Introduction
Around 87% of intent buyers research data online before they make a purchase decision.
Not only this, YouTube gets up to 300 hours of video every minute and over 2 million blog posts are indexed every day.
And this data is just before that of the pandemic world that saw a 200% plus a spike in Internet usage worldwide due to enforced lockdowns by various economies.
With content being available like never before, customers themselves prefer researching products in an attempt to address their pain points. These include performing online searches, reading relevant content, and comparing different options, etc.
None to our surprise, an average B2B buyer is mostly finished with the buyer’s journey before engaging with a salesperson.
Are They Approaching You?
Prospects out there are hunting for solutions to their problems that you can solve.
But do they approach you for the solution you can provide to their pain points?
Maybe they do, or maybe they don’t.
After all, there has to be some explanation as to why your competitor’s business is increasing or just for the very fact that you consider them your “competitor.”
Source – TrustRadius
The Dilemma Of Not Being Able To Pitch
Buyers do an online search everytime they face a problem. However, they often narrow down their options of solution before you’ve even had a chance to connect with them.
However, you can know what your prospects were searching for.
You could then engage a prospect on a relevant topic even if the information wasn’t related directly to your offer. Further, you could also have also determined if the timing was right to pursue a particular company and then you could have prioritized the opportunities.
The Promise Of Intent Data Providers
Imagine if you knew that prospects were researching a solution like yours shortly after they started the process. That imagination is exactly what data intent data providers can help you do.
An intent data provider works with you to find the right contact-level intent data to unveil information about your ideal customer and their pre-purchase activities online.
They develop search criteria, gather relevant data, assess its value and fit, and help deploy it to your team in an easy to grasp way.
What Is Intent Data
Source – Google snippet
Intent data is the behavioral information collected about people’s online activities.
It’s used with strategies that allow you to target potential customers when they are looking around for solutions that you can help them with.
What’s The Modern Approach In The Traditional Sphere?
While onsite engagement and physical sales have been used as triggers for years, intent data provides a structured, standardized, and scalable source of data.
This way you can target the right companies at the right time.
Companies that don’t use predictive intelligence data limit their response to data from their website, while their potential buyer has likely been trying to solve a pain point for weeks.
What’s Predictive Intelligence Data?
Predictive data allows your sales and marketing teams to contact buyers earlier in the buying cycle.
The trend of self-guided buyers reaching your site to look for solutions won’t last very long. Companies who wait for prospects to stumble fly on to their landing page will obviously be late to the game.
What Is The Intent Behind Intent Data?
The aim of buyer intent data is to provide a good sales intelligence tool that cues you into prospects’ subtle buying signals, positioning you to be first in the door to make your pitch.
How Can You Scale Demand Generation With Intent Data Providers?
Intent data providers can give you the leverage of greater demand generations to drive greater ROI for marketing and sales efforts. They are your boon companions that help you:
Source: TrustRadius
1. Identify Early Buyer Interest
Intent data providers pave the path for you to analyze the intent customer signals to identify the actively researching companies for your solution.
The content consumption habits of a prospect can provide insights into this prospect’s interests.
2. Get An Edge Over Your Competitors.
Intent data can indicate when businesses are looking at competitors’ products or services. So, you can even compete for business that you could have otherwise lost.
3. Generate And Prioritize Leads In A Systematic Way
Intent data will help your organization engage with potential customers and generate leads from users ready to buy but who haven’t directly interacted with your team.
Having the intent data, your sales and marketing teams can dynamically filter outreach lists.
Predictive purchase data provided by intent data providers will help you have a systematic, disciplined approach to prioritizing prospect and account targeting & scoring.
4. Collect High-quality Leads
Traditional sales contact databases contain demographic, firmographic, and technographic information.
Intent data providers, on the other hand, can give you valuable assets to prioritize customers that demonstrate an active purchase intent for your product. So, you can focus on marketing qualified leads.
5. Personalize Your Marketing Initiatives
Your marketing and sales teams can better personalize initial outreach with resources that match the accounts looking for solutions to the problems you solve.
You’ll be more equipped to craft relevant and personalized content that will resonate with your target prospects.
6. Help You Focus On The Fruit-bearing Path
Isn’t it easy to be blindsided by customers who failed to renew your product or the ones who bought an offering from a competitor they didn’t know you had?
With the assistance of intent data providers, you’ll have the right knowledge about your potential customers so you can direct your energy in the right sales direction.
7. Sell Proactively Through Account Targeting
Intent data providers can identify a vast amount of contacts so that you can leverage that data to sell your product proactively using account targeting.
Knowing which accounts are primed to spend, you can create and launch highly targeted demand generation campaigns for leads in that particular decision stages of the buyer’s journey.
Also, pivoting to an ABM (account-based marketing) strategy based on data, not aspiration alone, will bless your business with a long, fruitful life.
8. Do More Efficient Prospecting
Assessing the full spectrum of intent signals and focusing on the most likely buying triggers, you can calculate more effective sales and marketing plans.
You’ll be able to orchestrate better brand and demand generation activities.
9. Better Your Predictive Capabilities
Intent data providers are proficient in monitoring the changes in market engagement and can therefore help you keep your marketing strategies in line with the day’s demands.
You’ll be better apt at identifying changes in customer sentiment and notifying the sales and service teams to prevent any unlikely circumstance.
10. Improve Sales Intelligence
Source: Yourfreetemplates
Intent service providers share contextual insights about their target accounts and prospects. This helps garner more interest-based segmentation of leads who can then be targeted with specific emails or ad campaigns based on the topics the leads have indicated.
With increased data consumption, you can better target individual buying team members with timely, relevant messaging and content.
Moreover, through buyer data, you can more accurately predict the pipeline and improve your sales team’s performance helping to make a substantial, attributable pipeline impact.
You can always optimize your programmatic marketing, advertising, and lead generation campaigns with organized customer data.
Why Should You Be Using Intent Data?
Sales and marketing teams rely on intent data to ensure accurate segmentation, go-to-market strategies, and personalized outreach to the right prospects.
Armed with these behavioural signals, they can then prioritize accounts spiking on relevant topics over equally qualified accounts that don’t show intent. Thus, when used correctly, B2B intent data boost conversions and sales.
Organizations that can collect and use online intent data can reach buyers much earlier in the process and guide the prospect’s decision-making process.
What’s the best part?
You can do this before a competitor even knows about your prospect’s interest.
So, if you’re a forward-thinking company, buying intent indicators are a huge opportunity that you just can’t miss.
Wrapping Up
Customer journeys are ever-evolving, and so are the customer targeting techniques of businesses. You need to evolve with the newsies in the market to give your business an extra edge in creating a better customer experience.
Intent data is the ‘new’ that can give your business a major boost with its power to scale your product’s demand generation. It can fuel the entire B2B & B2C marketing ecosystems by improving the team’s operational efficiency and overall program performance.
By understanding and leveraging intent data, you can construct effective media programs to reach buyers in the market for your solutions. Simply put, investment in intent data pays off in stronger overall marketing performance.
So, when are you contacting an intent data provider to leverage your business or oh! perhaps they should reach out to you because now you have the intent to avail their service?
Gaurav Roy
22 June 2021
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