What Is Intent Data & How to Use it for Your Business
Data is crucial for the success of 2B sales and marketing. However, using the data solely to connect with your prospects is insufficient. Every effective marketer and salesperson is aware of the potential value of B2B Intent data and how it can be used to advance broad business goals. In addition to giving you a competitive edge, a thorough understanding of customer needs combined with data intelligence will enable you to create a reliable and robust pipeline for the sales team to manage.
However, in order to fully benefit from the vast array of customer insights it offers, very few marketers and sales professionals are knowledgeable about how to use the data intelligently. And one of the most important types of data for driving sales and marketing insights is Intent Data.
Intent Data: What Is It?
Simply put, intent data is a collection of behavioural signals that reveals your prospects' intentions with regard to buying a good or service.
Your potential customers are out there, looking for a fix for an issue you might be able to solve. They perform searches online, read articles, look for solutions, and discover ways to cope with their suffering.
According to studies, an average B2B prospect is 67% of the way through the purchasing journey before engaging with a salesperson. Combining buyer intent data with prospect signals gives businesses a clearer aerial perspective to better use customer insights. This means prospects have an intention to buy a product or service and a sales rep has to focus on the remaining 33% to close the deal.
What Makes Buyer Intent Data More Valuable Than Other Data?
Once prospective buyers hit your website, you can monitor their activity and assign them lead scores. You can use retargeting ads or email campaigns to nurture the leads when someone fills out and submits a form on your website.
Great! However, what about all those prospects that are looking for solutions like yours elsewhere on the web and not on your website? When your prospects go to other websites, you don’t have visibility into what they are engaging with. Only a fraction of buyers actively searching for a solution will make it to your site without sales and marketing outreach, and even of those hitting your site only about 15% of them will be actively engaged in a buying decision.
Why Intent Data is the Future of B2B Marketing & Sales?
Any marketer or salesperson who wants to increase success rates or who is constantly looking for ways to advance must comprehend the intentions of buyers. Businesses can better understand prospects' buying patterns and triggers by becoming more aware of their behaviour. With this information, marketing and sales teams can target a particular profile and adopt a personalized strategy for them on demand to increase the likelihood that a purchase decision will be made.
Businesses can identify "ready to buy" prospects and adjust their campaigns in accordance with the help of numerous aggregated intent signals. Intent Data can be used for prospecting in the future because they highlight certain trends and aid in influencing prospects' purchase decisions throughout the buyer's journey.
Given that, it's critical for you to be aware that, if your competitor isn't already utilizing the Intent Data, they very well may do so in the near future. According to the study, 35% of B2B companies are preparing to use intent data within a year, and 25% of B2B companies are already using it.
How to Use Intent Data for Your Business?
Here we will break down how you can make the Intent Data work for you and your campaigns. To remain competitive, the use of buyer Intent Data is increasingly important. There are many areas where it can make a huge impact. Here are the key ways you can take advantage of Intent Data.
1. Identifying Early Opportunities
The most obvious use of intent data is tapping prospects earlier in the buying process. One of the best ways to get a leg up on the competition is to get in contact with prospects before other salespeople do. Research shows that in 70% of cases, companies prefer a salesperson offering the business who communicates with them first.
When you approach prospects through marketing campaigns, there is a good chance that one segment of the audience is not in the correct buying phase to connect with your content. You are too late to reach out, or you are reaching them at the same time as the rest of your rivals. This is why B2B marketers are beginning to recognize the value of employing Intent Data to improve the success of marketing initiatives. Learn more about how Intent Data works for marketers.
2. Lead Scoring
Buyer Intent Data can help to distinguish between who is actively researching a pain point and who is simply reading about a particular topic without any intention to make a purchase. This information highlights whether a lead fits your ideal customer profile or not and makes prioritization easy.
A lead scoring model requires time, brainstorming, and effort. As a result, it frequently takes a long while to set up, monitor, and enhance the process. This is where Swishconnect’s buyer intent data can come in handy.
Swishconnect assists you in identifying your prospects’ purchase signals based on intent subjects that have been thoroughly explored by organizations. With around 7,000 Intent themes regularly watched, you can learn what your potential buyers are interested in before you reach out to them.
Each account receives a live score based on the level of interest in a specific theme. The higher the rating, the more information the account has consumed relevant to the Intent topic you picked. The lead scoring methodology is simplified because it is an automated procedure. By filtering the themes relevant to the products and services, you can locate accounts with the highest conversion potential. Learn more about setting up a lead scoring model using Intent Data.
3. Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing is all about relationships. Intent Data can become the most important contributor to engaging and building relationships with the right prospects. While ABM often requires technographic and firmographic data, it is vital that you use every possible avenue to collect more information about your prospects that will help you take a laser-focused approach.
Intent Data not only helps you expand your reach, but it also gives you data that you might not be able to collect yourself. This data helps you to find more in-market customers, score leads with greater precision, and re-shape your ABM campaign with customized messaging.
Research shows about 10% of buyers are actively buying or want to buy at any given time. If you have a target list of 100 accounts, 10 of them represent immediate opportunities. The question is, which 10? This is where intent data comes into play.
