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As a marketer trying to create impact, if you search for the best marketing strategies, then intent-based marketing is a must-have skill. It is an exciting application of Big Data Marketing to the field of B2B Marketing.
Here is a deep dive into intent-based B2B marketing and why it is considered the future of B2B marketing!
The key challenges faced by B2B Marketers:
• Multiple decision-makers have varying levels of influence on purchase decisions. B2B marketers need to navigate and find the most influential decision-makers who will be open to their offerings.
• Marketers also have to assume that their competition is in the same boat.
• How do marketers identify if an organization is actively looking out for the services/products they offer?
Do you know who is interested in your product/service across the globe? What if you can pitch them your product at the right moment? This is possible with the help of intent-based marketing.
Data Vs Intent Data:
Acquiring data about customers is not enough. Are your customers right now “intending to purchase”? The data about potential customer’s intent is the essence of “intent-data” marketing.
Data may indicate past behaviors, but that alone is insufficient to create customized marketing campaigns required today. Your potential B2B marketing strategy depends on the “Intent” a customer has today.
Intent data gives you direction and action inputs for customers with respect to the time duration of the purchasing process, typical steps involved, their preferences, etc.
Intent-based B2B marketing prepares you to customize your offering for the incoming prospect. According to Google, 57% of research about purchases happens before potential leads even land on your website. This means that if you are not aware of their prior research, you are missing out on your customer’s thought process. In a B2B space, this can be a deal-breaker.
Intent-based marketing is a marketing strategy for high-quality lead generation by putting the purchaser’s intent or target client in the front. In other words, we can say that you are aware of-
1. What to do? (Should we send an email, should we send a product offer or just an awareness campaign?)
2. When to do? (Right time to send product offers?)
As a result, you hit the sweet-spot exactly when your potential client is searching for your offerings.
Let us take a real-world example of B2B intent-based marketing:
If you sell CRM solutions to construction companies, then intent-based marketing can help you in the following ways:
◦ Using third-party intent data, you can check who is searching online for “Best CRM Solution for construction companies”. This gives you the target customer profile. Based on the following research parameters:
◦ Search terms used: What keywords are your B2B Customers using in their query? This helps you customize your email/marketing communication when creating your potential customer’s first contact.
For example, suppose the customer is looking for “CRM with Office integration”. In that case, it is a perfect opportunity to send an email emphasizing the fantastic Office integration your CRM provides.
◦ Browsing details: What content are your B2B potential accounts looking for? This helps you to funnel your marketing collateral towards their choice. Creating a personalized message depends on potential B2B accounts’ patterns, their language, and their preferences.
If potential customers search for white papers, you should offer them white papers once they land on your website / choose to give you their email address.
◦ Channel Monitoring: Which channels are your potential accounts using to make purchase decisions? Actions your target market takes give you insight into the experience they are searching for, allows you to guide them to relevant sections of your offerings.
For example:- Is your customer is landing on your website from Quora, then they probably searching for some answers related to your product domain. Guide them to blogs or customer testimonials section on your website.
◦ Organization Segmentation: The person with purchase intent belongs to which organization? There are high chances that individuals searching for B2B services are doing so to give their managers/boss/owner feedback. If you can identify the organization, then you can customize your approach to lead generation.
Types of Intent-Data
After knowing intent-data B2B marketing for a lead generation, let us know about the two types of intent-data and their unique advantages.
• Internal Intent Data / First-Party intent data
• External Intent Data / Third-Party intent data
Internal Intent Data / First-Party intent data
First-party intent data is the type of data that is derived when your target/potential customer visits your company platforms such as website, CRM software, etc. It plays an important role in identifying highly active pages, customer preferences, lead generation, and lead prioritization. This data is useful as it is created with your own tools, and you have complete control over all the details. However, this data is also limited.
It means you are missing out on a large part of the decision-making process, which happens outside your company domains. Like we mentioned earlier, more than 57% of purchase information gathering happens outside the company-specific domain. Though first-party intent data is extremely important, it is in no way sufficient to accelerate your sales cycle. And this is where external intent data / third-party intent data comes in handy.
External Intent Data / Third Party intent data
There are various publishers who have B2B network tie-ups. They create account-specific data with the help of different service offerings. Website cookies, email lists, user registration on-site, and traffic monitoring are some of the data points used by these platforms to generate intent data.
Data from such providers help in identifying your ideal target customer. Going through the most read blogs/articles, comments posted, downloads of white papers, a search performed gives you an idea about what your potential B2B market is doing.
It also helps you in giving some direction about various decision-makers and their roles. Account-based marketing can then use this data to customize their campaign.
There is one important reason why people buy this data – it is time-consuming to process raw data. Rather than sorting through thousands or millions of rows, it is much better to buy this data from experts. They have already done the work you need. Digitalzone creates solutions for you that help you improve your sales conversions. To explore how our experts can contribute to your growth, feel free to connect with us!
Source- Bombora
Benefits of using Intent Data for B2B Marketing:
Like any department, the marketing department receives a fixed budget and aims to create maximum budget results. With intent-based marketing, you are far likely to generate quality leads.
Using intent data helps you in the following ways:
1. High-quality data: Reduce noise, improve your lead data. Filtering low-quality leads takes time. Your sales team will be unproductive if they spend much of their time filtering raw data and trying to identify potential customers. Also, their morale will be down soon. Your sales team can focus only on the active leads with intent data, giving your team a much better chance of bagging the deal.
2. Be an Early Bird: Intent-based B2B marketing means you can outreach potential customers sooner in their purchasing cycle than other marketers. Your sales team can start nurturing the leads earlier, giving them a much higher affinity and personalized connection with potential customers. A custom email/business proposal shows that you understand the pain point of your potential buyer.
3. Reach out to leads. Don’t wait for them to reach out: As mentioned earlier, more than 50% of your potential buyers are researching buying process on the internet. They have not yet landed on your website, so your marketing /sales funnel is not useful. When you combine account-based marketing with intent-based marketing, you become aware of what solutions are your potential market searching for.
4. Lead Scoring: your lead scoring model gets better with intent data. When you take efforts to qualify your leads, you are chances of conversions go higher.
5. Personalised Outreach: Who does not love a message that connects to personal preferences? Your potential B2B customer is far more likely to open your email, respond to your marketing campaign, or even set up a meeting if you are speaking about their pain points. With intent data, you can create genuine, personalized proposals addressing your potential client’s specific needs.
Finally, if nothing else convinced you, then probably this fact will:
Google values the intent of the content and keeps it on a pedestal. Help people solve their problems, and you would be far ahead in the game of intent-based B2b marketing.
