How B2B Marketers Use Buyer Intent Data to their Advantage

buyerIntentData

Buyer intent data is increasingly becoming a useful asset for B2B marketers to optimize their business endeavors. B2B buyer intent data signals can be captured with the help of powerful MarTech tools and can be used to optimize the qualified leads, improve outbound sales pitches, optimize account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, and for reducing the average industry churn rates.

Indeed, the buyer intent tool is vital to create a more personalized pitch, engage with the right customers at the right time, to drive the sales team to grow your revenue.

Buyer intent data helps salespersons tackle one of the most challenging parts of sales or marketing, i.e. finding quality leads. Popular intent data signals include clicks on the social media ads, total visits on the website of a company, returning visits on a website, average time on a webpage of the website, and the number of people who have subscribed to the email newsletters.

According to HubSpot, 61% of marketers say that generating traffic and leads is the toughest part of their jobs.

B2B intent data provides your business with a list of highly qualified leads that you can send to your sales team. The data can also be used to create retargeting endeavors.

Reachdesk is amongst some of the companies that have used buyer intent data to their competitive advantage. Their website is visited by roughly 500 companies per month and 350 fit their ICP. 50 of these ideal customer profiles on average have been entirely new. That means teams are continuously being armored with new resources to optimize the way they market their products and services.

Utilizing the intent data of the customers helps the customers move through the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the buying process while providing them with personalized experiences at each stage which ultimately helps them in accelerating the conversions.

Buyer intent comes down to understanding what makes an excellent lead for your business. By leveraging a holistic perception of buyer intent, marketing & salespersons’ teams can optimize their lead qualification process and can optimize the conversions.

To attract ideal leads, salespeople must prioritize customers’ needs, wants, and interests at the center of your marketing campaigns.

Optimizing the customers’ experiences is a leading priority for modern businesses and the customers’ intent data helps customers in looking for a comprehensive solution to their problem. People in sales must capture the buyers’ intent data holistically, in a way that helps improve your content marketing endeavors. It also helps teams increase customer conversion rates and minimize the cost of customer acquisition.

How Intent Data Makes Marketing Customer-Centric

Leveraging the intent data of the customers helps optimize brand communication, products, and customer service. Customer experience has become a top priority for modern businesses.

Businesses opt for a customer-centric approach by providing their clients with the right products and services to make the right business decisions at the right time, using the right channels to accurately address the pain points of the customers. Several data analytics tools can be used to measure the marketing efforts of the customers. Metrics such as Demographic information, Keyword searches, Engagement rates, Email open rates, and Behavioral data help the business personnel decrypt the success of their marketing campaigns.

Leads, customer behavior, and buyer journey constitute the core elements of a customer-centric marketing campaign. The customers’ intent data can broadly be classified into two categories: internal/first-party intent data and external/third-stakeholder intent data.

Tools To Capture the Intent Data

1. Leadfeeder

This tool captures buyers’ intent and allows you to capture the intent of your website visitors and analyze what they are doing there. The tool has a wide range of features ranging from basic to customizable. This allows users to sort companies based on location, behavior, company demographics, etc.

Price: the basic version is priced at $63 a month for premium.

Uses can sort their favorable companies based on location, company, and demographics.

Leadfeeder integrates with other tools such as CRMs, Zapier, and email marketing tools. These integrations provide an overview of your sales and marketing efforts across omnichannel.

The Leadfeeder comes with a 14-day free trial.

2. ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is a business database designed to give users a 360-view of customers, prospects, and leadership opportunities.

It is a powerful tool that helps businesses understand and tailor their marketing efforts to the needs and wants of their customers.

Price: The free trial is followed by a charge of $4,900 annually and covers up to 5,000 contacts.

This power helps businesses understand their audience’s wants and needs so that accordingly they can tailor their marketing endeavors. ZoomInfo extension for Google Chrome also helps get quick views of the potential customers in your browser of choice.

3. KickFire

With KickFire the businesses have access to the first stakeholder’s intent data and this tool also keeps a track of the anonymous website visitors by capturing their IP addresses. The pricing varies vastly depending upon the number of users.

