Data is heavily influencing the marketing and sales process and improving success rates for companies that know how to utilize it for their new business development campaigns.
Prospects are actively searching for companies equipped to solve their business challenges through products or services. They may be searching online, consuming content, attending a webinar, or even doing research through a live event, all with the goal of solving their business challenges. They’re gathering information about who to contact and who can potentially help them overcome their challenges.
Google Analytics and other tools provide key insights into activities on a company’s website, as well as how prospects discover the site through an organic search. Website visitor intelligence is also frequently used by a company to discover which individuals or businesses are visiting their website and to get in-depth information about them.
SalesIntel’s VisitorIntel is one such tool that reveals details on who’s visiting your company website and which business they work for. It also allows you to gain deep insights into your website visitors through firmographic and technographic data. Furthermore, it enables you to find and reach decision-makers and key influencers working at businesses visiting your website.
As companies become more focused on capturing leads through website visits and contact forms, buyers are more perceptive of those efforts to capture their personal data. Buyers are increasingly aware that by providing their email address and job title to access a company’s content, they are agreeing to be designated as a lead and pursued by the company’s sales team. In order to avoid any level of commitment, those buyers often begin their research on independent sites.
While companies have access to analytics related to their own website, what they are often missing are the steps in the buying process that take place elsewhere online, before buyers visit their company’s website. That’s where third-party intent data becomes crucial to their success.
Table of Contents
What Is Intent Data; Where Does It Come From; and Why Is It So Important?
Providers of intent data collect a variety of online research activities, including data from thousands of media publishers and B2B websites participating in a co-op for data sharing. An intent data platform actively monitors thousands of intent topics researched by businesses and individuals, so users could easily know what their prospects are interested in before they reach out to them. It also allows users to select intent topics specific to their company or industry with the help of custom filters. This helps them further sharpen their search for prospects by giving out buying intent signals and creating targeted sales and marketing campaigns.
Intent data compiles prospects’ activities, including:
- Blogs and articles a user reads
- Site searches
- Downloads of white papers, case studies, and tech publications
- Website visits
- Product reviews
- Time on website pages related to industry topics
- Online subscriptions to newsletters and updates
- Views of infographics
- Attendance of webinars
- Spikes in content consumption on a given topic
In order to capitalize on the value of intent data, it’s important to include both first-party and third-party data:
- First-party intent data includes information related to people and companies visiting a client-owned website, identified by their IP address.
- Third-party intent data includes information related to people and companies collected by publisher networks, either at the IP level or through user registration and cookies.
Intent data goes beyond measuring buyer behaviors on a company’s website (first-party) and collects information about activity across the Internet. It detects spikes in searches for a particular product or service and identifies the subjects being researched, telling the company what topics are most relevant to their target audience. Marketing teams can receive information about the research that is being done, as well as who is doing the research.
An algorithm captures the amount and type of content consumed, time spent on a page, how many consumers are reading the content and scrolling speed. These key statistics are used along with other indicators to generate a score for each company on each topic.
An alert is triggered when a business demonstrates an increased amount of research into a given topic compared to its historical baseline. This increase is a strong indicator of purchase intent.
In fact, ThinkWithGoogle reports that 89% of buyers do online research before making a purchasing decision, and 47% of buyers viewed between three and five pieces of content related to a purchase before making any contact with a sales representative (Demand Gen Report, 2016).
What Are the Benefits of Intent Data?
Intent data provides a broader picture of any given lead, allowing the company to prioritize the accounts they want to pursue, and which accounts are not a good match for their product or service offering. Statistics show that intent data helps improve engagement by over 16% and close rate by more than 79%.
In addition, intent data offers the following advantages:
- Intent data bridges the gap between marketing and sales, allowing the sales team to pursue only those leads most likely to convert.
- It’s possible to identify the number of employees from a single company that are researching a particular topic, providing context for the importance and timeline of a potential purchase.
- Companies are better able to identify stakeholders in a purchasing decision.
- Conversion rates improve because companies have a better indication of the leads most likely to make a purchase.
