What if you could identify and engage the strongest leads at the perfect moment? Enter intent data: the key to aligning your sales and marketing strategy with true buyer interest. In this article, we’ll define intent data and explore how you can leverage it to transform your approach to prioritizing leads, personalizing outreach, and driving conversions. You’ll learn the what, why, and how from the experts at Predictiv Data.
Understanding Intent Data: A Comprehensive Overview
Buyers are incredibly overwhelmed online, and standing out from competitors is more critical than ever. Intent data helps your brand be in the right place, at the right time, with the right message to best connect with your ideal buyers.
What Is Intent Data?
Intent data synthesizes your target audience’s online behaviors into data points that signal potential future actions as they research, consider, and purchase a product or service. When sourced and used appropriately, intent data uncovers critical buying impulses, guiding sales and marketing teams toward qualified prospects with perfectly crafted messages in hand. When you understand what your buyers need, you can serve them relevant information on a silver platter to cultivate interest in your offering and ultimately land more deals.
Intent data providers usually sort collected data points into three categories:
- Commercial data: Provides insights into a prospect’s research patterns and purchasing activities.
- Content data: Offers information on a prospect’s engagement levels with different types of content.
- Behavioral data: Helps identify a prospect’s online behavior and preferences.
When you examine these three data sets, you can glean valuable insights into your target audience’s activity and customize your marketing and sales efforts accordingly. Personalization is key to impactful messaging, and intent data allows you to fine-tune your outreach for maximum impact.
First-Party Vs. Third-Party Intent Data
First-party intent data is information collected about the audience or customers from interactions with a company’s own digital properties. This data is highly relevant and specifically tailored to your company’s needs. The advantages of first-party data include direct data collection and sole ownership.
On the other hand, third-party intent data is information collected from outside sources that provides a broader view of a buyer’s intent. Third-party data is collected by monitoring buyers across various external websites. This expanded buying data allows companies to gain insights into potential leads by observing online behaviors across different digital platforms.
A balance of both data types can provide a unified view of the customer journey, enabling a more informed sales and marketing strategy that helps you increase efficiency and efficacy.
The Power Of Buyer Intent Data
Growing a pipeline as a B2B organization can be a major challenge, and by nature, it relies heavily on outreach. Unfortunately, contacts are inundated day in and day out with inquiries and offers, and if you’re not strategic, your requests to connect will fall flat. As your prospects move from awareness to consideration, they’ll start indicating they have the intent to purchase — and with the right messaging, you can be a key player they consider and ultimately select.
While some businesses continue to purchase contact information, a name, email address, and phone number only tell you who they are with little to no consideration of their purchasing intent. With intent data, your sales and marketing teams will have an intimate understanding of what each potential lead is looking for and where they are in the sales funnel so you can enter their buying journey with the right approach at the right time.
Analyzing data streams can reveal buyer intent signals that indicate what stage of the buying process a prospect is in. This knowledge allows sales and marketing teams to craft highly targeted messages that significantly influence potential customers’ purchasing journeys. Buyer intent data is instrumental for empowering winning go-to-market teams, enabling a quicker and more efficient road to adding logos.
Identifying And Targeting High-Value Target Accounts With Intent Data
Intent data provides marketing and sales teams with target accounts actively researching solutions, allowing for more strategic prioritization. Instead of pursuing a massive number of leads with low chances of converting, you can isolate your efforts on leads that are more likely to become your customers.
Using Intent Signals To Uncover In-Market Buyers
Contact information is all well and good, but if you don’t intimately connect with your ideal buyer, your messaging and sales pitches won’t resonate. Intent signals help pinpoint in-market buyers so you can focus your efforts on leads that are closer to making a purchasing decision. Intent data allows you to uncover the most timely opportunities by identifying and targeting prospects who are:
- Actively searching for a solution, indicating their readiness to make a purchase
- Researching relevant topics
- Engaging with the content you or your competitors put out
If a lead isn’t in the market, that’s okay—you can funnel those contacts into a longer, lower-pressure warming cycle. Intent data allows you to tailor your approach to each unique lead, allowing you to balance your marketing and sales teams’ efforts and streamline your approach.
Account-Based Marketing Strategies With Intent Data
As account-based marketing (ABM) becomes a more popular method for engaging leads, intent data can help outreach teams break through the noise. By incorporating intent data into ABM campaigns, businesses can increase the effectiveness of their outreach, nurture stronger relationships with target accounts, and ultimately drive higher conversion rates and revenue.
Lead Scoring With Intent Data
Mapping out how your sales team will score leads can be a major challenge, and if it’s not done right, you’re more likely to exert effort on leads with little promise. With intent data, you can assign points based on a contact’s typical online behavior, content consumption patterns, and engagement with marketing materials. Strategic lead scoring can also ensure everyone’s on the same page across all departments. By assigning scores to leads based on their demonstrated intent, marketing and sales teams can efficiently allocate resources and focus efforts on high-potential prospects, maximizing the effectiveness of your outreach efforts.
Implementing Intent Data For Seamless Marketing & Sales Processes
Once you’ve identified which accounts and leads to target, intent data can shape the tactics you use throughout all your marketing and sales processes. With an objective source of truth, your go-to-market teams can work together like never before.
It can be all too easy to turn off a potential lead in the earliest stages of discovery. With intent data, marketers can craft more strategic messaging tailored to ideal customers’ preferences and needs. Once an MQL is passed along to sales personnel, intent data can be used to further improve conversion performance. From identifying high-priority accounts to personalizing outreach, intent data can fuel the success of your sales strategies.
When marketing and sales teams are aligned, they’re more likely to capture and close leads.
Build Brand Awareness Through Personalized Marketing Campaigns
In an increasingly connected world, personalization is key to winning customers’ hearts — and that starts with creating solid buyer personas. With a data-backed understanding of your customers’ buying impulses, you can segment your audience based on shared characteristics, needs, and pain points.
Armed with rich personas, you can enhance personalization in marketing campaigns based on your leads’ specific interests through targeted messaging. For example, if you’re pushing out an ad on LinkedIn, you can deploy multiple variants with different targeting criteria based on each persona’s unique needs. Or, if you’ve gleaned that a lead is close to requesting more information, you can offer a downloadable guide tailored to their search behaviors. Intent data allows you to adapt to each audience’s (or even each unique lead’s) behavior so you see maximum ROI from your campaigns.
Improve Close Rates With Data-Informed Lead Cultivation
When it comes to lead generation, intent data serves as a powerful ally. It enhances the identification of ideal customers and buying contacts, along with providing updated buying intent signals for prompt and relevant follow-ups. Improving close rates is about being proactive, staying one step ahead of your leads, and being ready to engage them at exactly the right time.
By utilizing intent data, businesses can gain deeper insights into their ideal targets’ buying journeys. Equipped with this data, sales teams will have the upper hand against competitors in personalizing their outreach efforts, delivering helpful information at exactly the right time to build stronger relationships.
Every lead is a potential customer, and intent data helps you to engage them in the most effective way possible across your sales and marketing pipelines.
Leverage Best-In-Class Unified Intent Data With Predictiv
At Predictiv, we’re all about empowering your marketing and sales teams to run more efficiently and confidently. We offer a proprietary intent data platform that enables businesses like yours to find and convert in-market buyers using intent-powered intelligence and demand programs. Our approach to intent data revolves around a unified intent model that blends first and third-party demand intelligence so you can better understand your buyers and accelerate revenue growth.
Want to see Predictiv in action? Get a demo or start for free.