Hit the Bull’s Eyes: Bringing in Intent Data Into Buyer’s Journey

Intent data is comparatively a new term that has been doing the rounds in recent years. To put it simply, intent data is all the information that you require to understand the needs of your prospective client and prevent him from chancing upon your competitor. It is when accounts or individuals are looking for information on a particular product or service. In the age of the internet, research shows that buyers complete almost half of their search on the product of their choice online before they actually meet a salesperson. While they browse through several online sites and form opinions and become more aware of the product of their choice, they unknowingly create digital footprints or what is called buyer intent data.

As a marketeer, you monitor their online activities and their search trends and what you get is what forms the previous knowledge about your future client. If you wish to solve and help out your customers much ahead than the others, intent data is something that you need to be concentrating on.

Intent data also plays an important role in android components for transferring or communicating data from information providers to services.

Intent data can be roughly divided into 2 types: internal and external. The internal intent data is also known as first-party data. This data consists of buying trends, the pages and links the users visited and other details like how long a user spent on a certain web page and so on.

On the other hand, external intent data, also known as the third-party data monitors the types of articles the users read, the nature of the content they save for later use as well as some of the comments that some users leave at times. The external intent data is available through multiple data providers available in the market.

Before you understand how to use intent data, you must be aware of how intent data can be obtained. While there are vendors that provide you with data, you must be aware that data can be collected both anonymously as well as through voluntary methods by allowing users to fill out forms for you.

Intent data predicts what a client is about to do next. This information can boost up your sales and extend your clientele within a short period of time. Tracking intent data helps sales and marketing teams to understand and plan when and how to engage with prospective clients. However, for that to happen, you must be well aware of how to cash in on the intent data.

The following are some of the ways in which you can utilise intent data to improve your performance and boost your marketing techniques:

1. Streamlining According to Interest: once you are in possession of intent data, your marketing and sales teams can sit together and categorise them on the basis of product and active interest. For example, the data can be classified based on the nature of products as well as on the urgency of purchase. Doing this will give you and your members clarity on the task at hand.

2. Helps to Engage with Customers much earlier: unlike yesteryears when the only time you would get to know what your client wants would be when he came up to you personally and enquired about it, using intent data can help you engage with customers and potential clients much before in their journey of purchasing a product.

3. Enhance Personalisation: once you know the needs of your client, creating the product should be a cakewalk. By knowing the nature and requirements of your client, you can personalise the product using resources that match the interest of the clients. Intent data especially helps for companies targeting anonymous visitors.

4. Marketing and Advertising on the basis of Intent Data: intent data can help marketing companies advertise the products accordingly. Advertising can become quite a hard task without knowing the clients. However, if the intent data can be procured, advertisements can be targeted as per the needs.

5. Identifying Potential Customers: once your vendor provides you with intent data, you can trace out your potential customers and start planning marketing strategies to rope them in.

6. Recognising Shortcoming: once you identify what your client needs, you also identify how much you can cater to their needs and the areas where you need to improve and improvise. Therefore, intent data not only helps you in understanding your clients but also helps gain a better perspective about your own self as well as your team as well.

Monitoring intent data is increasing by the day. More and more organisations are indulging in this search to understand their ‘Total Interested Market’. Thus, to help these organisations, multiple B2B marketing data providers are slowly seeing the light of the day. While you choose from the long list, make sure you do a little research on each one of them as some of them are known to be scam providers as well. Some of the well-known B2B intent data companies are:

1. Bombora: this is believed to be the most popular intent data provider in the market today. They believe in sustainability marketing. Four years into the job, they indulge in Historical Buyer Journey analysis and help sales and marketing teams to identify the needs of clients. In the year 2018, DiscoverOrg, a leading sales and marketing intelligence solution company got into a partnership with Bombora to provide buyers with more accurate digital intent signals.

2. Tech Target: an American based company, Tech Target boasts of over 140 websites focussing on technology. They help business organisations reach buyers in the field of IT products and related services.

3. The Big Willow: founded in 2013, The Big Willow engages deeply with the buying journey and identifies specific search patterns and suitable vendors.

4. IDG: IDG or the International Data Group is a Chinese owned company that helps clients across the world to make wise purchase decisions with regards to technology.

Once your intent data is in place, marketing not only becomes easier but also more effective. Companies can customise marketing content on the basis of intent data and build a more direct and stronger bond between the intent of the user and the content of the marketeer. With more clarity achieved, the right keywords can be used, emails can be more privatised, and advertisements can become more relevant and other promotional strategies are privatised and marketing becomes more accurate and less solicited. Such accurate marketing ensures satisfied clients and products matching the tastes of buyers.

Even until a few years ago, knowing every detail about your potential buyer and the market almost seemed an impossible dream. But today, marketeers are well equipped with tools and techniques to track every move related to their buyer’s search history.

It can be said without a doubt that intent data increases the scalability of your product by giving you better and clearer insights into customer behaviour. No matter which part of the world you are in, if you are a buyer or a seller, you are bombarded with data at every minute. However, by predicting the next possible move of your buyer, you are already one step ahead in strategizing your business and cracking your next big deal.