Why Intent Data Is the Future of B2B Marketing

Today’s buyers expect to see content that’s valuable to them. Better yet, they want content that answers their questions. Intent data offers the best way to give them what they want. In fact, a leading marketing insights and intelligence organization calls intent data the future of B2B marketing. But according to Demand Gen Report’s ABM Benchmark Survey, only 25% of B2B companies are currently using intent data to power their marketing campaigns.

Intent data gives B2B sellers insights into the digital behaviors of prospects by tracking the search terms they use. Using a combination of IP addresses and cookie tracking, along with natural language processing (AI), intent companies are able to identify and catalog these searches or website visits into groups of relevant, down-funnel digital prospects.

Digital behavior used for intent data can be broken down into three categories:

• Informational – Looking for answers to a specific question: searches often begin with “How do I?” “What is?” or “Why does?”
• Transactional – Have the intention of making a purchase or completing another action such as a form submission, sign-up or phone call
• Commercial – Similar to transactional, these searches are related to free offers or discounts that capture buyer attention

Put simply: intent data can tell you who is actually looking for what you offer. This can enable you to target them more effectively with your current campaigns and enhance your list building for future initiatives. Additionally, intent data allows sellers to know where customers are in their buying journey, which in turn allows companies to know when to switch to more personalized transactional emails. (On that note, studies indicate transactional emails convert 8 times higher than regular marketing emails.)

Here’s how we leverage digital intent monitoring at OMI: As IP addresses and intent data surge to specific content on the internet, we monitor that data to provide more than 14 billion new  intent signals to our clients each week. The signals are grouped into buckets by industry and interest level, with additional insights added about the types of departments and contacts most likely to be associated with these buckets. From there, the data is matched by IP address to the company associated with the searches—and to the potential buyer contact as well, using our database of more than 18 million companies and 78 million contacts with email addresses.

Intent data can give you better insight into who you should be targeting, where your prospects are in the buying cycle, and when to reach them. And with a more targeted approach, intent data can boost your marketing campaigns’ organic visibility, and result in improved ROI and increased landing page conversions.

If there was a way to get your message in front of people searching for what you offer, would you use it? So, are you? Reach out if you want to find out more about embracing the future of B2B marketing with intent data. Let us show you how to build a more precise audience for your offers and fuel more effective campaigns.

Outward Media’s proven data cleansing services and targeted, accurate B2B data can enable you to achieve better digital marketing ROI and, ultimately, convert more prospects into customers. Go here to find out about leveraging our SMB and medical market data on the LiveRamp Data Marketplace, where 95% of our email data matches the identity graph for use with display ad marketing.