The Road to B2B Revenue is Paved with Good Intentions

Recently, I got together with a stellar team of marketers to share some thoughts as part of a live panel at the inaugural Marketing Live conference in Sydney. I had a lot of colleagues, connections, family and friends who asked if the panel would be recorded or livestreamed, but unfortunately it wasn't. Whilst it was definitely great to be back in-person and embrace the ‘ephemerality’ of live events, because so many of you couldn’t attend in-person I thought I’d share some of the thoughts discussed on the panel here. We chatted through all things ‘intent data’ – what does this mean? Can every marketer use it? Who owns it? How do you use it? What are the common mistakes?

First things first. What is ‘intent data’?

Intent data is data that indicates a company or individual is potentially interested in purchasing a product or service. These ‘buying signals’, are typically collected from various sources like web searches, social media activity, online content consumption, and other digital footprints.

It’s important to recognise that all intent data isn’t created equally. Different platforms have different criteria for classifying ‘intent’. First-party data means the data from your owned channels, and what ‘intent’ actually means can be a strategic decision made by the marketer. For example, you may decide your potential customers is showing intent when they click x number of pages on your website, or they download a case study, they open x number of emails – the options are pretty endless. And, you can also use a combination of these, using and/or logic to define intent. You can look to previous customer’s journeys to discover where and when they started to consider your product/service, and make decisions based on your own data too.

Second party intent data is when you’re receiving first party data through a provider. You should always keep abreast of how they are classifying intent prior to passing information to you. This data may be ‘first party’ to that provider, but you still don’t control the decisions around what classifies intent, so it’s classified ‘second party’ by the time it comes to you.

Third party data is provided by third party platforms and is generally?sourced from large conglomerates that purchase signals from various websites or co-ops. This data is then collected and packaged together to be sold to companies for the understanding of user trends.

Often using a combination of first, second and third party data will be an effective approach. But it’s important that your strategy changes to respond to the type of intent data you’re using. For example your customer could be at a different stage of the funnel depending on the type of intent data you’re receiving alone. You should consider treating customers differently based on the criteria used to classify their intent. For example, a customer who has engaged with your website versus a customer found to have intent around your broad subject area that was discovered through web scraping their internet activity. One is a lot further down your funnel than the other, and thus requires a different outreach strategy.?

Very often the most reliable and effective data is your own. It means that that prospect is also further down the funnel if they’re already engaged with your brand. It’s a lower hanging fruit! You don’t have to spend big money on third party platforms to be able to take advantage of an intent-based strategy.

How to build your intent-based strategy:

Before any implementation or new marketing approach, you need to consider your strategy up-front. For third party platforms, you need to consider who the onus of opt-in is on to ensure you’re compliant. You need to know what the criteria being used to classify intent are (see above on how this will inform your approach and help devise your message/story). It may seem obvious, but you also need to confirm if you're getting contacts, or just general account information.?And, confirm how often data is updated/cleansed (people change jobs often!). Also ensure competitors are excluded. You don’t want to start getting intent signals for XYZ competitor because they were researching your company.

Consider your sales team. Sales and marketing have a symbiotic relationship, and you need to integrate sales into your intent-based strategy. The first thing to consider is that sales are busy folk who have a lot of competing priorities, and sometimes, even more competing systems. You need to integrate into their world. Make sure any platform you bring onboard integrates into where sales lives, day to day. And secondly, you need to build trust with your sales team. This means building an intent-based strategy that passes leads through to sales at precisely the right time. Too early, and the prospect isn’t ready for a sales conversation. You’ve annoyed the customer who isn’t pitch-ready, but, possibly more detrimentally, is that you’ve chipped away at the trust that salesperson had that marketing would pass through a sales-ready lead. Same goes for passing a lead through too late. That customer may have already moved on to a competitor and ruled out your organisation. Getting the timing of your lead flow to sales right can have a great, or not-so-great, outcome for the sales/marketing relationship. Right person, right message, right time – no one said our job as marketers was easy!

You need to know the difference between intent-based research, and research. We might have a CEO who is researching data breaches. We might think, ‘hey, this CEO seems really keen on our data breach prevention solutions’. Turns out, that CEO has a vendor who has experienced a breach. They’re researching to keep informed about that vendor’s breach and any news/updates. They don’t intend to purchase from you anytime soon. You pass that lead to sales and it’s not yet showing actual intent – time, money and the relationship capital you’ve built with sales have all been impacted in this instance.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the compelling story. As marketers, we are storytellers. But, we have to be compelling storytellers. We need to make a strategic choice around the stories we will tell, and at what point we will tell them. There’s always a story behind each data point, so as a marketer you need to know what story will compel your customers and affect behaviour. You need to be matching your content to the stage of the buying journey the prospect is at, tell an engaging story, and one that reaches them at the right time, or the whole strategy will fall down.?

Behaviour-based persona building:

B2B marketers have been building personas since the beginning of B2B marketing. These personas are usually based on demographic or psychographic data. Now with intent data, there is an opportunity to build behaviour based personas, or intent-driven personas.

Behaviour-based personas are created based on the behaviours and actions of a particular group of customers, focusing on actions and habits as the characteristics that places them within that group, rather than that demographics or psychographic data.?

Traditional personas will always be valuable to inform a lot of marketing messaging and we shouldn’t lose sight of them.?It may be that traditional personas will inform your tone of voice, whilst your behaviour-based personas will inform your actual customer message in that moment.?

How do you define them? You have the answers already - your customers. You can look at the behaviours of customers who have made it to the bottom of the funnel. You usually already have the data to build these personas. Look at your organisation’s loyal customers, a great customer case study or ‘ideal customer’. Then look into the journey they took. What behaviours made them reach the ‘consideration’ phase of their journey? Those are the behaviours that should classify intent.?

Not every marketer may have the tools for viewing a customer journey as consecutive documented data points. If you don’t have the tools and platforms in place to get all of this information, do the work of speaking with the frontline teams, or, even interviewing customers directly. Marketers often don’t consider themselves as a ‘customer-facing’ function, but in a lot of ways, we are the most customer-facing function. Don’t be afraid to conduct first-party research and speak to customers at the coal-face about their journey to purchase.?These will be some of your greatest insights.

So, the summary:

• Know where your data is coming from and let this inform your strategy.
• Integrate with sales’ systems (live where they live), and build their trust.
• Data isn’t much without the stories. Work cross-functionally within your business to find these customer stories and map out your ideal customer’s journey, learning the messages they consumed along the way.?
• Keep to utilising first party intent data where you can, and supplement with second and third party

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These were some of my key takeaways from our session, but as I mentioned at the start, some excellent marketing minds joined me on stage and each of them had some seriously impressive experience to talk to, and super insightful points to be made. I’d encourage you to follow axel sukianto , Bronwyn Cook and Nicholas Kontopoulos to learn more from some top marketers in their field, and keep the conversation going.?