Uncover invisible demand, engage more prospects, fight churn, and stay ahead of your competition.
B2B buyers increasingly choose to remain anonymous and avoid engagement with sales teams until they are ready to make a purchase. This trend sets up a challenging situation: Sellers may have little or no opportunity to engage in a conversation with these in-market buyers, let alone provide a customized offer.
For B2B sales and marketing teams, it’s crucial to uncover this invisible demand. How can you reveal these “hidden” businesses that are interested in your products and services? This is where intent data comes into play.
Buyer intent is the level of interest displayed by a company’s buying group. Buyer intent data can reveal the online activity of key B2B accounts. This information helps you understand which businesses may be in market and which stage of the buyer journey they may have reached. With intent data, marketing and sales teams can more easily determine which accounts are actively researching and shopping well before they decide to purchase and implement new solutions.
Intent data can help you learn about the types of content your target companies search for, engage with, and consume. That includes activity not just on your own company website but also on third-party websites — activity you otherwise might not discover.
Intent data can also indicate the pain points that buying groups are eager to resolve. That information helps you develop and share relevant content and offers that can help influence the nature and timing of their purchase decisions.
Understand the Importance of Context
On its own, intent data tells only part of the story. Think about it: Doing research online doesn’t necessarily mean a buyer has a genuine need or an approved budget, nor does it always indicate the buyer has the authority or even the willingness to make a purchase. To help interpret the behavior, you need context.
Context can add insights about these buyers to help you decide whether they are actually in the market to purchase or if they’re just kicking the tires. Context should supply firmographic data, such as corporate hierarchies, buying locations, and financial information, to help you zero in on the right accounts. Context can include an individual buyer’s role or title within an organization as well as more granular details — for example, whether the buyer has experience in certain technologies or exhibits other characteristics that match your organization’s ideal customer profile.
Combining context and intent data with other B2B data helps marketing and sales teams construct a 360-degree view of prospective customers. Once these individual buyers or buying groups are no longer anonymous and hidden, you can create more engaging marketing and sales campaigns, and you’re more likely to see improvement to your company’s bottom line.
Use the Three Cs to Select a Data Provider
To obtain buyer intent data, marketing and sales leaders often turn to a third-party data company. And choosing the right data provider can be crucial to the success of your future targeting and prospecting efforts.
As you review and assess data vendors, focus on the three Cs — compatibility, customization, and compliance — to help you understand what each vendor offers. They can help you determine which vendor is most likely to meet your specific needs and help you achieve your desired outcomes.
Compatibility: If onboarding and utilizing intent data seem daunting, consider centralizing your entire data system. With marketing automation platforms, you're probably using first-party data already to track progress and lifecycle. Combining first-party data with third-party intent data can reveal valuable new insights that can help you nurture new leads and rekindle existing relationships.
Look for vendors that offer a single platform source (such as D&B Hoovers™) for first- and third-party intent information. The single platform should enable you to activate audiences through personalized, omni-channel campaigns. With more comprehensive customer intelligence, your marketing and sales teams can more effectively optimize content for targeted audiences and for your particular go-to-market strategy.
Be sure you also understand the limitations of a provider’s data. Keep in mind that intent data based on keywords can be robust for established segment and industry categories but may not be as strong for newer ones or for companies that provide extremely specialized niche products or services.
Customization: All keyword-driven intent data is not created equal; there's a difference between general category information and more targeted content that indicates an organization is preparing to make a purchase. Data companies offering intent data should provide scored data based on the nature of content consumed to help you determine if prospects are just browsing or are ready to buy.
Some providers of keyword intent data offer "off the shelf" keywords that may not resonate with the audiences you want to engage. This “off the shelf” information can result in less compelling interactions that may even turn off current and potential customers. Your results can improve if you have the opportunity to use your own customized keywords and phrases to create a model that's unique — and uniquely yours.
Machine learning techniques such as natural language processing (NLP) can help to identify which online content has semantically similar content for your targeted audience. Find out which data providers can help you build the model and can offer more than a limited list of “prepackaged” topics or keywords.
If you reach out to prospects with content that’s uncannily relevant to their present pain point, you’re more likely to get their attention and earn their trust. That’s another reason why buyer intent data derived using NLP can be beneficial. By focusing on higher intent scores along with buying-stage intelligence, marketing and sales can share the content that is most likely to help influence engagement and trigger conversions.
Compliance: Compliance can be a legal minefield for some intent data providers. Ask each data vendor to confirm that its data is sourced in line with regulatory requirements — including GDPR, CASL, CPRA, CCPA, and others — to help reduce risk exposure and protect your company.
Does the data provider use only the company IP domain as the identifier? That may appear to be an advantage because it helps protect you from privacy law violations. Remember, however, that IP addresses alone won’t offer insight into corporate relationships or account-level purchasing power. As explained earlier, you will need additional context to make effective use of the intent data and to help ensure you are focusing on the right buyers.
Find Buyers Who Are Actively Shopping
With the B2B buying journey becoming increasingly digital and self-serve, you need to reach your audiences faster to stand out. Help your company avoid uncertainty, save time, and focus resources effectively with buyer intent data. Intent data can help marketers and sellers find those prospects who are in market and ready to buy — before your competitors reach them.
Leverage buyer intent data to:
Reach out to and engage with the right prospects early in their buyer’s journey
Prioritize inbound leads based on their engagement with your company
Create targeted content that drives prospective customers into and through the buyer’s journey
Preemptively meet customers’ needs by uncovering helpful products or integrations
Prevent churn by identifying how and when customers connect with competitors — and when they consider switching vendors
Our white paper, “How Intent Data Can Unify Sales and Marketing,” offers even more tips on how marketers and sellers can discover prospects, prioritize leads, tailor outreach, and identify when buyers might be in the market for your company’s product. Download it to learn more.
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The information provided in articles are suggestions only and based on best practices. Dun & Bradstreet is not liable for the outcome or results of specific programs or tactics undertaken based on your use of the information. Please contact an attorney or financial/tax professional if you are in need of legal or financial/tax advice.