Business data forms an integral part of every marketing and sales campaign. The campaign’s success depends heavily on the quality and accuracy of your data. Having said that, today, it’s not enough to simply have data at your disposal. You need to manage, analyze and derive insights for better marketing outcomes. This is where intent data comes in handy. Leveraging B2B buyer intent data provides you with an in-depth view of the customers’ buying behavior and purchase intent.
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What is B2B Buyer Intent Data?
Buyer intent data is a behavioral insight into what product or service an individual is interested in. It tells how likely a prospect would make a purchase. In other words, B2B intent data is the probability or the degree of willingness of prospects to buy a particular product or service. It is often determined by an individuals’ online and offline buying behavior. Intent data is a type of sales intelligence that provides information about the prospects that are actively looking for your business offerings.
Why is Intent Data Important for Businesses?
Intent data provides valuable insights to the sales and marketing teams that enable them to take a data-driven approach to their campaigns. Not only does it optimize their time, money and resources but also improves the quality of leads they generate. Intent data helps you create content strategies and customer outreach programs that match the expectations of your ideal customers.
Here are some notable statistics that highlight the importance of B2B buyer intent data –
What are the Different Types of Intent Data?
First-party or Internal Intent Data
It is generated by an organization’s own resources. It is captured through tracking websites, social media presence and marketing automation platforms. Internal intent data can also be referred to as customer engagement data and acts as a prominent indicator of buying intent.
External or Third-party Data
It is the data information that organizations buy from third-party b2b data providers. This data is usually collected through cookies and at the IP level. It enables insights into customer intent data from other websites that are not operated by you. This helps you get a wider view into your prospects’ interest areas and buying intent.
Ideally, combining internal and external intent data can help organizations create a clearer and more comprehensive view into buyers’ online research intent, the factors that influence their buying decisions, challenges they face and their propensity to make a purchase.
How B2B Buyer Intent Data Helps You Increase Sales
1. Identify Opportunities at the Right Time
The most obvious benefit of intent data is identifying prospects early in their buying journey. Once you detect buying intent early, you can engage with the prospects before your competitor does. Customers are more likely to buy from businesses that contact them first and provide them with all the information they need. It becomes easier to understand the customer expectations better when you engage with them from the early stages of their decision-making.
2. Reach Prospects in the Zero Moment of Truth
Intent data helps you understand who your high-value customers are. You can then direct your efforts towards them and save your resources, time and money. This also results in quality engagements. Intent data helps you deliver relevant and accurate information to customers in the Zero Moment of Truth and helps them make better buying decisions.
3. Optimize Sales & Marketing Campaigns
Buyer intent data enables you to make your sales and marketing campaigns more granular and convert prospects with higher buying intent into customers. Valuable insights gained from the intent data help you optimize your marketing spends and avoid reaching the wrong audience. With intent data at your disposal, you can recognize the prospects with a higher buying intent and share specific content with them that will help them understand your offerings better and encourage them to make the purchase.
4. Reduce Customer Churn & Upsell
One of the best ways to win customer trust and reduce the churn is to always provide relevant and accurate information. Intent data helps you understand what exactly the customers are looking for and then share high-value content with them. This creates a sense of trust and loyalty amongst your prospects. You can leverage this earned trust to upsell your products and services and increase your sales.
Other Benefits of Intent Data
1. Better Account Based Marketing Efforts
Account-based marketing is all about understanding your customers and connecting with them through the areas of their interest. B2B buyer intent data becomes an extremely important factor in engaging and building meaningful conversations with the right prospects and the right time. Intent data provides marketers with useful insights that help them repurpose their ABM strategies for a better impact and ensure high customer engagement.
2. Improved Customer Targeting
B2B buyer intent data helps you create buyer personas and build an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). You get better clarity on which audience groups are most likely to become your customers. These are the groups you want to target. You can direct all your email campaigns, ad campaigns and other marketing campaigns at these high-intent target groups and drive higher ROI.
3. Deliver Personalized Messages
Customers expect businesses to understand their needs and challenges and offer solutions customized to their requirements. Marketing communication plays a huge part in connecting with the customers on a deeper level. B2B buyer intent data helps you refine your marketing communication and deliver personalized messaging to your target customers.
Conclusion
With so much customer information and business data flowing in every day, it becomes really important to draw valuable insights for better decision making. B2B buyer intent data helps sales and marketing teams to optimize their efforts and improve business outcomes. Bespoke B2B data solutions can truly enable ROI-driven marketing and help you take your business to another level.
As customers increasingly expect personalized marketing communication and relevant information that will help them make better buying decisions, the importance of B2B buyer intent data grows multifold.
