6 Ways to Use B2B Intent Data to Boost More Revenue

B2B intent data

B2B intent data isn’t necessarily new, but it has become more accessible over the past few years.

As more and more B2Bs catch onto the idea that personalization is vital for generating leads, converting leads into customers, and retaining clients, the importance of intent data grows.

In fact, up to 85% of buyers say they’ll dismiss a company that doesn’t personalize the very first interaction. The first interaction!

Intent data helps you make sure you’re spending your marketing budget and efforts in the right places at every stage. Here are a few ways you can use it to boost your bottom line.

What Is the Definition of Intent Data?

When someone reads a blog on your website, you can reasonably assume they’re interested in a certain topic.

You can use that information alone for retargeting purposes – but it won’t deliver the conversion rates you want because you’re casting the net way too wide. With PPC or sponsored social posts, you’ll waste a ton of money – fast.

Just because someone expressed an interest in learning about personalization through a blog on your website, for example, it doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy your product – or would even consider it.  

B2B intent data, by definition, tells you why someone is visiting your blog post – it tells you their intentions.

Intent data adds context and insight into your data. Intent data can come from either first-party (like your own website) or third-party sources. It can come from known visitors (like leads you’ve collected) or anonymous visitors.

How to Use B2B Intent Data to Drive More Revenue

You can use intent data to optimize every piece of your marketing strategy.

Of course, you’ll want to make sure you’re working with accurate data first. However, after you get that worked out, you can use intent data to create effective content, generate more leads through retargeting, and so much more!

1. Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy with B2B Intent data

Surprisingly, many B2Bs haven’t latched onto intent data for building their content marketing strategies.

Most B2Bs use their content marketing for things like generating leads (70%), educating audiences (79%), and creating brand awareness (86%).

Intent data can remove plenty of the guesswork that goes into creating content. Since you’ll have a better idea of where your leads are at in the sales funnel, what types of content they like, which competitors they’ve researched, and other factors, you can take these pieces of information into consideration when you design your content strategy.

Understanding your leads and visitors on a contextual level is especially important for creating thought leadership pieces. 63% of senior-level execs say content is too generic while another 58% say it lacks originality. In other words, B2B content creators have plenty of gaps to fill and intent data can help.

2. Use B2B Intent Data to Prevent Customers from Jumping Ship

Intent data offers deep-level analysis not only on leads but on your current customers as well.

We all know that it costs more money to generate new leads over keeping current customers, right? What if you knew when your customers were checking out competitors and thinking of churning? Intent data can tell you.

Not only can intent data tell you when a customer visits a competitor’s website, but it can also help you boost the lifetime value of each customer. If one of your current customers is researching for a specific solution you offer but hasn’t completed a purchase, you’ll know exactly where to dedicate additional marketing resources.

3. Combine B2B Intent Data with Other Pieces of Information

Intent data on its own isn’t exactly super helpful. It doesn’t really matter which competitors a prospect has researched if you know nothing else about them, right?

The magic really starts to happen when you combine other pieces of information with intent data – specifically firmographics.

When you know which company a lead works for, their job role, their buying power, which competitors they’ve researched and for how long, THAT’S when you can start building an effective strategy.

4. Use B2B Intent Data for Effective Lead Scoring

Just because a lead fits into your target audience, that doesn’t mean they’ll buy something from you.

Intent data can help you fill lead scoring gaps.

Since you’ll be pulling data from multiple sources, you’ll be able to figure out if a lead truly has a need for your product and when they may possibly be in the market for it.

5. Develop an Effective Account-Based Marketing Strategy

Companies with an account-based marketing strategy generate 208% more revenue from their content marketing efforts.

By nature, account-based marketing is more relevant and personal – most B2Bs have already figured that part out.

However, intent data can kick it up another notch by removing many of the blind spots, so you’ll always know which accounts to target.

6. Use B2B Intent Data to Plan Events

Did you know that 91% of B2B professionals say that webinars are their favorite type of content?

Events – both online and off – are great tools for connecting with leads, exploring your audience, and building brand awareness.

For in-person events, you can use intent data to nail down the best locations and build a marketing strategy that targets the right accounts.

You can also use B2B intent data to create discussions and topics for your events since you’ll know what your audience is researching online and what they’ve already consumed.

Use Data to Boost Your Content Engagement by 305% Now

Hushly can help you harness the power of data to increase your lead conversions by 51% and content engagement by 305%! You’ll only pay for verified leads you generate through our system – we’ll never charge you fees for using our platform.

With Hushly, you can create a personalized experience for every website visitor with adaptive content hubs and self-nurturing landing pages. Plus, it takes almost no time to implement and is fully GDPR compliant.

