Layering Intent Data Onto Your Top-of-Funnel Marketing

Intent data is increasingly crucial in B2B marketing, particularly for lead generation. However, many marketers lack clarity on its optimal utilization. Ken Lordy, Chief Product Officer at Anteriad, offers insights on how marketers can leverage intent data to enhance early-stage lead generation.

For many B2B marketers, all roads lead to, well, leads. According to a LinkedIn report, it’s the top B2B marketing strategy that marketing leaders plan to invest in in 2023. And no wonder LinkedIn also reports that finding and acquiring new customers is the top challenge for B2B marketers in 2023.

With a tight economy, the middle of the funnel is a bit slower for many B2B organizations, and client upsel is also tougher. At the same time, there’s added pressure to hit goals and prove value. With this kind of squeeze, the top of the funnel is the first place where B2B marketers are looking for some needed success.l

For anyone that’s tried the old “more is more” game with leads, it becomes clear that not all leads are worth the cost, or the effort. In this case, all leads should not be treated equally. Knowing where to find promising new leads, and which new leads to prioritize can help create that needed momentum a lot more effectively. Intent data can help.

Leads You Didn’t Know You Had

The typical marketing approach starts with a customer profile persona or “ideal customer” description. This is shared with lead partners and used to filter leads and score them. The closer a lead is to that ideal customer, the “better” it is. Intent data can show us that this may be too narrow of an approach, especially when a marketer feels that all available leads have already been sourced.

Take a medical supply company that typically sells to doctors working at large hospitals. While this is their ideal customer, intent data might uncover a number of other profiles that could become very promising new customers. By looking at the profile of other people searching their website or relevant content (i.e., showing intent to purchase), that medical supply company might find that nurses at schools, managers at gyms, and owners of elder care facilities are also researching the same medical equipment for their facility. While not a primary persona, these are very real leads that might provide the extra momentum the marketer seeks.

Less is More

On the other end of the spectrum are marketers with plenty of leads coming in and not enough of a filter to know which leads to prioritize. Intent data can be the lever that helps bring some order to a big influx of leads. For example, if there’s a software company that sells to small businesses and gets 10-20 leads per day, it can be difficult for the sales team to know which leads to reach out to first. If recently acquired leads get tacked on to the bottom, sellers always reach out to slightly stale leads as they work through their list. Simply upending the list and reaching out to the most recent leads might be a little better, but great prospects that are on the stale side might then get ignored.

Enter intent data, which can provide a valuable lens on top of each lead for a better comparison. Understanding which intent signals are most closely tied with an eventual purchase can help marketers flag leads that are showing those signals as top priority. If someone just downloaded a product catalog, that lead might be significantly more likely to buy than someone who signed up for the newsletter because they may be in the market in a year or two.

Knowledge is Power

These two scenarios are entirely achievable but do require some close analysis. Intent data is powerful and requires a deft hand to make sure that the data says what it seems like it says. Things need to be tested, evaluated, tweaked and tested over and over again. Intent data is like a guidepost, but marketers still need to navigate the path ahead with discretion.

For any company looking for new lead profiles, it will take a bit of time and some test campaigns to understand if the widened buyer profile is worth it. That medical supply company could start by testing out some marketing messaging aimed specifically at buyers from elder care facilities and see what the response rates are like before they go all in with a new strategy for a whole new client base.

And for companies looking to better prioritize larger lists of leads, using analytics and data is likely a good approach. That software company could start by creating a lookback report of the last three months’ worth of leads and determine which actions clustered with those leads that ended up becoming customers. Testing a scenario where sellers prioritize the leads that display those strong buyer signals is a great approach.

As companies become more analytical about their use of intent data, they can start creating more sophisticated models – such as scoring the intent of a lead and creating marketing campaigns that correspond to that score. Imagine that 100 is a score for a lead that’s about to sign a contract. Perhaps a score of 50 is when someone is tipped into a marketing campaign with some content but not yet passed to sales. Someone with a score of 75 might get an email from a seller, while a score of 90 might get a call right away.

Of course, every business is unique, and the corresponding intent data for that business will also be unique. Intent is not an instant fix but rather a valuable layer that can help direct marketing and sales efforts to get more out of their leads. Putting in some time to get to know leads better will help the marketing and sales organization become more effective and more analytical. Marketers will naturally be more confident and better able to “prove it” to their executives.

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This article was written by Spiceworks and originally published here.