You can reasonably forecast what a company wants to buy if you know what they are actively looking for. That is precisely what intent data provides. Thousands of subjects about various products and services are continually tracked to see which companies are interested in specific themes. The more a prospect examines a topic, the more likely they are to purchase in that category.
4. Developing a Better Content Strategy
You can develop a content strategy that is aligned with the interests of your ideal customers with the aid of intent data. While you can use a variety of SEO tools to find the most popular search terms and hot topics, incorporating Intent Data will give you access to a whole new level of data that will help you improve your content marketing strategy.
领英推荐
5. Specific Marketing
By utilising buyer intent data to target leads that exhibit specific signals, you can make your marketing campaigns even more targeted. By doing this, you can avoid wasting any of your advertising budget on potential customers who aren't serious about purchasing your goods.
You can start sharing specific content that will help your B2B buyers achieve their goals and create an opportunity for you once you can make the connection between what they need and their buying signals.
6. Fuel Your Sales Pipeline
Driving company results demands more than simply following an end-to-end plan. You must go beyond only identifying and engaging demand in your marketing funnel. It is no longer enough to create innovative lead-generation campaigns. It is necessary to research your target market, understand their behavior, and approach them with unique content. Personalizing your marketing plan has gone beyond demographic and firmographic data on your target audience. In a world where sales must do more with less – time, money, and attention – intent data provides insight into where to concentrate effort and engage in activities. To maximize your sales pipeline, you should focus on intent data. Intent data is used by B2B marketers to create effective and personalized campaigns. Watch this webinar by Intent Data leaders Bombora and Swishconnect where the experts have covered how to use Intent data in Swishconnect to fuel your sales intelligence and drive pipeline growth.
7. Sending Powerful Direct Emails
Direct mail is just one element of your prospect marketing that can and should be influenced by intent data.
You can increase the impact and engagement of your brand by using tactile marketing automation to apply that intelligence to direct mail. The most effective channel for involving members of the C-Suite is integrated, branded, and personalized direct mail, which performs better than traditional direct mail. If you can use your integrations to determine whether the visitor fits your ideal customer profile (ICP), intent data opens up a world of possibilities for automating customized brand interactions.
Once you can connect the dots between what your B2B buyers need and their buying signals, then you can start sharing specific content that will help them meet their objectives and opens-up an opportunity for you.
How is Intent Data Collected?
Because your competitors may be unaware of Intent Data, they may continue to use blind targeting and untargeted client acquisition techniques. B2B salespeople and marketers who use intention data correctly may acquire prospective buyers more quickly and move them down the funnel more efficiently than their competitors.
So, how can you collect intent data? Should you try a DIY approach? Tracking user behavior without their agreement is a violation of the new GDPR and CCPA legislation, and can result in significant fines. So should you look for a data partner?
Well, different companies have different approaches to gathering Intent Data – with some practices better than others.
There are three sources to collect Intent Data:
1. Independent Websites or Portals
Independent websites or portals collect customer information and share it with other parties. Although they cannot collect vast amounts of data, they can more than handle their users’ opt-in and authorization to share their data.
2. Bidstream
Bidstream data is user behavior recorded by an ad pixel and distributed via ad exchanges. The purpose data supplier will post an ad on a public site hosting content. Then they use the ad to scrape the keywords and visitor information on that site without the website owner’s or visitor’s knowledge.
3. Publisher Co-Ops
Publisher Co-ops are groups of publishers and websites that pool their data for all participants to profit from a larger data set. On the first interaction, each publication or website also demands the consent of its visitors.
How Does Intent Data Work
Once the data is collected, it is analyzed to understand a person’s intent. This is done by identifying patterns and trends in the data, such as specific keywords or topics that are frequently searched for or discussed. This information can then be used to create more targeted marketing campaigns, improve customer engagement and sales.
Intent data is typically used in B2B marketing, lead generation, account-based marketing, and other sales strategies. It’s worth mentioning that some companies provide intent data in real-time and others in a period of time, depending on their data collection methodologies and data providers.
What Are Intent Signals
Intent signals are indicators or cues that reveal a person’s intent or interest in a particular product or service, it can be observed through a person’s online behavior such as searches, website visits, and social media interactions. Examples of intent signals include search queries, website visits, social media interactions, email engagement and form submissions. Understanding intent signals can help businesses understand their audience better, create more targeted marketing campaigns, and improve customer engagement and sales.
What is Intent Marketing
Intent marketing is a strategy that uses data about a person’s intent to inform and guide marketing efforts. This data is collected through various online behaviors, such as searches, website visits, and social media interactions, and analyzed to identify patterns and trends that indicate a person’s intent or interest in a particular product or service. Businesses use this data to create more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns, improve customer engagement, and increase sales.
Start Incorporating Buyer Intent Data in Your Prospecting
Intent data can be incredibly valuable on its own, however, it works best when paired with other data points such as firmographic, technographic, and engagement metrics to create a holistic scoring model that also reflects qualifying criteria and engagement. If used in the right combination, Intent Data can be a powerful predictor of which accounts have the highest chances of buying your product or service.