, and their pipeline growth increased by more than 50%.
Summing It Up
Buyer intent data tools can enhance the way you do business, how efficiently your sales and marketing teams function, and how effectively you can run your ABM marketing campaigns. Choose your buyer intent data tools from trusted intent data providers based on their offerings, their privacy compliance, integration capabilities, transparent metrics, and overall functionality so that you can make the most of your account-based marketing strategy. This way, you can make the most of your marketing efforts.
FAQ
How can you get buyer intent data?
Buyer intent data is collected by buyer intent data tools, which may be a part of your ABM platform or which you can integrate with your platform. They collect the data from website visits, CRM, social media data, content consumption and off-site activity.
What are the benefits of buyer intent data tools?
Buyer intent data tools provide insights on a customer’s intent to purchase. They do this by mapping the customer journey, performing predictive analysis, behavioral analysis, and tracking competitor data.
How can you use buyer intent data to scale your business?
By using buyer intent data, you can personalize your website, prioritize your inbound leads, nurture your leads, personalize your emails and identify potential customers who haven’t engaged with you yet. So, you can convert the leads into customers by offering them just what they want.
Read More
Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
ABM in Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is diametrically opposite of traditional marketing. Instead of targeting all kinds of customers with generic content, it targets only the most lucrative accounts using personalized content. This concentrated targeting results in more conversions, longer business associations, expansion, and account retention.
In an interview with Media 7, Clive Armitage, CEO of Agent3, said,
“If you are not utilizing the power of data, technology and content then you are failing to be a modern marketer.”
ABM leverages firmographic data (basic info), technographic data (data about the kind of technology the lead uses), intent data (lead behavior), and engagement data (data gained through form filling, and event attendance) to target accounts and segment them based on priority.
A 2020 benchmark study by the Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) found that 76% of companies reported a higher ROI with ABM than other marketing types.
How Does ABM Contribute to Revenue Growth?
ABM drives higher ROI and measurable sales using marketing campaigns created by both sales and marketing teams.
A successful ABM strategy has components like these:
Targeting the right accounts and managing them
Cross-channel engagement
Measuring and dynamically optimizing the ABM programs using specialized dashboards to map targets, programs, and revenue metrics created by an account-based marketing software
ABM helps scale business revenue in the following ways:
Shows a Clear ROI
Businesses prefer precise results from their marketing strategies. ABM prioritizes ROI. It gives the highest ROI compared to any other B2B marketing strategy because it targets the highest-value accounts that meet defined criteria through custom campaigns addressing their needs and pain points.
Helps with Resource Allocation
ABM focuses only on high-value accounts. Consequently, companies can allocate their resources better and save time and money.
Engages the Audience
Personalized content means targeted accounts see only the content they can relate to so there is increased engagement and interaction.
Can Be Tracked Every Step of the Way
ABM metrics can be tracked every step of the way, so there is a clear idea of what is working and what isn’t. Important metrics include ROI, engagement, awareness, target account reach, and influence.
Aligns Sales and Marketing Teams
ABM aligns sales and marketing teams by helping them find common ground for their goals and objectives.
5 Must-ask Questions about ABM Strategy Implementation
Account-based marketing questions about ABM technology and strategy arise when businesses transition from traditional lead generation techniques to ABM. The following five must-ask questions about account-based marketing can be the keys to transitioning to ABM:
How to Create an ABM Strategy That Works?
To create an ABM strategy that works, follow these steps:
Define your target accounts.
Identify the key decision-makers of your target accounts.
Personalize your content to cater to your target accounts.
Choose appropriate channels to approach your target accounts.
Formulate campaigns to engage the target accounts.
Measure the success of your campaign using correct metrics.
What Things Should You Consider Before Allocating a Budget for ABM?
It is pretty challenging to find the correct answer to this question. The cost of tools, channels, and individual items keeps varying. Money spent on-field events, content creation to cater to target accounts, ads, trade shows, research, and intent data collection factors into budgeting.
To make budgeting easier, consider bifurcating the expenses into categories like technology (CRM, marketing automation systems, and data management platforms), human resources (data analysts, social media associates, and content strategists), events (one-on-one meets, trade shows, and webinars), media campaigns and direct mail.
How to Decide on the Size of the Target Accounts?
The size of your target accounts depends on your business goals (acquisition, retention, expansion), team size, and initiatives on an organizational level. Tiering accounts into three categories using data, technology, and thorough research has worked out for several businesses.
Tier 1: These are the accounts that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) bill perfectly and have high strategic value.
Tier 2: These accounts have an excellent ICP but lower lifetime value.
Tier 3: These accounts meet only some criteria of ICP. Pursue these accounts but don’t go overboard to get their business.
What Metrics Should Be Used to Map ABM Success?
The biggest advantage of an ABM strategy is that its success can be measured. To measure this success, you need to focus on important KPIs like:
Engagement: This includes email metrics, social metrics, consumption rates, and offline activity metrics.
Awareness: This KPI measures how aware your target accounts are of your brand, how credible they think it is and how they respond to it.
Influence: Measure how your ABM campaign contributes to the lead conversion rate, and increase the frequency and volume of your lead interactions.
Target Account Reach: With the help of ABM tools, this KPI measures the percentage of the target account’s engaged decision-makers.
ROI: Mapping ROI is essential for assessing the success of an ABM strategy. ABM gives better ROI as compared to other marketing strategies.
Other metrics to consider are value, customer retention, and sales metrics.
