4 Ways You Can Leverage Intent Data in B2B Marketing

By Payal Parikh, Director of Client Engagement at Heinz Marketing

The last blog post I wrote about what Intent Data is, the different types of Intent Data signals, and why do you need intent data. I would like to dive deeper into this topic and provide some information on how to leverage intent data in your B2B marketing.

Intent data is an individual’s web content consumption, it monitors for key intent search terms. It can pinpoint when a target account or prospect is in an active buying journey. B2B intent data provides insight into a web user’s purchase intent; allowing you to identify if and when a prospect is actively considering or looking to purchase your (or similar) products or solutions. This enables informed, timely campaign responses as well as a well-crafted sales outreach.

How to leverage intent data

Now that we know what intent data is and the different types of intent data, let us look at some use cases where you can utilize intent data to drive revenue.

Identifying potential customers

When a prospect reaches out to you on your website, they are much further along in their buyer’s journey. They already know they have a problem, and they are looking for a solution. Chances are they have already done some research, talked to their peers, consumed content on social, and researched about you on review sites. These activities are also called 2^nd and 3^rd party intent/behavioral signals.

Intent data platforms take these massive highly unstructured data and feed it to you in a structured way. They tell you who is performing a Google search for the keywords that matter to you. These are also categorized as ‘In-market’ accounts and leads. You can start reaching out to these ‘in-market’ audiences before they form an opinion about your brand or before they reach out to you.

Personalized web experience

Dynamically personalized content for website visitors is an important element of most ABM programs. You can engage every website visitor with a personalized, relevant experience – and watch your conversion rates skyrocket. Like I mentioned above, when your web visitors are looking to buy, and they find time to check out your website, they’re at their moment of highest intent. Engaging these visitors with real-time personalization gets their attention and moves them to the next step with sales.

Website personalization happens in real-time, you don’t have to spend time and energy for the personalization iterations. You can accelerate revenue by supercharging the customer experience, right at the front door – your website – all the way through to conversion. This will help your marketing dollars go further and ramp up your sales teams’ productivity.

Personalized lead engagement  

With your current marketing automation platform, chances are you are already using 1^st party behavioral signals and are seeing that in your lead scoring. Your current lead scoring model helps you quantify the intent of your prospect based on the various activities they are showing by engaging with your content. For example, when someone opens an email you score them, when someone visits a certain page on the website, you score them.

You can incorporate 3^rd party intent data into your scoring model. When a prospect is researching relevant topics online but isn’t showing engagement with your content. You can start reaching out to these prospects and meet them where they are in their buying journey. Intent data platforms typically provide you with an audience that is in different stages in their journey. You can set up marketing campaigns and programs that target these individuals and accounts based on where they are in their journey. This will help them move down the funnel faster, hence contributing to your overall revenue.

Here’s an interesting post from one of my colleagues about the features and functionality of different ABM platforms.

Personalized sales outreach

The best salespeople outperform all other salespeople because they ask the right questions. Even when handed a bunch of “random leads,” a great salesperson succeeds because they try to understand the customer. They obtain information that can improve the customer’s journey. In other words, they personalize it. The more personalized the customer journey is, the greater chance you have of closing the deal. And with intent data, you can hyper-personalize the customer experience to unprecedented levels.

What keeps me up at night is not if we’re going to close the deals we’re in. It’s that there are deals out there where we’re not even in the conversation. Does this sound familiar?

What about a scenario when the sales team has a list of top 100 accounts but doesn’t know how to rank them in the order of priority that’s based on relevance and timing?

Intent data can help in all of the above scenarios. It can tell you if an account has shown a recent interest by researching solutions online and what problems and solutions they are exactly researching about.

I am sure there are other scenarios where you can leverage B2B intent data to grow your funnel and to grow the revenue contribution. Let me know in the comments below if there’s a specific use case where you’ve seen success.

If you would like to explore how intent data can be used in your sales and marketing approach, email me for a 30 min complimentary consultation.