The intent data from audience groups can be tracked by KickFire to identify anonymous audience groups through the IP addresses. The marketing and sales teams can then use this data to deliver personalized content and optimize the sales outreach.

The several versions of the tool include Live Leads and KickFire for Google, which integrates with Google Marketing.

KickFire provides diverse data which can be tracked from multiple tools and then used.

4. DemandJump

This MarTech tool removes the blind spots in customers’ journeys and allows them to see a holistic picture of the customers’ buying cycle. The activities of the prospects across the web can be tracked. The websites that the prospects visit and the terms they search for can be tracked.

Business personnel can also search for the keywords that their competitors rank for and what type of content are they publishing to get ahead.

Pricing: The pricing starts at $99 per month for 25 keywords and covers 3 competitors. This tool is extremely beneficial though can be costly at times.

TechTarget Priority Engine

The pricing of this tool is customizable & the tool provides the businesses with real-time access to leads. The leads are also ranked by purchase intent and engagement level. Companies can use the information to optimize their ABM campaigns and to prepare contextual content. This tool provides contact information for leads and is slightly expensive compared to other tools. Many customers report difficulty in determining what information contacts engaged with and when they engaged with it.

TechTarget Priority Engine improves your branding endeavors by providing direct access to real consumers at priority-ranked accounts. This tool supports what shoppers do and helps them close deals faster. Buyers receive valuable insights into what active accounts in their territory do. Inbound Converter helps convert website visitors into opportunities and enriches shoppers with the purchase intent insights to help them close more leads.

For pricing details, one needs to post an inquiry on their official website.

Collecting Buyer Intent Data Optimizes the Success of Your Lead Generation Endeavors

Once the buyer intent signals are collected from different sources with a high volume of quality traffic to leverage insights, it helps the brands optimize the success of their lead generation endeavors.

Salespeople running successful pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are acquainted with the power of lead gen fueled by buyers’ actions or clicks on third-party websites such as Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp.

The future of B2B lead gen and buyer intent data expands the traditional capturing pool. The buyers’ data is captured before any action takes place. Intent data provides insights into buyer engagement and purchase intent. Once that data is collected from the source with a high volume of quality traffic, this can be leveraged to boost your sales advantage.

How Buyers Can Optimize Their Sales Outreach

Prospects spend 50% of their time seeking information from third-party sources, which depicts the research from Gartner. Sales teams normally wait for shoppers to complete an action or contact form to identify the interests of the prospects. With the buyer intent signals, it becomes possible for prospects to uncover prospect movement and prioritize the outreach based on the intent indicators.

Gartner: End-User Buyer Survey

Intent Data Guides Sales and Marketing Messages

The buyer intent can be strategically used to target the in-market prospects and turn them into quality leads. Quality intent data can provide the B2B business people with an insight into prospect research history including specific companies and products. This information can be used to get an edge over the competitors and craft messages ahead of your competitors.

By the end of the year 2022, more than 70% of B2B marketers will use the third-party intent data to target prospects and engage with the groups of buyers in selected accounts, states Gartner.

Initial sales and marketing outreach commonly include generic tactics, product information, and offerings because of the limited information available to the prospects. Buyer intent signals can be used by teams to identify where the respective shoppers are in their purchase journey. This enables salespersons to adapt to targeted marketing messages and sales pitches and helps them better align with the specific interest signals that buyers leave across the third-party sites.

Intent Data to Reduce Churn Rate

Brands need to continue to leverage buyer intent data even after the prospects convert to clients. For this, they must monitor intent signals to identify clients who are looking for alternative solutions or competitors. This information most probably indicates the target audience groups who might need additional attention or support.

Whenever the clients are searching for additional or alternative solutions on third-party websites, it happens because a particular product failed to fulfill a specific need. Salespeople must set up triggers to request feedback from clients to identify gaps, guide future product development, and reduce churn.

The buyer intent data fetched from a reliable, high-traffic volume resource is absolutely priceless and should be used across many facets of an organization. Businesspeople need to offer their teams access to intent data to allow them to increase their efficiency, encourage them to make decisions backed by data, and for them to be able to create a more comprehensive sales strategy.

