How well do you know your market?
One of the easiest ways to measure this is by looking at the results of your B2B online marketing efforts.
It stands to reason that, the better you know your market, the more leads you’re able to attract and convert.
So, if you’re not currently seeing the numbers you want, the problem is probably that you don’t know your market well enough. Specifically, you don’t understand their intentions.
3 Reasons to Infuse Your B2B Marketing Efforts with Intent Data
Intent data refers to information collected about business prospects’ observed behavior regarding web content consumption. By understanding it, you can better predict how they’ll act in the future.
What are they researching?
What will they buy?
When will they do it?
Here are three reasons you should make it a priority to use this data when creating your next B2B online marketing strategy.
1. It’s Easier Than Ever
Before we dive into the other two reasons, let’s begin with the question you’re probably asking: “Where do I find intent data for my B2B marketing, to begin with?”
Fortunately, the answer is also the first reason to begin putting buyer intent to work for your B2B company: it’s never been easier to do so.
The top and almost only source of data out there is Bombora’s company surge analytics, which is fueled by their buyer intent data. It is highly correlated to sales and churn. In addition, it is the largest source available. It is portable and it can be used across multiple tactics – in any platform that ingests data and is global in scale.
In the past, harvesting this kind of information was time-consuming, expensive, and/or erroneous. Now, you can simply outsource it to Bombora and begin using valid information right away.
2. It Will Align Your Sales and Marketing
Everyone knows that aligning sales and marketing is essential for an efficient, cost-effective sales funnel.
However, this is nearly impossible to do when you don’t have accurate information about buyer intent. Instead, what happens is that you use what information you do have to inform your B2B company’s marketing decisions.
With any luck, using basic firmographics and a look alike-type model provides some success at attracting a sufficient amount of leads. Still, because you didn’t accurately predict these prospects’ behaviors, your sales team now needs to get a prospect interested, hope that they have a budget cycle coming up, and work much harder to convert them.
It would be much easier to filter the addressable market down to the 15% or so, that are actively researching business problems or solutions that your product would solve and spend the marketing dollars and sales efforts going after those businesses.
The alternative is spreading your budget over 100% of the addressable market, quadrupling the spend on the businesses that are going to buy. Sales will thank you and your marketing team gets a serious look the next time they ask for budget.
3. Customer Stakeholders Are Growing
Back in 2016, CEB Global famously reported that the number of customer stakeholders had grown in just two years, from 5.4 in 2014 to 6.8.
This represents one of the most difficult challenges for B2B sales teams. The more people they need to sell, the harder their job becomes.
By better understanding the buyer intent of the individuals involved, this problem is largely mitigated.
And how do you find the people and get information in front of them? Intent-based audience data. Again, Bombora collects this intent data at the cookie level, which is at the individual level – in other words, the person doing the research.
Given its potential for destroying deals, this reason alone should be enough to invest in buyer intent in multiple forms. It could become your company’s competitive advantage and this is probably the biggest secret of buyer intent in B2B.
Knowing what companies are surging, throws the net over the companies that are going to buy. At that point, online targeting of these companies is like sending a Trojan horse in and spreading the word about your product. Anywhere online – Facebook, Linkedin, mobile, etc. – the surging intent audience can be replicated and targeted everywhere.
Start Seeing Greater Conversions from Your B2B Online Marketing Strategy
Once you begin implementing the advice above, it won’t be long before you see better conversions.
That’s how powerful buyer intent is.
Another extremely powerful way to generate greater conversions – quickly – is with Hushly.
In fact, our brand promise is that we will increase your landing page conversions by at least 51%!
Know of another method that can do that?
You can use Hushly without making any changes to your current content – that includes your landing pages. If you’d like to see our platform in action, please take a minute to watch our free demo.