4 Ways to Make Intent Data Your Pillar for Marketing Success

Today’s buyer’s journey to make purchase decisions is digital and this journey, more often than not, begins with online research.

Your prospects are out there right now, searching for a solution online to a problem you can solve. They’re reading content, watching videos, and comparing options to find the right solution.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could identify these prospects and what exactly they are looking for? Well, there’s a way to do that – Intent Data.

With intent data, you unveil a rich mix of behavioral insights into what prospects are doing so that you can connect with buyers in a relevant way and offer your solution at the perfect moment.

In this blog post, we’ll deep dive into what intent data is and how you can use it to boost your marketing efforts.

What is Buyer Intent Data?

Intent data consists of behavioral data collected by organizations to enable companies to identify buyers during their purchase cycle.

Let’s say, when you search for a particular topic or visit a website, you are expressing an interest in that topic.

For instance, you are reading this blog post because you have some level of interest in ‘intent data’.
Intent data helps you understand a buyers’ intent toward your products and services, thus, boosting lead generation efforts and overall marketing ROI.

Types of Intent Data

Now that you know what intent data is, let’s understand the different types of intent data.

• First-Party Intent Data

First-party intent data is unique to you and is directly captured by you across your digital properties such as website, social media, CRM software, etc. For instance, your website’s contact form is filled by a user, the person making contact is communicating intent by wanting to know more about your company and its services. This data is generally useful for lead prioritization, campaign performance measurement, and segmentation.

• Third-Party Intent Data

Third-party intent data gives a holistic view of your prospect’s activities and interactions over a period of time and tells you what a prospect has been doing before landing on your website. This data is from external sources/third-party providers and is often purchased by B2B marketers. This data is generally useful to run targeted ads or create personalized content.

However, as Google would bid adieu to third-party cookies by 2022, it is ideal that you use first-party data to gain actionable sales and marketing insights.

How Can B2B Marketers Use Intent Data?

According to research, 40% of software organizations currently use buyer intent data for lead generation. Intent data is indeed valuable but what matters is how organizations can use intent data to position their brand ahead of the competition. Let’s find out how.

1. Understanding Prospects

Intent data enables you to identify a prospect’s interests based on their digital behavioral pattern. For instance, let’s say that you are a SaaS company that offers a wide range of products and services. A prospect is looking for an ERP solution and they come across your website, watch a video, or download an eBook about ERP. All these activities show interest in using ERP. So, now that you know what the prospect is looking for, you can develop and simulate the prospect’s profile, create a better marketing strategy, implement targeted campaigns, and achieve a better outcome.

2. Personalization and Targeting

Intent data helps you understand what your prospects are looking for. This makes it easier for you to reach them with the offer that hits the sweet spot. With insights into your prospect’s topic interests and challenges, you can identify any messaging gaps that you may have, create tailored content, and address your target prospect’s pain points. Armed with this knowledge, marketers can target a specific profile, and create personalized campaigns for them to increase the likelihood of a purchase decision. Be it your ad copy, landing pages, or subject lines in sales outreach, intent data can fuel many areas of sales and marketing with personalization.

3. Account-Based Marketing Efforts

Savvy marketers know that identifying target accounts should not only depend on account profile fit but also on purchase intent signals. It is a great way to avoid leads that fit a profile but have no active interest in your service at the moment.

With intent data, you can:

• Understand which target accounts are actively looking for solutions similar to yours.
• Identify and segment the ‘buyers’ of the account.
• Unravel the type of information prospects of a particular account are looking for.
• Prioritize engagement on the best-fit accounts based on the levels of intent interest being displayed.
• Adapt and personalize messaging and content when a target account is showing intent.

When backed by intent, your ABM efforts gain an extra layer of precision.

4. Content Marketing

Intent data, when used correctly, can be a powerful arsenal for content marketing teams. It allows you to understand what users are searching for at each stage of the customer journey. With these insights, you can shape your content strategy to address any potential concerns and pain points and guide prospects down the sales funnel. Also, you can use it to identify gaps by showing what topics your prospects are actively researching and then start creating what they are looking for. It enables content marketers to improve content creation and distribution efforts at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Intent data offers a great way to understand your target audience, leads, and existing customers. It helps you get your finger on the pulse of your prospects’ needs and generate personalized experiences and improve lead generation.

Wish to level up your marketing efforts with intent data? Talk to us!