Account Based Data
Article | June 29, 2023
For B2B marketers like you, wouldn’t it be great to know which buyers are ready to purchase and when? It would be, but this doesn’t generally happen. Marketing and sales teams across businesses spend their time trying to find the perfect prospects instead of focusing on selling to the accounts that actually want to buy.
What Goes into Prospecting?
Prospecting is an entire process that is not only time-consuming but might not lead to anything worthwhile. Common steps involved in prospecting include:
Finding accounts that fit your target account profile
Zeroing in on the point of contact to get in touch with the account
Creating messaging to influence prospect’s buying decision
Wait for the prospect to answer calls
It is no wonder that prospecting is the most difficult part of sales. According to research by Sales Insights Lab, 50% of the prospects you go after aren’t a good fit for your product. To add to the mix, sorting through incomplete forms, questionnaires, anonymous web visits, and event attendee lists is backbreaking work.
Predictive Analytics: Pipeline Growth and Revenue Covered
ABM relies heavily on high-quality data management and analysis. It is based on quality and, not quantity. It can succeed only if the prospect account’s data like management hierarchy, business practices, pain points, requirements, etc. is interpreted, analyzed and utilized properly. This is where predictive analytics comes in. A predictive analytics model looks at how different parts of an account relate to each other and ranks them. A large amount of data can be successfully interpreted this way. Data mining, statistics, and text analytics uncover different patterns and relationships to give insights into an account’s behavior and outcomes based on data.
A Predictive Analytics Model Boosts Your ABM Strategy
Here is how predictive analytics can boost your ABM strategy:
Prioritizing Accounts Based on Rating
Marketing representatives need to approach prospects at the right time to capture expected revenue. Predictive analytics gives real-time data, forecasts into when to approach a prospect to get the conversion. With deep data insights, predictive analytics optimizes ABM and the allocated marketing budget.
Personalized Messaging
Personalized messaging is possible only when the data at hand goes beyond account intelligence-based numbers. Predictive analytics goes a step ahead, forecasts buyer behavior and gives marketers a tool to create content that appeals to every individual in the prospect account’s buying group and leads to conversion.
Objective Scoring
As accounts near the end of the sales funnel, predictive analytics forecasts the best time for sales overview, so risks like data deletion are bypassed.
Getting Ready to Adopt Predictive Analytics
To adopt predictive analytics in your ABM strategy, you need to follow these steps:
Create an ABM-centric organization where content marketers apply ABM
Marketing and sales teams need to understand predictive insights and its implementation in ABM
Align your marketing and sales teams
Decision makers understand predictive insights and how they are used at the grass-root level
Wrapping It Up!
Focus your investments on an intent data set based on predictive analytics and AI learning to make the most of the high-quality data insights without worrying about underlying technologies.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | June 20, 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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Programmatic ABM
Article | June 9, 2022
Selling more and selling faster is the goal that drives B2B marketers. Strategically implementing account-based marketing (ABM) to target individuals with hyper-personalized messaging across different channels is what helps them achieve it. But what is Buying Group Marketing (BGM), and why do B2B marketers need to keep up with it?
Buying-Group Marketing (BGM): Taking ABM up a notch by focusing on an entire buyer group instead of the account as a whole, it’s called buying-group marketing (BGM).
According to a recent Forrester survey, 94% of B2B organizations sell to groups of three or more. They do this instead of spending time identifying a set of ICPs and making a purchase decision.
Let us take a look at what BGM is all about.
Buying Group Marketing: The Next Evolution of ABM
To implement BGM, you first need to understand what buying groups are. A purchasing group is a group of people within a target account who have a say in the purchasing decision. This makes them crucial in B2B targeting. Once B2B marketers learn about their target personas, they can come up with an effective marketing plan and approach them strategically.
In large enterprises, purchase decisions are never restricted to one individual. The larger the purchase decision, the larger the size of the buying groups. When a decision involves new technologies, services, or products, an individual struggle to make a purchase decision swiftly.
According to Gartner, more than 75% of customers describe these purchases as very complex or difficult. With the help of BGM, the decision-making process can be streamlined and shared among multiple people within an organization.
Driving Success with BGM
To better execute BGM, organizations need to change their mindsets, processes and technologies and work to understand how buying groups work together. Until demand management matches the ways buyers are making purchasing decisions, marketing and sales alignment will not be possible.
Organizations need to first understand how buying groups work together, then align their mindsets, technologies, and processes to efficiently execute BGM. When the marketing and sales teams align their demand management goals with the decision-making groups, only then can they drive success in their campaigns.
Interest from more than one person from a single company can lead to more success and influence in the buying phase. B2B marketers need to move beyond the idea that only the first person to respond from a company should be entertained as a lead if a second person from the same company shows interest in their product or services. They need to understand that no matter how tempting account-based advertising may seem, it doesn’t guarantee success. They should focus on engaging the actual decision-makers of their target accounts.
When customer personas are mapped according to their buying roles within a group, organizations will have the much-needed intelligence required to make personalized sales. The success of BGM demands the delivery of content that resonates with an individual as per their role in a buying group. B2B marketers must meet them where they are with the content that they need.
Organizations can have crucial intelligence on their customers after mapping their personas and considering their roles in the buyer groups. Delivering content that the target individual can relate to is a prerequisite of BGM.
BGM may not be new as a concept, but B2B marketers see improvements in their performance by harnessing it as their principal strategy. Adapting to BGM will give them the edge that they seek, while the rest try to keep up with the changing trends of the ABM industry.
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Buyer Intent Data
Article | March 3, 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.
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