What Is Intent Data in B2B
Intent data is a powerful tool for B2B businesses to identify potential buyers actively researching and considering purchasing their products or services. By leveraging this information, you can tailor your approach and messaging to better engage with your target audience, improve your conversion rates, and stay ahead of your competition.
The Types of Intent Data
There are two main types of intent data: first-party and third-party. First-party intent data is collected from a business’s digital properties, such as its website, email campaigns, or social media channels. This data includes user behavior information, such as visited pages, clicks, and downloads.
Third-party intent data, on the other hand, is collected by external data providers and includes information on user behavior across the internet, such as search queries, content consumption, and social media activity. Both types of intent data can be valuable for businesses to identify potential customers actively considering their products or services and personalize their sales and marketing efforts accordingly.
You could also consider second-party intent data, which would be the data you share with another company similar in its targeting.
Using Intent Data in B2B Environments
Utilizing intent data can aid in pinpointing potential customers who may be interested in your company’s additional products or services. To identify these prospects, watch for signals showing they are exploring new offerings, such as a surge in web traffic from their account or engagement with your content.
Here are some ways to use intent data in a B2B business:
- Fill your Sales Funnel: Use gated content or synced website forms to automatically fill your sales CRM and populate your sales funnel with prospects interested in your offerings. Since these prospects have voluntarily provided their information, they are often pre-qualified and more likely to be warm leads for your sales team.
- Prioritize sales efforts: With intent data, you can identify which prospects are more likely to convert into customers, allowing you to prioritize your sales efforts on the most promising leads.
- Enrolling prospects in personalized cadences: Which approach would be more effective: enrolling prospects in a one-size-fits-all cadence or tailoring them based on their interests?
- Personalize marketing campaigns: By analyzing intent data, you can gain insights into your prospects’ interests and preferences, which can help you create more personalized and targeted marketing campaigns. Read more about intent data and marketing.
- Optimize content: Intent data can provide valuable information about the content resonating with your target audience, allowing you to optimize your content marketing efforts to meet their needs better.
- Improve account-based marketing: Intent data can help you identify the companies and individuals actively researching your products or services. It allows you to tailor your account-based marketing efforts to their needs and interests.
- Enhance lead nurturing: Using intent data, you can better understand where prospects are in their buyer’s journey. This can help you tailor your lead nurturing efforts to their needs and interests.
- Automate your pipeline based on intent signals: You can choose customer actions on the website, content, or email and send them through the pipeline automatically.
Overall, intent data can provide valuable insights into your target audience’s interests and behaviors, allowing you to target your sales and marketing efforts better and ultimately drive more revenue for your B2B business.
High Intent Data
High-intent data indicates a prospect’s strong interest in a product or service, indicating they are in the late stages of the buyer’s journey and ready to purchase. This type of intent data is particularly valuable to businesses because it helps identify prospects more likely to convert into paying customers. These prospects have gone beyond simple browsing and are actively evaluating their options, making them prime candidates for targeted marketing efforts. High-intent data is collected by analyzing a prospect’s behavior, such as their online searches, website visits, and engagement with marketing materials.
Filling Your Sales Funnel With Quality Leads
One of the key goals of any sales and marketing team is to fill its sales funnel with quality leads. One effective way to achieve this is by utilizing gated content or synced website forms. These tools allow you to automatically collect information from prospects interested in your offerings, such as by downloading a whitepaper or filling out a form on your website. Since these prospects have voluntarily provided their contact information, they are often more engaged and qualified than other leads. This means they are more likely to be receptive to your sales efforts and may even be considered “warm leads.” By consistently filling your sales funnel with these types of leads, you can increase your chances of generating more sales and growing your business.
Prioritizing Your Prospects
Now your pipeline is filled with prospects, intent data can be a valuable tool in helping businesses prioritize their sales efforts. By analyzing various signals from potential customers, such as their online behavior, content consumption patterns, and engagement with marketing materials, businesses can gain insights into which prospects are most likely to convert into paying customers. With this information, businesses can focus their sales efforts on these high-priority leads, potentially increasing their conversion rates and sales efficiency.
Campaigns Based on Intent
When it comes to enrolling prospects in personalized campaigns, it is important to consider the effectiveness of a one-size-fits-all approach versus a tailored approach based on the prospect’s interests. While a one-size-fits-all cadence may be easier to set up, it may not resonate with prospects with different interests and needs. On the other hand, a tailored campaign can help to better engage prospects by providing them with content and messaging that aligns with their specific interests. By taking the time to understand a prospect’s interests and tailoring the cadence accordingly, businesses can increase the likelihood of success in converting them into customers.
Analyzing Content
Intent data can be crucial in optimizing content marketing efforts. By analyzing signals such as heatmaps, scroll depth, click-to-open rates, and more, businesses can gain valuable insights into what types of content are resonating with their target audience. This information can then be used to optimize existing content or to create new content that better meets the needs and interests of prospects. Businesses can increase engagement and drive more conversions by creating more relevant and valuable content for their audience. In this way, intent data can be a powerful tool in helping businesses to create more compelling content marketing strategies.
Better Prospect Nurturing
Lead nurturing is a critical part of the sales process, as it involves building relationships with potential customers to guide them through their buyer’s journey. Using intent data, businesses can better understand where prospects are in this journey and tailor their lead nurturing efforts accordingly. For example, suppose a prospect has demonstrated a strong interest in a particular product or service. In that case, businesses can use this information to provide targeted messaging and offer more likely to resonate with them. Alternatively, suppose a prospect is in the early stages of the buyer’s journey and is still researching their options. In that case, businesses can provide educational content and other resources to help guide them through decision-making. By using intent data to enhance lead nurturing efforts, businesses can build stronger relationships with their prospects and increase the likelihood of converting them into customers.
Automating Your Pipeline Based on Intent
Automating your sales pipeline based on intent signals can be a highly effective way to streamline your sales process and improve efficiency. Businesses can set up triggers based on specific actions by analyzing customer actions on your website, content, or email campaigns. This trigger can automatically move prospects through the sales pipeline, moving the prospects’ stage or sending communications based on their behavior. For example, if a prospect downloads a white paper, businesses can automatically send them relevant follow-up content or schedule a call with a sales representative. By automating these processes, businesses can reduce the need for manual intervention and ensure that prospects receive timely and relevant communications at every stage of the sales process. This approach can improve efficiency and increase the likelihood of converting prospects into customers, as they are more likely to receive the right message at the right time.
Wrapping up
With all these pieces falling into place, intent data has revolutionized the B2B industry forever. You can now qualify prospects more quickly, create personalized cadences based on intent, provide better lead nurturing, and automate your pipeline. The key is identifying and using the right intent data that best fits your business model. And if you’re looking for a way to track down new sales leads and gauge the interest level of your prospects, then Leadinfo makes it easy to qualify your leads and target them based on web activity. Make sure you capitalize on this opportunity, so you don’t miss out on turning an unqualified lead into a potential customer!