Top 5 Ways To Use Intent Data For More Revenue

The major part of marketing and sales depends upon the data that tells who the customers are and where they are. However, this data doesn’t really help in finding the prospects that are interested in purchasing your solutions. More importantly, it has become difficult for marketers and salespeople to increase the conversion rates based on the typical data collecting method, which is hollow to the bottom.

This is where intent data comes in to play its role effortlessly. Data that tells who the buyers are, what they are doing, and how you can convert those buyers into customers. In this blog, we’ll know what intent data is and how we can use it to increase revenue.

What Is Intent Data?

Intent data is a collection of behavioral information of buyer’s online activities that tell what your buyers are doing, what their interests are, and thus, giving you strong predictability of their future buying activities and interests.

For example, people who are looking for food deliveries, are interested in online food services, more so if they have ordered food in the past particularly a chicken wing then they are showing a very strong intent of ordering chicken wings at the moment as well, which makes them an ideal customer for KFC.

The above example shows the two types of data that are combined to form intent data. Those two data are- topic data and context data. The food delivery of chicken wings is the topic of interest and based on past orders, the buyer seems to be a person who’s a young teen in the context of the individual.

On the basis of this, to collect topic data, there are 4 categories to consider-

• Known 1st party data: People who are visiting your website, who gave their contact details through signing to your newsletter or filling the online form, are the “known data”. With the help of an automation tool or platform, you can keep an eye on those people.
• Unknown 1st party data: People who are visiting your website but haven’t given any personal or contact details are “ unknown data”. But, you can track these people by their IP address, which is mapped to the company they represent, and thus, eventually identify these people.
• Known 3rd party data: This data consists of people that roam or visit your competitors’ websites, that fills the online form of that website and enables us to know those people as well. Due to this access, vendors make this data available to other marketers.
• Unknown 3rd party data: People visiting other websites that you don’t have access to or not owned are “unknown” to you, but somehow show relevance.

Context data-

Context data is all about knowing the intention behind the buyer’s purchase. Why did he/she take the action to purchase that particular service? For example, if the person reading this blog is a marketer, then there’s a strong chance that he/she is planning to launch a product that uses intent data.

The higher the level of context, the easier it is for you to target that person. If you know where the marketer works, what’s their role in the organization, and what their history is related to intent data, then you can target this person with utmost confidence.

Without the actual reason behind the intent, you will waste your budget on people who might show interest in your services, but will never turn to customers. Therefore contextual information is as important as topical information. Both of them work as a couple.

How To Use Intent Data

As we know what intent data is and why it is important to B2B businesses. In fact, this report shows 25% of B2B businesses are using intent data, while 35% of businesses are planning to use it within a year.

This means you have a limited period of time to get better than your competitors.

Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing is a marketing strategy that is different from traditional marketing strategies. Compared to traditional strategies, ABM is a focused approach that targets specific accounts.

With the help of the sales team and marketing team, you can use ABM effectively. Intent data helps you in getting those insights about customers that eventually contribute to shaping that ABM campaigns with personalized messages. Thus, intent data helps you in building relationships with customers.

Lead Scoring

Many companies are using intent data to track their customers. With the help of known 1st party data, you observe the behavioral pattern of the customers and alert the sales team to convert them.

For example, if a lead visits your website, the lead score will increase and as that lead spends more time on different pages of your website the lead score increases significantly and when it reaches a threshold, marketers send salespeople to reach that person.

Targeted Advertising

Using intent data, you can customize the advertisements based on the behaviors of the people. If you target your ads to people who show no intention of buying the product then you are wasting your money and time.

Therefore, with the help of intent data, you target only those people who show strong intent signals and open numerous opportunities. Thus, it saves your time and money.

Reduce Manual Effort

One of the main benefits of using known 1st party intent data is, it reduces manual efforts of marketing operations. With known 1st party intent data, there is no need for the marketing team to manually design and segment the content as per the collected data, instead, AI does the most work for you.

Using intent data, AI decides to create the best content for each buyer with personalized recommendations as well, giving marketers more time to focus on other important strategies.

Identifying Potential Customers

Unknown 3rd party data is vast and complex, thus most companies do not have the budget and expertise to combine this data into their marketing and sales model. In fact, marketers are using predictive analytics platforms that combine with CRM platforms and marketing automation.

Which ultimately helps them in determining the relevant 3rd party topics. This information then helps in identifying new leads for inbound and outbound initiatives within higher-scoring accounts.

Final Words

There is no doubt intent is valuable, it gives an advantage over competitors for a long time. Rewarding higher brand preference, revenue, and cost improvements. Today, you can’t afford to ignore the customer intent data while designing the strategies.

However, focusing only on intent data can also exclude the buyers who are not captured by the intent data model, and B2B intent data works best when combined with other data to create a holistic approach.