See an adaptive content hub in action now to get started!

How to Choose B2B Marketing Tools for Personalization

hushly blog

If you’re like most B2Bs, you know that personalization is critical for attracting leads and closing sales, but you aren’t sure which tools you need to complete the task.

Which B2B marketing tools are worth the money and which ones will just bloat your budget?

If a tool doesn’t help you collect and access relevant data – that’s a red flag.

If a tool doesn’t improve your relationship with leads – that’s a red flag.

Automation is supposed to make your life easier, not more frustrating.

Consider the tools below to create a user-friendly experience for your leads. Let your website do most of the work and leads will come flowing in.

6 Factors to Consider When Creating Your Stack of B2B Marketing Tools for Personalization

First things first, the most important B2B marketing tools in your arsenal are a mobile-friendly website and lead generation process.

According to Think with Google, B2B buyers spend up to three hours each day conducting research from their smartphones. By 2020, 70% of all business searches will happen on mobile devices.

If your website isn’t optimized for mobile browsing, you’re already losing money and you’ll be losing a lot more very soon.

Your buyers don’t only expect a mobile-friendly experience. They also expect a uniquely personalized experience. Consumer brands like Spotify, Facebook, and Netflix have created an individually personalized and on-demand environment that people have come to expect from brands.

Like expert analyst Brian Solis says, “Business buyers don’t go to work and forget what they do as humans. There’s a new normal that blurs the line between B2B and B2C. They just want things personalized.”

Use B2B marketing tools and strategies to make it happen.

1. First-Party Intent Data

First-party intent data is the fuel behind any successful account-based marketing campaign.

According to Marketing Profs, businesses that run ABM strategies driven 208% more revenue than those that don’t. The key to a successful ABM strategy is relevant, up to date, and accurate data.

Intent data is as close to real-time data as you can get. In the case of first-party intent data, it’s based on the information you’ve collected through a lead’s activity on your website so you can use it to create personalized campaigns immediately.

Personalized strategies based on intent data work because they put you in the mindset of the lead. Since you understand their place in the sales process and why they’re researching your website, you can create the most relevant content for them.

2. Retargeting Campaigns

There’s no way around it: relevant retargeting campaigns are some of your best B2B marketing tools. That is, of course, if you know how to run them properly.

As always, you need accurate data to make these campaigns work. Once you have that, you can target your leads through email and LinkedIn with personalized content.

LinkedIn is an excellent retargeting tool because the platform offers comprehensive audience insights. Not only that, but you can check out which URL a lead visited, plug it into the LinkedIn ad creator tool, and run a targeted ad for LinkedIn users who specifically visited that page.

See why accurate data is the lynchpin here?

3. Triggered Email Marketing Campaigns

Automated email campaigns are surprisingly easy to set up, yet highly personalized, and can deliver excellent results. Triggered campaigns tend to have an average open rate of over 45%.

Just log into your email service provider and create a new campaign. You’ll have the choice to set up an automated email here in most programs.

Look at your website now for some of your best content. Design unique emails that will go out after a lead visits each piece of content on your site.

4. Types of Content

Not every B2B lead wants to read whitepapers and tutorials. 65% want to hear podcasts from you while 49% want to learn about your company through video.

Don’t take an “if we build it, they will come” approach – create the kind of content your leads want.

If you’re running an ABM strategy, it’s more than worthwhile to do some research here. For example, the end-users of your product tend to prefer one type of content on certain subjects while top decision-makers prefer others.

At the end of the day, your personalization strategy runs on high-quality content and data, so these are the best B2B marketing tools at your disposal.

5. Adaptive Content Hubs

Now that you’ve started creating high-quality content, you need to put it all together in one – organized location.

That’s where an adaptive content hub comes into play.

An adaptive content hub is important for a few reasons.

First of all, your leads find it valuable because they’ll be able to educate themselves at their own pace, easily find the information they need on any device, and see that you care about their needs post-purchase.

However, an adaptive content hub is also useful to your personalization strategy because you can use it to collect information about your leads and utilize that data to fuel future campaigns.

For example, a visitor reads one piece of content. The algorithm will monitor what type of content they prefer and continue showing it to them. See how easy it is to collect information like this?

Source: Hushly

6. Exit Intent and Abandonment Strategies

At Hushly, we recommend everyone gets rid of forms completely.

Instead of bombarding users with a form as they try to exit your website, give them more content instead.

They’ll be more likely to stay because you’re actually providing them with something useful instead of asking them to do something for you.

