5 Ways to Operationalize Intent Data
Here is a fun fact about me: about a decade ago I completed my 200-hour yoga teacher training. Working as a marketing coordinator at the time, I taught yoga classes on my evenings and weekends and was deeply committed to my own yoga studies and practice. We live in a fast-paced world – inundated with constant stimuli – and taking the time to pause, clear your mind and focus on the present moment is a challenge that earns many benefits. For this reason, I would often encourage my yoga students to “set an intention” at the beginning of our time together.
Setting an intention creates the opportunity to be mindful about how you want to show up and what you are aiming to achieve. Your intention, or intent, is your purpose, your goal, your objective.
Who would have thought that today I’d be studying intent from a whole new lens?
Intent has become a commonly-used term by B2B marketers. Referring to insights we can glean from a person or an account’s digital footprint, intent can be understood as signals or indications of someone’s plan to do something (like make a purchase in your B2B software category).
Intent data takes two forms: first-party and third-party intent. We can measure first-party intent by tracking a person’s activity on your owned websites, like monitoring a visitor’s page views or content downloads. We can use third-party vendors to gain visibility into off-site intent signals. By tapping in to vast networks of online search behavior, intent data providers give you insights into what accounts are on competitor websites, what keywords they are researching across the web and what their activity has been on review websites.
Why is intent important for B2B marketers today?
The popularization of marketing automation has led marketers everywhere to strive to master the art of getting the right message to the right person at the right time. But until recently, a lot of what we have done as B2B marketers is more aligned with a segmented message, at a predetermined time, with somewhat superficial personalization.
We are marketers – not psychics – without a better understanding of our audience’s intent, our strengths are predominantly limited to our targeting of the message (not the timing or the content). By monitoring and evaluating intent data, we become privy to our audience’s motivations and behaviors. This allows us to take our targeted marketing and messaging to a whole new level and truly cater the right message to the right people at the right time.
How you ask? Read on to discover five ways to operationalize intent data.
5 Ways to Operationalize Intent Data
1. Account prioritization & selection
Intent signals can be used to discover which accounts are actively researching solutions like yours by telling you what accounts are visiting your website or competitors websites and what topics and keywords they are searching. By leveraging these intent signals, you can identify what accounts are currently in-market for what you are selling and then prioritize your marketing to those in-market accounts.
2. Inform your content creation & distribution
Intent data can help you create more specific and strategic messages by analyzing what topics and keywords your target accounts are researching most and catering your content creation to those terms. You can use intent data to inform your content marketing and then serve up content to accounts that have shown interest in those intent topics. Take this a step further to deliver ad messages that align with surging intent topics and personalizing your website to the messages that will resonate most with those accounts.
3. Improve ROI on ad spend
By incorporating insights from intent signals into your ad messaging and concentrating ad targeting on companies that are currently in-market for a solution you offer, you can greatly improve the cost-effectiveness of your ad spend. Intent targeting allows you to eliminate wasted spend on accounts that aren’t currently researching your solutions and focus your ad dollars on the best message for the best audience.
4. Competitor campaigns
According to a 2017 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report, B2B prospects are more than 70 percent of the way through their decision-making process by the time they connect with a vendor. By monitoring intent signals, you have the ability to identify and reach out to buyers early in their research to make sure you are on their radar before they commit to a competitor. A great way to leverage intent is to identify accounts that have visited a competitor’s website but have not visited yours and launch a targeted competitor campaign to those accounts.
5. Prevent churn and identify up-sell opportunities
By watching the intent of your current customers, you can flag early signals of potential churn and identify new up-sell opportunities. Customer marketers and sales teams can monitor current customer online research activity to identify accounts that are likely to churn and address the issue before it’s too late. In addition to preventing churn, these same teams can leverage intent to identify current customers who may be researching terms related to solutions you offer that they haven’t yet purchased.
B2B Innovator or Laggard?
If intent today is something you only practice on your yoga mat, now is the time to evaluate how you can incorporate it into your B2B marketing practices!
Demand Gen Report’s 2018 ABM Benchmark Survey found that only 25 percent of B2B companies said they currently use intent data and monitoring tools, while 35% said they plan to use intent insight within the next 12 months. Chances are, if you start operationalizing intent data now you will gain an advantage over your competition.
If you are interested in experimenting with intent data for your company, sign up for Bombora’s free Company Surge Alerts here and try it out for your company today!
Have you experimented with intent data in your B2B marketing playbooks? What has worked for you? Share your experience in the comments below.