Intent Data + Marketing Automation = The Duo That Drives Higher Revenue

As a marketer, getting your customers’ attention and engaging with them across multiple channels is important.

Without it, you’re just creating more content – emails, ads, and pushing discount offers that are not unlocking their true potential.

Instead of pushing various initiatives towards what you think your customers want, you should listen to them, and create more targeted campaigns.

As a key revenue driver, marketing and sales representatives can use intent data to develop content and execute their campaign strategy efficiently.

To resonate with your audience, you need to leverage intent data and marketing automation to provide your customers with what they want and drive more revenue.

In this blog post, we’ll decode the what and why of intent data, its types, and how you can leverage it to drive revenue.

The What and Why of Intent Data

Intent data is a collection of data sets that are generated from user actions or their online behavior that tells you what an individual’s intent towards a product or service is.

Intent data is important for marketers because it allows them to understand:

• The behavior of potential buyers on different websites,
• Their pain points,
• The solutions they are looking for,
• The product /services they want, and
• The content they are consuming.

By using intent data in sales and marketing campaigns, marketers can efficiently identify the customer’s intent to purchase exactly at the right time and plan activities to engage them to derive maximum results.

Utilize Intent Data for Different Marketing Initiatives

Using intent data in your marketing strategy can help you overcome challenges like improving brand awareness, engaging with customers, and providing them with the right content at the right time. Let’s take a look at how intent data can benefit your business:

1. Improved Brand Awareness:Intent data is a great tool for marketers to improve brand awareness and increase their leads. With intent data, you can reach out to prospects who are looking for solutions and present your brand or solution in the best light possible. Consequently, you can bring good exposure to your brand even before prospects land on your website. With intent data, you can:

• Create personalized interactions with prospects.
• Track topics related to your industry and common pain points of customers and create marketing assets around these to boost your brand awareness.
• Get better insights to boost engagement through digital advertising.

2. Accurate Buying Prediction: Intent data allows marketers to accurately predict a prospect’s buying behavior by providing better insights into their online behavior and their purchase intent. It helps marketers target prospects while they’re actively showing buying intent or even before directly revealing their purchase intent.

3. Marketing and Sales Alignment: Intent data can help you to keep your marketing and sales teams on the same page so that they can focus on a shared business goal. Here’s how intent data encourages marketing and sales alignment:

• Allows sales teams to receive high-quality leads from marketers to expedite sales cycles and conversions.
• Enables sales and marketing teams to save their time by skipping accounts that are not likely to bring business.
• Helps marketers to pass on valuable information to the sales team to help them create engaging sales interactions.

Types of Intent Data

Intent data is gathered from various online sources and is divided mainly into two categories:

• Intent data based on nature
• Intent data based on source

Types of Intent Data Based On Nature

1. Search Intent: Keywords are used to find answers to your search queries. Keywords are the digital footprints that indicate the user intent. Marketers can use this information to track trends and create a forecast for the future.

2. Browsing Intent: While search queries and keywords provide insights into how customers conduct research, browsing intent data shows you the specific data they are viewing. This data is crucial as it highlights how the prospects move through your website and how they interact with the information.

3. Action Intent: Actions like signing up, sharing content, and downloading help you understand the exact stages that the prospect goes through as they navigate through your website and marketing assets. By keeping an eye on how users move around your digital channels, you can better optimize your content to fit their needs.

4. Firmographic Data: Firmographic data is a set of facts used to segment organizations and companies into defined groups. It includes information like geographic area, industry, revenue, number of clients, and number of employees. By using intent signals with company segments, you can get a better understanding of how different organizations behave and what they’re interested in.

5. Predictive Intent: Predictive intent is a method of identifying past patterns to get insights into future trends and evolving customer behavior. You can predict future trends leveraging technologies like data mining, artificial intelligence, and machine learning because these technologies pull data from various resources like sales data and customers’ profiles.

Types of Intent Data Based on Source

1. First-Party Intent Data: First-party indent data are the behavioral signals that you collect through web form fill-ups, content downloads, tracking online chats, or email engagement. You can get this data from your marketing automation platform or analytics tool and collect valuable insights to make informed decisions.

2. Third-Party Intent Data: Third-party intent data includes intent insights from all over the internet or third-party sources. This gives you a holistic picture of your prospect’s activities, behavior pattern, and the type of content they consume.

3 Ways to Use Intent Data and Marketing Automation to Drive More Revenue

It’s no secret that buyers do a lot of research before connecting with potential service providers. By using insights provided by your marketing automation platform and intent data, you can identify the ‘when and how’ of a prospect’s consideration for purchasing. Here are the three ways to get it right:

1. Hyper-Personalized Customer Journey: 62% ^[i] of marketing professionals view
hyper-personalization as a crucial strategy. Your marketing automation platform along with intent data helps you to target prospects with hyper-personalized messaging at the right time. You can utilize intent data and marketing automation to understand:

• The purchase intent of the customer
• Whether they’re in-market for your product
• Whether they’re looking for a competitor’s solution
• How to segment the audience based on their intent score, intent topic, or behavior.

You can also use intent data to add hyper-personalization in your B2B marketing strategy to retarget audiences when they’re looking for a solution and convert them into customers. For instance, after you track the pages that a website visitor engages with, you can use web personalization to offer specific, relevant content to them, essentially incentivizing them to take a certain action.

2. Prioritize Inbound Leads Based On Engagement: By using first-party intent data and a marketing automation platform, you can optimize your lead scoring model. For instance, when leads visit your products page, their lead score will increase by 5 and a score of 10 if they visit your pricing page. When a lead’s score reaches a peak point agreed upon by marketing and sales, an alert can be sent to sales representatives to reach out to that prospect and turn it into a conversion.

3. Execute Hyper-Targeted Ads: Intent data is a great tool when it comes to maximizing the click-through-rate (CTR) engagement and other conversion metrics. You can create highly-focused pay-per-click (PPC) ads and other marketing campaigns within your marketing automation platform. Also, ads served with the right intent signal alone have a 40% ^[ii] greater purchase intent lift and 30% greater consideration lift.

The Bottom Line

By leveraging intent data with the right marketing automation tool, you can understand your buyers, segment your accounts and prospects into the right campaign tracks, trigger real-time emails and score your leads more accurately.

If your timing and strategy are right, you would be on your way to delivering superior experiences to your customers, all while growing your business better.

Want to leverage intent data and marketing automation to drive revenue? Talk to us!

Statistics References

^[i]https://www.ventureharbour.com/hyper-personalisation-examples/
^[ii] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/video/intent-signal-statistics/