Watch Your Lead Conversions Grow By 51%

At Hushly, we’re all about removing anything that interferes with the lead nurturing process. In most cases, that means getting rid of forms.

Your leads hate them and your marketers hate sifting through the inaccurate data.

Instead, upgrade your B2B marketing tools to include features like self-nurturing landing pages and adaptive content hubs. Back your data up with algorithm checks and human lead verification. From there, you’ll have the data you need to create relevant and valuable personalization strategies for your current and future leads.

Check out an adaptive content hub in action!

4 Sales Lead Management Strategies Every B2B Needs

hushly blog

Managing a handful of leads is easy.

You can see where they came from, understand their needs, and evaluate your tactics to collect information and hone your skills.

Once your business grows, however, things get a little more complicated.

Without a comprehensive sales lead management strategy, things start falling through the cracks and your data goes sour.

Sadly, this also leads to bad personalization strategies and lost revenue.

The lead management landscape has changed drastically as automation and relationship management tools have become more accessible to businesses of all sizes. Let’s look at some strategies you can implement right now to stay organized and engage your leads.

What Does Sales Lead Management Look Like Today?

Previously, lead management was a tedious and frustrating process.

You needed to look at each lead from multiple angles, break them up into distinct groups, hand them over to the right department, and continue the process indefinitely.

There are a few major problems with this process. For starters, you’re working with old data.

By the time you process leads through your system, divide them into categories, and add them to your spreadsheet, the information you’ve collected is already outdated.

It’s no surprise that 62% of businesses say they’re working with data that’s up to 40% incorrect. Job roles change, people switch jobs, the company needs shift – the world turns.

Inaccurate data poses a big problem because you can’t nurture leads properly if the information you’ve collected on them is wrong. However, poor data also throws off your personalization strategy for other leads that come in.

The most valuable data you have is the first-party data you’ve collected through your own website and a solid sales lead management system is the only way to keep it clean.

Today, technology like automation and AI supply several tools and options for managing your leads and keeping track of data seamlessly in real-time.

4 Sales Lead Management Strategies Your B2B Needs in 2020

Implementing these sales lead management strategies will help you first create meaningful relationships with your leads.

Not everyone is ready to buy right away but forming relationships can boost your conversion rate by 1.2x and each deal size by 1.3x.

Plus, you’ll be able to develop effective personalization strategies for both future and current leads. After all, clean data is at the heart of every relevant personalization campaign.

1. Divert Your Attention to Intent Data

Intent data is important because it tells you where a lead is at in the buying process and which leads visit your website and are actively looking to close a sale.

According to Marketing Profs, companies with account-based marketing strategies generate 208% more revenue than those that don’t run ABM campaigns. Intent data allows you to create effective ABM campaigns because it’s as close as you can get to real-time data.

Look at it this way. The average B2B buying process involves nearly seven different people. While C-level executives have the final say in 64% of cases, lower-level employees still play important roles in influencing their decision.

Without intent data, how can you create content and retargeting campaigns to reach every role involved in this process? Your data will never be accurate enough to make a difference.

Source: Think with Google

2. Only Collect High-Quality Leads

Do you feel like you’re running a witch hunt following up with leads that aren’t qualified? It’s a waste of time and resources. Thanks to automation technology, it doesn’t have to be this way anymore.

If you’re hiding all your best content behind a gate and requesting every visitor give you their email address, now is a good time to re-evaluate that strategy – how’s it working for you?

When you collect information from everyone who visits your website, that data doesn’t tell you much about your actual leads or target audience. Instead, it throws off your data and makes your process even more confusing.

Get rid of your forms completely. Give your visitors the choice to supply their email address when they’re sure they want to stay in touch with you.

Furthermore, it’s also important to employ a combination of automation and human verification to ensure you’re only collecting information from real people and bona fide business addresses.

3. Create an Environment for Leads to Self-Nurture

An amazing thing happens when you remove forms: your leads start to nurture themselves at their own pace.

At Hushly, we recommend throwing out forms in favor of features like self-nurturing landing pages. An adaptive content hub, for example, puts all your best content in one location where it’s broken up into categories.

Some leads like in-depth blogs, others like eBooks, 65% like podcasts, and 49% prefer videos – give them what they want in one place. Once they start clicking, an algorithm will continue showing them relevant content.

In terms of sales lead management, you can collect this information to score your leads and personalize your communication with them.

4. Follow Up with Highly Relevant Retargeting Content

If a lead visits your website and spends two hours reading your eBooks, that’s a good sign they’re interested in closing a sale – but you can never be sure.

