Before you intend to engage your potential customers in the buying journey, there are chances that they are more than halfway through already. This is why mending your intentions and targets according to their behavioral intent data should be a part of your plan.
With this, let’s understand the much-hyped importance of user intent for marketing success. The latest key phrase in the B2B customer data repository. So, what is B2B intent data?
Intent data is all the information about a buyer’s intentions. It contains data regarding what, where, and how a buyer thinks, prefers, refers, compares, analyzes, uses, experiences, extracts, combines, discusses, infers, decides, and purchases. The B2B intent database refers to the ultimate buying intention, from where it develops, leads and proceeds, engages, and ends.
All of this has a lot to do with cognition and consumer psychology. Let’s be precise. It is in fact, cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the mind as an information processor. And this is exactly what marketers are doing – studying the mind of the prospective buyer through user intent data, which is a real-time indicator of buyer interest. How will B2B companies engage with a potential customer in their buying journey? That’s no rocket science. Buyer intent data offers a wealth of opportunities to marketers and is intelligently reinventing the marketing funnel.
Why Is Customer Intent Data Important?
The reason why a buyer is investing in your product or service is one of the most crucial factors of the buyer’s journey. This is where customer intent data comes into play. Deck 7 has come up with the top suggestions to realize the importance of customer intent data and its role in service and product marketing.
Content Creation and Optimization
Content is the most performing method for reaching your audience and gather the required information. Using different forms like written or visual content works for most buyers. When you have clear and concise marketing intent data then you can create content that your audience will relate to and can be optimized further for increased sales.
Discover Customer-Centric Solutions
Knowing exactly what your customer is looking for and presenting just that helps you in converting that prospect into a customer. Intent data for B2B companies is undoubtedly a growing technique for creating solutions that directly solve the customer’s problems. With this, the customer gets the solution and you get to retain your business with them.
Focused Advertising
How you present your offering to the customer is completely your choice. But when you invest or purchase intent data, you are in a better place to judge what kind of advertising will work and what won’t. With the correct intent data, you are able to create advertising campaigns suitable to each client and industry.
Improve Lead Quality
The organization assembles different types of data. But not all of it is valid for a prolonged time. Hence to market to the right audience and convert prospects that invest in your offerings, you need to make use of intent data. With information about an audience that will purchase your product or service, you are able to improve the quality of your leads.
Types of B2B Intent Data
There is a lot of data that is bound to get accumulated over a period of time. Segregating it is crucial for a better use of this information. B2B marketing intent data can be classified into the following types:
Internal Intent Data or 1st Party Intent Data
The first and more common type is the internal intent data. This type of intent data is the information that companies capture by tracking their website, different marketing automation tools as well as CRM software. Since the buyer intent is collected directly through the number of visitors and engagements a campaign is getting first-party intent data helps in creating detailed, customized solutions for the buyers.
External Intent Data or 3rd Party Intent Data
This type of data is collected from external websites and other mediums. Third-party intent data is mainly compiled from websites cookies, user registrations, tracking IP traffic. Using this type of intent data companies are able to have a wider understating of their audience on the web as the data is collected from various sites and sources. Organizations use this data to run specific ad campaigns, publish personalized content, and more.
When Is User Intent Data Relevant for B2B Marketers?
User intent is powerful only when it is used correctly. Its practicality is known when companies have a suitable service or product that targets a particular audience. Without a set of target audience (TA) intent data is invalid. This is where the question of how to find intent data for your business arises.
These instances help you recognize when is user intent data relevant for B2B marketers.
- Lengthy and complex sales cycle – Intent data is valid for most cycles but it is the most relevant when the process is too long and unending
- Accurate processes to use the data – If your organization has the accurate tools to collect and store data
- Marketing and sales aim to reach a common goal – B2B intent data is applicable when marketing and sales teams have the aim of getting a client on board
How Can Marketers Utilize B2B Buyer Intent Data?
Your company might have a large amount of user data. The real question here is, how to use intent data? There's no denying that all the data you have collected is valid or there aren’t any problems with B2B intent data. But if acknowledged correctly there are ways to use the buyer’s information to your advantage.
The best way to leverage intent data is through the following steps:
- Find and identify what the prospect is trying to search (keywords, phrases, a combination of words, etc.)
- Write quality content specifically on what the prospect is searching for
- Promote the content on all the channels that the prospect is exploring
- Analyze the 'where to' and 'where from' in the buyer journey
- Examine all nodes of engagement and place a call to action
- Monitor changes and instances of engagement that take place
- Nurture the lead generated and establish the account
Use of Intent Data for a Defined Customer Analysis
Data-driven marketing with user intent has gained a new meaning in this digital era. There are more than ever intent-based data centers being developed that make sure buyer information is recorded and stored in a more systematic format.
More than 40% of B2B marketers use intent data in B2B for these key reasons:
- to identify the current phase of a buyer in the buying journey
- to identify stakeholders within target accounts
- to help marketing and sales teams prioritize and target key accounts
- to track deals back to campaigns they originated from
- to identify focus areas to create content on
- to engage a company in an active buying cycle before competitors
The true value from intent data can be obtained only when the prospective buyer is targeted at the awareness stage and be an integral part of the buyer journey thereon. With the consistent evolution in technology and the use of digital media, intent data will be put to the right use and leveraged in the right capacity. It will pave the way for scaling leads and nurturing each key account in a customized fashion.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is B2B intent data?
B2B intent data gives you an in-depth understanding of an individual's purchase intent online. This lets you recognize whether and when someone is actually considering, or interested in buying your services or products.
What is buyer intent data?
Buyer intent data is the pool of information that is gathered before any purchasing action takes place. This type of data mainly consists of buyer engagement and purchase intent.
What is intent data?
Intent data is a set of information about an audience consisting of what they are interested in thus predicting what they would say, buy, or react to. When an individual visits a website online, they are likely to show their intent to the marketer.