According to research, the average B2B consumer is already 67% of the way through their buyer journey before they consider engaging with your sales team. How can you get their attention earlier in the buying process and beat out your competitors?
The answer is buyer intent data. Buyer intent data shows you the signals which indicate a prospective customer is interested in buying. Analyzing one’s intent to purchase is not a new thing—actionable intent insights have existed for awhile, and many organizations have incorporated it into their sales and marketing strategies. However, with current technological advances, companies are better equipped to obtain an increasingly granular view of their buyers’ intentions.
The work doesn’t stop after finding out who your prospective customers are. To ensure they are a good fit, you need to tailor your strategies around a buyer persona. Get a better understanding of their pain points, goals, responsibilities, decision-making power, budget, and other important factors. If not, you could end up with low-fit leads who look good on the surface, but may never purchase your product. Other key considerations when collecting intent data include: engagement (how are prospects engaging with your content?), recency (how recently has a prospect engaged with your brand?), and frequency (how often are prospects engaging with relevant content?).
After determining your prospect is a good fit and is indeed interested in buying, how can you leverage buyer intent data to convert them and maximize revenue?
Personalize content
From writing blog posts to posting videos on social media, there are many intent marketing strategies where content plays a key role. When creating content, the goal is to generate something that will resonate with your target market, and that’s why knowing what your prospective customers are interested in is key. You can get this insight by looking at the buyer intent data: Not only will it help your marketing team come up with personalized initial outreach, it will also help your sales team start an informed conversation and increase the chance of them converting those prospects and generating revenue.
To get started, create both TOFU (top-of-funnel) and BOFU (bottom-of-funnel) content, and assign different buyer intent signals to each type. Rather than focusing solely on search volume, focus also on creating content that attracts people with an intent to buy. When creating content, you’ll want to include a CTA (Call-to-Action) which implies intent when clicked. You’ll then want to promote your content, whether via ads, social media, communities, email broadcast, or other channels. Your buyer intent data tool will help you allocate resources efficiently and effectively by keeping an eye on which type of content results in revenue generation and which doesn’t. You can also analyze different types of content by comparing how they performed against the same audience or by testing them to different audiences.
Get to know prospective customers early
Choosing a good buyer intent data tracking tool is crucial. The right tool will help you identify which prospective customer is ready to buy and the signals that indicate that. In fact, according to Gartner, more than 70% of B2B marketers will utilize third-party intent data to target prospects or engage groups of buyers in selected accounts by the end of 2022. Once you see those signals, you need to have a system in place that triggers a response to show that you notice your prospective customers—not the next day, week, or month, but right then and there. As soon as a lead visits your product or pricing page for the second time in a single day, you notice a spike in account-level activity, or a lead comparing your product to your competitor’s, you need to send them a hyper-personalized email or give them a call.
Leverage buyer intent data to strategically target in-market prospects and turn them into qualified leads. Quality intent data can provide insight into a prospect’s research history, including specific companies and products. Use that information to craft personalized messaging and stay ahead of your competition. Initial sales and marketing outreach normally includes generic marketing tactics, product information, and offerings due to limited prospect information. Buyer intent signals help marketing and sales teams identify where prospects are in their buyer’s journey, create targeted messaging and sales pitches, and better align with the specific interest signals prospects leave.
Increase retention and reduce churn
There are other things you can use buyer intent data for other than just generating leads. You can also leverage it to retain existing customers through targeted efforts. Intent data can capture a customer’s dissatisfaction by analyzing their actions. The same tools that track visits to pricing and product review pages can track visits to “cancel my subscription” pages.
To prevent your customers from churning and increase retention using intent data, you can set up triggers around success metrics like usage frequency, feature usage, and license utilization. Once you have identified those “at risk” customers, you can set up marketing automation to trigger email or phone call tasks to make sure you reach out to and help them get the most out of their investment in your product. You can also set up triggers around cancellation page visits and “Your product vs. Your competitor’s” comparison page visits. Track the NPS (Net Promoter Score) for each of your customers and set up automated emails to be sent out when a customer gives you a low rating.
Are you already leveraging buyer intent data? How has it helped you and your team? Join the RevOps sub-group in Systematic and find out how other RevOps experts are utilizing intent data!