Now’s the time to step in with a sales lead management strategy. Use the information you collected about the content they read to send out retargeting campaigns through email and LinkedIn.

If they don’t engage with your retargeting campaigns, something isn’t right. If they do, you can gauge their spot in the sales cycle.

Create the Website Your Leads Want Today

Effective lead management starts with a user-friendly website. Visitors arrive at your website and they want to educate themselves at their own pace. They don’t want to read a blog post, fill out a form, and wait for you to bombard their inbox with emails.

Get rid of forms and create the website your leads want. It’s much easier to implement sales lead management tactics when you’re only working with highly qualified leads and accurate data.

Self-nurturing landing pages let visitors convert into leads and educate themselves about your company without forms. See a Hushly self-nurturing landing page in action here!

What is Intent Data? Why You Need Information to Fuel Your B2B Strategy

What is Intent Data?

“What are your intentions with my daughter?”

As a sitcom joke, this line is obviously outdated – but think about it from a B2B marketing perspective.

“What are your intentions with my website?”

When someone visits your website, wouldn’t it be great to know exactly why they’re there?

Specifically, wouldn’t you love to know which leads are ready to buy – right now?

According to Marketing Profs, companies with an account-based marketing strategy generate 208% more revenue than those that don’t – but you need the right kind of data to deliver successful results.

If you’re wondering “what is intent data,” that’s the gist of it: understanding why someone has visited your website. Here’s why it’s important and how you can use it to fuel your B2B marketing strategy

What is Intent Data?

Using information about a visitor’s online behavior, intent data tells you their stage of the sales funnel.

Think about how you conduct online searches and how Google guides your search:

  1. You type “sore knee after running” into Google and browse some of the links.
  2. After learning about common running-related knee conditions, you type the letter R into the search bar and Google prompts you to finish a search for “runner’s knee.”
  3. You return to the search bar and type “il” and Google assumes you’re typing “iliotibial band syndrome.”
  4. After learning about IT band syndrome, you go back to the search bar and type “IT band” and Google already knows that you’re looking for “IT band syndrome treatments.”

From here, you can see why this prior search history and other information like age and gender may be useful for a physical therapy office. They can understand your intention – that you’re seeking treatment from running-associated knee pain – while running PPC ads and providing personalized content on their website.

However, that’s B2C. What is intent data in a B2B context?

Topic Data

Intent data involves two components: behavioral data and context.

When someone visits your website, you may not think you know much about them, but other websites do. Using topic data, you can figure out:

  • Which website they visited before arriving at yours.
  • How long they spent reading about specific topics.
  • Which other topics they’ve recently researched.

Context Data

Context data supplies background to your behavioral data which may include:

  • The company a visitor works for.
  • How long they’ve worked there.
  • A visitor’s job role and buying power.

It’s easy to see how combining behavioral and context data can help you identify a lead’s stage – and role – in the buying cycle.

Where Does Intent Data Come From?

Intent data can either be anonymous or known. It can come from either first-party sources (your website and lead magnets) or third-party sources (other websites, social media, other email lists, and other websites’ lead forms).

  • Anonymous Intent Data: You have an IP address and other information based on it (like Google search history and company name) but not a name or face.
  • Known Intent Data: You know more personal details about a visitor based on information from sources like forms.

Why is Intent Data Important?

Intent data sounds cool, but why does it matter? Is it worth the time and effort?

Yes. Here’s why.

It’s Useful for Personalization

65% of businesses say they’d have no problem switching vendors if a company does not provide personalized content.

That’s a lot of lost revenue. 

With intent data, you can gain a better understanding of your leads and website visitors so you can create personalized content for leads at every stage of the buying cycle.

It’s Hyper-Relevant

Intent data doesn’t just give you information about website visitors – it puts that data into context.

Context is especially useful when the time comes to run personalized email campaigns and retargeting ads on social media.

It Saves You Time and Money

You’ll know which leads are ready to buy, which aren’t quite decision-makers, and which are just browsing so you’ll be able to laser focus your marketing efforts.

Every dollar will stretch much farther when you know the buyer intent of each lead.

It’s More Accurate than Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics are useful, but they’re often delayed. Intent data is based on real-time behavior and information so it’s the most correct and up-to-date data available.

What is Intent Data Useful For?

Here are a few ways you can incorporate intent data into your overall B2B personalization strategy.

Creating Effective Account-Based Marketing Strategies

If you’re only targeting senior-level executives, you’re missing out.

According to research from Think with Google, while 64% of senior execs have the final say, non-C suite members still have a massive influence in the buying process.

Intent data can help you identify how much influence each visitor has, which role they play, where they’re at in the buying stage, and which other competitors they’ve researched.

