How to implement Intent Data in your Marketing Strategies

Intent data has emerged as a valuable resource for modern marketers seeking to understand their audience's interests, preferences, and purchasing behavior. This insightful data allows businesses to tailor their marketing strategies more precisely, ensuring relevance and enhancing engagement. In this article, we'll explore the significance of intent data and how to effectively leverage it for marketing purposes.

Understanding Intent Data:

Intent data refers to information that reveals the online behavior and activities of individuals or businesses, indicating their intent or interest in specific products, services, or topics. There are two primary types of intent data:

1. First-Party Intent Data: This data is collected from your own digital properties, such as your website, social media channels, and CRM systems. It includes data from forms, website visits, content downloads, and interactions with your online platforms.
2. Third-Party Intent Data: Third-party intent data is obtained from external sources and vendors, aggregating information from various online platforms and providing insights into broader market trends and behaviors.

Ways to Utilize Intent Data for Marketing:

1. Enhanced Personalization: Leverage intent data to personalize your marketing efforts. Tailor content, messages, and offers based on the specific interests and behaviors of your audience. Personalization significantly improves engagement and conversion rates.
2. Lead Scoring and Prioritization: Use intent data to identify prospects showing high purchase intent. Implement lead scoring models that factor in intent signals, allowing you to prioritize leads that are more likely to convert.
3. Targeted Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Intent data aids in identifying accounts actively researching solutions in your industry. Implement targeted ABM strategies focused on these accounts to increase the effectiveness of your outreach.
4. Content Strategy and Creation: Align your content strategy with the topics and keywords that resonate with your audience's interests. Create valuable content addressing their pain points, needs, and interests as indicated by their intent signals.
5. Optimized Advertising Campaigns: Use intent data to refine your advertising campaigns. Target audiences displaying relevant intent signals, ensuring that your ads reach those actively seeking solutions or information related to your offerings.
6. Real-Time Engagement: Utilize real-time intent data to engage with prospects at crucial moments of their buying journey. Timely interactions, such as triggered emails or personalized messages, can significantly impact conversions.
7. Sales Enablement: Empower your sales team with intent data insights. Provide them with valuable information about prospects' interests and behaviors, enabling more informed and targeted sales conversations.
8. Measure and Refine: Continuously analyze and measure the effectiveness of your intent data-driven strategies. Adjust and refine your approaches based on insights gained from the data to optimize results.

Leads You Didn’t Know You Had

The typical marketing approach starts with a customer profile persona or “ideal customer” description. This is shared with lead partners and used to filter leads and score them. The closer a lead is to that ideal customer, the “better” it is. Intent data can show us that this may be too narrow of an approach, especially when a marketer feels that all available leads have already been sourced.

Take a medical supply company that typically sells to doctors working at large hospitals. While this is their ideal customer, intent data might uncover a number of other profiles that could become very promising new customers. By looking at the profile of other people searching their website or relevant content (i.e., showing intent to purchase), that medical supply company might find that nurses at schools, managers at gyms, and owners of elder care facilities are also researching the same medical equipment for their facility. While not a primary persona, these are very real leads that might provide the extra momentum the marketer seeks.?

Less is More

On the other end of the spectrum are marketers with plenty of leads coming in and not enough of a filter to know which leads to prioritize. Intent data can be the lever that helps bring some order to a big influx of leads. For example, if there’s a software company that sells to small businesses and gets 10-20 leads per day, it can be difficult for the sales team to know which leads to reach out to first. If recently acquired leads get tacked on to the bottom, sellers always reach out to slightly stale leads as they work through their list. Simply upending the list and reaching out to the most recent leads might be a little better, but great prospects that are on the stale side might then get ignored.

Enter intent data, which can provide a valuable lens on top of each lead for a better comparison. Understanding which intent signals are most closely tied with an eventual purchase can help marketers flag leads that are showing those signals as top priority. If someone just downloaded a product catalog, that lead might be significantly more likely to buy than someone who signed up for the newsletter because they may be in the market in a year or two.?

Knowledge is Power

These two scenarios are entirely achievable but do require some close analysis. Intent data is powerful and requires a deft hand to make sure that the data says what it seems like it says. Things need to be tested, evaluated, tweaked and tested over and over again. Intent data is like a guidepost, but marketers still need to navigate the path ahead with discretion.

For any company looking for new lead profiles, it will take a bit of time and some test campaigns to understand if the widened buyer profile is worth it. That medical supply company could start by testing out some marketing messaging aimed specifically at buyers from elder care facilities and see what the response rates are like before they go all in with a new strategy for a whole new client base.?

And for companies looking to better prioritize larger lists of leads, using analytics and data is likely a good approach. That software company could start by creating a lookback report of the last three months’ worth of leads and determine which actions clustered with those leads that ended up becoming customers. Testing a scenario where sellers prioritize the leads that display those strong buyer signals is a great approach.

As companies become more analytical about their use of intent data, they can start creating more sophisticated models – such as scoring the intent of a lead and creating marketing campaigns that correspond to that score. Imagine that 100 is a score for a lead that’s about to sign a contract. Perhaps a score of 50 is when someone is tipped into a marketing campaign with some content but not yet passed to sales. Someone with a score of 75 might get an email from a seller, while a score of 90 might get a call right away.?

Of course, every business is unique, and the corresponding intent data for that business will also be unique. Intent is not an instant fix but rather a valuable layer that can help direct marketing and sales efforts to get more out of their leads. Putting in some time to get to know leads better will help the marketing and sales organization become more effective and more analytical. Marketers will naturally be more confident and better able to “prove it” to their executives.?