Who Should Be on the ABM Team?
To begin with, your ABM team should have leadership that knows ABM and its implementation. Key decision-makers from the marketing, sales, and operations departments should be on this leadership team. It should work on setting goals, overseeing the implementation of the ABM strategy, and mapping its success.
How DocuSign Used ABM to Increase Their Customer Engagement and Sales Pipeline by 22%
“We have more awareness and educational content that’s reaching our non-engaged accounts. And we will dedicate a lower level of spend to that program so that we are prioritizing our spend on our more engaged accounts.”
- Perri Gardner, Director of ABM, DocuSign.
By using ABM to target high-value accounts and categorizing their spending based on the value of those accounts, DocuSign increased their customer engagement and sales pipeline by 22%.
Conclusion
Transitioning from a traditional marketing strategy to account-based marketing is vital to drive ROI, engagement, brand awareness, and influence. Correctly implementing an ABM strategy contributes to revenue growth through quicker lead conversions, proper allocation of resources, and a targeted approach.
FAQ
What is the first step in implementing an ABM strategy?
The first step of implementing the ABM strategy is to define the accounts you want to target.
Is ABM better than a traditional lead-based marketing strategy?
Yes. As of 2021, 70% of marketers are using ABM and are seeing a remarkable increase in their ROI.
What does an ABM strategy depend on?
An ABM strategy depends on high-quality intent data. Content personalization, account segmentation, and lead nurturing cannot be achieved without it.
Read More
Core ABM
Article | June 6, 2022
Here’s a (somehow) well-kept secret about ABX: it can create immediate wins for your teams.
When you and your teams start laser-focusing on the right prospects and customers — at the right time — it doesn’t take long for the wins to start piling up.
Why?
A winning ABX strategy will leverage an AI-powered customer data platform (CDP) that has an existing database of critical information such as:
What your ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like
Accounts you might not know about that are in-market and ready-to-buy
The websites, keywords, and topics your buyers research most
The signals your buyers give off when they’re ready to buy
When you leverage this historical data, it’s like flipping on a spotlight on your most important accounts and everything they’re doing.
Let’s look at why a CDP is so important for an ABX strategy and how you can switch your thinking from, “When will I start seeing ROI?” to “How will I capitalize on all of these opportunities?”
How CDPs Bolster Your ABX Strategy
Pursuing an ABX strategy means fine-tuning your revenue activities (marketing, sales, operations) to target very specific accounts.
The critical data you need about those accounts comes from your CDP, which houses all of the interactions you have with your prospects and customers.
That information includes:
Web pages they visit
Webinars they attend
Content they download
Calls they have with your sales team
The CDP ingests all of that data and starts to learn what your typical buyer looks like, the patterns they follow, and what signals they give off when they’re ready to buy.
Over time, and with enough data from your interactions, this information becomes very powerful and enables your teams to start honing their strategies. All of your revenue activities become more efficient because you’re reaching the right buyer at the right time.
There’s a problem with traditional standalone CDPs, however. They can’t look backwards.
They can only begin collecting data once implemented, and therefore take some time to start uncovering patterns and delivering results.
But what if you could unlock the CDP-version of a flying DeLorean that empowers you travel into the past and unlock those missing puzzle pieces — without waiting for your CDP to ingest enough data?
Win Fast with a CDP Full of Critical Data
The key to unlocking fast wins for your ABX strategy is to utilize a CDP with historical first-party and third-party data.
Your buyers have searched keywords related to your offerings, attended industry events, and read third-party review sites long before you implement a stand-alone CDP. Why should you have to wait for the platform to catch up and uncover those insights that are hiding in plain sight?
6sense’s embedded CDP grants you instant access to all of the historical data that our AI-powered platform has collected for years.
Previously anonymous accounts that have been researching topics that match your offerings
A detailed ICP based on real, historical data
Insights into which of your prospects are actually in-market and ready-to-buy
Clear evidence on which accounts and buyers should be prioritized
We call uncovering this information lighting up the Dark Funnel™. When you shine a light on your Dark Funnel™ your teams can immediately start reaping the benefits. It won’t take months or even weeks to get your first wins — within days you can see a positive impact on your pipeline.
Your sales team will get leaner and meaner. No need to spend hours trawling through LinkedIn to find the one uncovered gem of a prospect. As soon as you leverage an embedded CDP loaded with historical data, you’ll discover exactly who your next target should be. Your inside sales team can focus on personalizing outreach, not figuring out who to talk to.
Your marketing team will begin improving their engagement numbers without increasing their spend. When a Director of Sales at “Ready-to-Buy Corporation” has been performing some under-the-radar research, the marketing team will receive an alert and can start targeting that person with ads that address their specific pain points.
Software development company PTC is a good example. It has used 6sense to uncover more than 1,500 net new high-intent accounts that have generated $18 million in pipeline.
“With 6sense, our team has driven outbound success by being empowered, motivated, and eager to strategically prospect to the right targets with relevant messaging,” says Brenda Souto, High Velocity Sales Manager at PTC.
Conclusion
Traditional standalone CDPs help you capture the interactions you have with your prospects and customers. All of this data is very useful to build a focused and efficient ABX strategy.
But, a standalone CDP lacks historical data and trends — meaning it can take longer to see wins and ROI.
An embedded CDP with a treasure trove of previous interactions, buying signals, and trend data can instantly prioritize your target accounts. Within days your teams will know much more about your buyers and how to target them with the right message at the right time.
Read More