What is Intent Data?

Source: Think with Google

Personalize Your Website’s Experience for Everyone

With features from Hushly like content bingeing, adaptive content hubs, and self-nurturing landing pages, you can use intent data to personalize content – even for anonymous visitors.

Filtering Your Audience List by Engagement

Since intent data happens in real-time, you’ll be able to score leads more effectively and offer them the most relevant content at any given moment.

Running Successful Retargeting Campaigns

Retargeting ads through email marketing and social media can play an extremely useful role in your B2B marketing strategy, but if it’s not hyper-personalized, it won’t deliver results you want. Intent data can optimize your retargeting game.

Improve Your Personalization Strategy Now

Hushly can help you create a personalized experience for every website visitor. Using data-driven technology, you can create adaptive content hubs and self-nurturing landing pages with content bingeing features that allow your leads to educate themselves at their own pace – perfect for account-based marketing.

Best of all, Hushly uses human verification to make sure all of your leads are not only real people but also real B2B buyers by cross-referencing LinkedIn information. You only pay us for real leads, not using the platform. Check out the demo now!

How to Use Content to Lower Your Cost of Leads

cost of leads

Launching a lead generation strategy can be exciting, but there’s no better feeling than when it pays off and your B2B company actually has the number of leads it needs to be successful.

Sadly, for many marketers, this ecstasy is short-lived when they find out what their average cost-for-leads is. It becomes clear that, if something isn’t changed quickly, the strategy that seemed so promising may actually turn into a major problem.

3 Ways You Can Use Content to Cut the Cost of Your Leads

There’s a lot to be said about the importance of publishing high-quality content to your B2B company’s website. Sharing it on social media can be extremely helpful, as well. The right content doesn’t just help to bring in organic traffic. It can help you build authority and qualify your company to prospects, as well.

Content can also go a long way toward dropping your cost-of-leads. Whether it’s currently out-of-control or you’re just worried it may be heading in that direction, here are three ways content can efficiently clip those costs.

1. Invest in Intent Data

At Hushly, we’re big advocates for the power of intent data. As the name suggests, this is data that reflects how someone behaves online with the goal of linking individuals to particular topics of interest.

So, if you sell CRM software, it would help to know if a prospect is reading your content because they’re trying to more effectively follow-up with leads or simply increase their lifetime value. Intent data would show you this, making it easy to deliver them the most relevant content.

Without this advantage, it will not only be difficult to keep your cost of leads down, but to convert them, as well. Imagine the prospect who wants to learn about how CRM can increase lifetime-customer-value who is shown several pieces of content on other topics instead.

They might stick around.

But they may also just go back to Google to see what the rest of their options are.

2. Switch to PPC Until You Have a Better Handle on Your Prospects

Every B2B company should have a plan for securing a reliable stream of organic traffic. It’s not just a high-ROI strategy, it can also be one of the most effective methods of increasing conversions, especially with long buying cycles.

These benefits are only reserved for those companies that know how to create the kind of content their most qualified leads want.

Again, intent data will help with this.

Until it does, though, you should consider focusing more of your marketing budget on paid ads that target those prospects directly. This will help cut your cost of leads and give you a reliable ROI while you take some time to better understand what kind of content works best for your market.

3. Conduct a Content Audit

Finally, one of the simplest steps you can take toward cutting the cost of your leads is by actually looking at the effectiveness of the content you create.

Even if you were to create all of your own content, there would still be a cost involved. That’s a lot of time spent away from other important priorities.

Of course, most B2B executives are paying others – either employees or contractors – to handle content creation for them.

That’s why it’s so important that you go back and see what’s actually working and to what degree. Otherwise, you may continue to invest in content types that offer little-to-no ROI. Your client acquisition costs will always remain inflated, then, because you’re paying for content that doesn’t move the needle.

There are a number of benefits to conducting a content audit, not the least of which is that it will help increase organic traffic, something that should then help you drop your costs significantly.

However, a detailed audit will also show you what kind of content to quit creating, what kind to double-down on, and even what kind may have potential but deserves further consideration.

Cut Your Cost of Leads by Converting More of Them

Implement the above advice and you’ll quickly find your company’s average cost of leads drop. Even just switching to PPC can give you some valuable breathing room while you consider the other two.

That said, we are also very proud to offer a platform that will increase your conversions immediately. Nothing will make your leads cost less than being able to convert them quickly and we guarantee that your lead generation and ABM conversions will increase by at least 51%.

Sound too good to be true?

We know.

That’s why we would be more than happy to prove it. Contact us today to set up a free demo.