Intent data powers both your sales and marketing teams to increase conversions and revenue by engaging prospects most interested in your brand, or product. It helps with up to 4X pipeline expansion and 300% marketing ROI. You can save sales and marketing time and resources with intent data as it spotlights only those prospects actively researching you across the web and most likely to become your paying customers.
It’s important to partner with the right intent data company to ensure you benefit from the best possible data accuracy, coverage, and hygiene levels. Research and seek recommendations from industry experts to select the right data intelligence partner for you.
Here’s a link to a detailed comparison between two of the leading players in the B2B data industry: SalesIntel vs ZoomInfo.
Qualified, Sales-Ready Leads = Intent Data + “Fit”
With intent data, marketing teams receive extensive demographic information. This, however, does not guarantee that there’s a good match between a company’s “best client criteria” and the data received about a prospect. Data will be provided that a certain company has significantly increased searches on a topic related to the product or service, for instance, but that does not guarantee the company is a quality lead.
Intent data is most effective when it is paired with information relating to a company.
Capturing the leads that your ideal prospect is a more streamlined process with telemarketing services.
Telemarketing allows a company to identify those buyers that fit their ideal customer profile, filling a critical gap that combines intent data with internal data and then improving the quality of both through a personal conversation.
A company or a person researching a topic is not a guarantee for a sale. It could be a person or company with great interest, but one that does not meet the best client criteria, or it could be a competitor.
Fit helps establish if any given person doing research related to the product or service is in the market to make a purchase. When a quality lead qualification and nurturing process to determine fit are designed, the following information can be expected:
- The particular role the individual is in (if they are a decision-maker) and whether there are additional decision-makers
- What the decision-making process is
- Budget availability
- Buying timeline and steps to purchasing decisions
In addition, a conversation that takes intent data and works to establish fit is also pursuing other important goals, such as building a business relationship between the company and the prospect. It can also offer the lead access to more relevant information and content based on the stage they are at in the buying process, as well as answer questions or concerns. This conversation gives a personal element to what has largely become an automated process of qualifying leads.
Conclusion
A lead generation campaign presents exciting opportunities for a company pursuing growth but relies on compiled purchased lists, or even on an intent database without “measuring” and securing fit. A campaign developed this way will end with disappointing results. Worse, high costs invested in fruitless lead generation programs with little to no return on investment will lower the sales team’s trust in the process and the leads.
Incorporating lead qualification processes and nurturing to establish fit are as much a necessary step as the initial lead generation campaign. Companies will experience a higher level of prospect engagement, higher cooperation and excitement from the sales team, and happier upper-level management by incorporating the necessary steps to determine fit to best client criteria (with intent signals).
About Blue Valley
Blue Valley can provide access to an intent database, qualify leads, measure fit and can even nurture prospects. They excel at developing and executing content syndication (distribution) campaigns for clients who see a robust return on their investment time and again. Blue Valley will use a database of prospects that fit best client criteria and contacts that demonstrated intent (interest) in the products/services offered by a company. Services offered include email marketing, telemarketing, and other digital marketing services as valuable components to companies’ integrated marketing plans. This is all done while also providing a personalized human touch to the connection with the target audience. Contact Blue Valley today for more information about how their experience can help meet business growth goals.
About SJC Marketing
SJC Marketing is a full-service marketing, communication, and content-creation company. They offer professional communication solutions for small businesses and nonprofits. With a team of writers, marketing professionals, and social media experts, they offer targeted and highly-focused content and marketing plans. The focus of SJC is delivering high-value strategies and unique content that are backed by research and creativity.
About SalesIntel
SalesIntel is a global leader in the B2B contact and company data industry. The top B2B data provider has 95% accurate human-verified contacts, 77 million machine-verified contacts, and a comprehensive, all-encompassing B2B company database. Having the highest number of direct dials and human-verified contacts in the industry, SalesIntel maintains 95% data accuracy, reverifies its data every 90 days, and continuously scales up its database.
The best-in-class sales and marketing data intelligence company uses a combination of automation and a world-class research team to make this possible. SalesIntel is a cost-efficient, trusted, and reliable B2B data partner that promises top-notch data quality, customer service, and revenue increase. Request your free trial today.
Last Updated on November 20, 2023 by Ronen Ben-Dror