Capturing the Buyer Intent in B2B Marketing

Capturing the buyer intent for your business typically involves the steps underlined below:

1. Analyzing Your Sales Funnel

Analysis of the sales funnel begins with tracing the process that the buyers go through before committing to a purchase. The modern B2B buyers have typically identified their problem before they decide to enter the sales funnel.

Typically, a buyer’s journey varies depending upon the organization & the industry and this is the usual process that a lead follows to make a purchase. The steps involved in a typical buyer’s journey are:

  1. Interest
  2. Consideration
  3. Decision and
  4. Purchase

2. Tracing the Touchpoints

Modern buyers do a lot of online research before making initial inquiries. Pre-packaged sales solutions are no longer useful. The research conducted by the buyers leaves behind “digital footprints” or touchpoints (intent data). Every website visited by a buyer, the websites read by them and their online actions can give the respective brands an idea about their motivation and purpose.

By determining the buyer intent using the customer touchpoints, businesspeople focus on engaging prospects to buy from them. Data can also be used by business people to gain a competitive edge over other businesses.

3. Leveraging Third-Party Vendors

Capturing external intent data involves using tools to track the offsite activities of the users. Examples of traceable metrics include analysis of competitor’s website data, online subscriptions, keywords, and product reviews.

During the initial stages of research, the analytics platform can gather data on users’ search behavior, content engagement, and social media behavior to empower you with buyer intent insights. Businesspeople need to combine their data with their internal data to form a holistic view of their buyers and get a more accurate view of buyers’ journey maps.

4. Start with a Purpose Upfront

Project your purpose in front of your target audience groups. Reiterate your target audience groups, why they need the resolution that you have to offer. Follow the Golden Circle by Simon Sinek and answer the buyers’ questions in the order:

  1. Why do your target audience groups need the resolution that you have to offer?
  2. How will you achieve what you have promised?
  3. What does a particular Company need?

Prioritizing your buyers’ perspectives and showcasing your purpose and value proposition will allow you to optimize your relevancy and value proposition.

5. Use the Buyer Intent Data to Sculpt A Winning Content Marketing Strategy

Brands need to understand how they can make the best use of the data that they have at their disposal. They must learn how to use intent data to play their cards and win the deals. Using the buyer intent data can help brands improve their content marketing, lead generation, copywriting, and key optimization tactics so that can they can engage with the prospects at an optimal time.

Businesspeople need to question themselves why their buyers are reading their weekly blog content. What are the prime motivations behind them downloading their e-books? They also need to figure out why the viewers on the website are visiting their product and service pages.

Understanding the buyers’ intent helps the sales and marketing teams to magically tune their content strategy and identify which stages of the buyers’ cycles their customers are in. Accordingly, the marketing team can create educational or informational content to push their target audience groups to take desired actions.

The relevancy and value of the content can be improved using educational and informational content. Marketers can optimize their content strategies along all the stages viz. Awareness, Consideration, and Purchase stage.

Intent data provides leads with the resources required to encourage them to continue their journey. Buyer intent data can be used by the users to map their keyword strategies. When seeking the keyword opportunities, one must answer the question: “Why do the businesses are using specific keywords to search for their products and services online?”

Wrap Up

Intent data has better power to supercharge conversions. Marketers must first collect the buyer intent signals from sources with a high volume of quality traffic to leverage insights and optimize the success of your conversion tactics. The marketers who are running a successful PPC campaign already realize the power of lead generation fueled by buyer actions or clicks or third-party sites like Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice.

Buyer intent data holds the future of B2B lead generation and expands the traditional prospect pool by capturing valuable buyer data before any action takes place. Intent data provides insights into buyer engagement and purchase intent. Whenever data is collected from a source with a high volume of quality traffic, it can be effectively leveraged to boost your sales advantage.

Valasys Media is a pioneer name amongst the B2B Media Publishers to advise and help you with an array of B2B marketing solutions. For any assistance or advice feel free to get in touch.

Leave a Reply