The Secret Sauce to Saving Marketing and Sales Resources: Intent Data

How marketing and sales teams can optimize go-to-market strategies amidst an uncertain economic landscape, saving both time and money:

When revenue-generating teams are not aligned, it has an adverse effect on productivity, efficiency and performance. Alignment is particularly essential for B2B organizations as marketing, sales, and customer success teams each play a unique role in delivering exceptional customer experiences and driving company growth. Unfortunately, sales and marketing teams have historically suffered from a lack of alignment, preventing them from synchronizing their efforts to maximize growth. But now more than ever this is not a viable strategy, particularly as Goldman Sachs calculates a 35% probability that the US will tip into recession over the next year. With an uncertain economic environment, operating efficiently and driving results must remain top of mind for businesses of any size, in any industry.

B2B revenue-generating teams have to align on the organization’s growth strategy. That involves interpreting how marketplace trends and evolving customer needs will impact the organizations’ growth agenda. An often overlooked key ingredient in that interpretation is buyer intent data.

Intent data is information that marks a prospect’s level of interest in a particular service or product. It includes information surrounding a prospect’s web searches, pages visited, and the content consumed. Equipped with this information, teams are better able to make account identification and prioritization easier and more accurate.

In fact, by the end of 2022, more than 70% of B2B marketers were expected to be utilizing third-party intent data to target buyers—which means teams who haven’t adopted it yet are behind the curve.

So, how does intent data drive efficiency, exactly? Let’s dive in.

How Intent Data Helps Teams Drive Efficiency

Intent data indicates which companies are actively researching topics, solutions, and brands related to specific products and are therefore likely to become customers. This information enables teams to segment their target account list into intent-identified businesses and then allocate their time and resources on leads that are more likely to convert.

Take digital marketing teams, for example. When setting up digital ad campaigns, marketers can review intent data to determine the best parameters to target in-market companies. By pinpointing precisely which businesses are looking to buy, they are making data-informed decisions on how to target their ads—maximizing the budget at hand to boost ROI. As a result, marketers will see increased lead engagement and ROI on ad spend—taking the shape of brand lift, website traffic, leads, conversion rates, and ultimately demand.

How to Incorporate Intent Data Into Your Strategy

As marketing teams look to drive efficiencies during periods of economic turmoil, here are three ways they can incorporate intent data into their strategy for immediate impact:

1. Build Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

As marketers identify strategies to promote a product or service, they may narrowly focus on just one type of prospective audience. And as a result, they hunt for data points that align with the preconceived notion of what a “good fit” looks like. But the reality is, this practice skews go-to-market tactics, such as content creation, engagement tactics, and value propositions.

However, when equipped with intent data, marketers can identify segments of the industry that are a good fit for a particular product or service. By analyzing intent signals to identify patterns among specific firmographics (e.g., industry, company size, etc.) that indicate a higher likelihood to be “in market” to buy a particular product or service, marketers are able to unearth a host of prospective target accounts with characteristics that one would never think to include in the ICP.

With these new insights, the ICP can be articulated into a more effective targeting tool, ultimately leading to greater efficiency and efficacy throughout the entire buy-cycle.

2. Improve Account Prioritization and Scoring

Intent data enables marketing organizations to quickly prioritize which target accounts to focus on based on research behaviors. These insights allow both demand gen and digital ad teams to focus media budgets on those accounts to boost ROI.

Simultaneously, marketing operations teams can use intent insights to inform account- and lead-scoring models. If a prospect is searching keywords or topics specific to a brand or product at a higher rate, for example, they’re likely pretty deep into their buying journey. Those spikes in interest indicate which accounts should be given a higher score. With this scoring model, salespeople will also glean insight into which leads are closer to closing deals and the resulting ROI—thus indicating which folks need additional time and attention. By incorporating intent in this way, conversion rates further increase and create velocity down the demand funnel.

3. Bolster Your Content and Messaging Strategy

Content marketers are busy. Data from eMarketer indicates 60% of marketers strive to create at least one piece of content each day—and that translates to an exponential amount created and distributed over the course of a year. And more content means a noisier market, making it harder to stand out.

However, intent data can help you break through the noise effectively. If a significant percentage of target accounts are actively researching topics focused on a specific pain point, it becomes easier for the team to prioritize messaging accordingly. The data informs content development and distribution efforts at every stage of the buyer journey. By providing content that enables prospects to understand the challenges they need to solve and the solutions available to them, marketers are able to move them further down the funnel quickly.

With ongoing economic turbulence on the horizon, teams must stay sharp and drive efficiency wherever possible. Intent data provides immediate opportunities for marketing, sales, and customer success teams to streamline their processes, reaching the right customers faster and boosting the bottom line. When paired with the right intent partner, businesses are able to source, digest, translate, and apply data sources into GTM strategies quickly and efficiently—and ultimately stand out in a crowded market.

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