Read My Mind: 3 Ways to Use Data to Fuel Greater #DigitalMarketing Impact

Just because prospects aren’t replying directly to your email, scheduling a call, or setting up a (virtual) meeting doesn’t mean they aren’t moving through the buying cycle. Recent Forrester research revealed that a large percentage of the buying process happens without the seller present. But even so, buyers expect sellers to anticipate their needs and understand their priorities before even meeting with them.

 

It’s time for digital marketers and sales teams to read the buyer’s mind – not literally, but by careful observation. And in the digital world, this means tracking behavior online. That’s where data comes into play. A prospect’s digital interactions – the website pages they visit, searches they conduct, and links they click – can tell you a lot about what they’re thinking, so you can respond intuitively like a “psychic,” as the Forrester article compares it.

 

Here are three ways digital marketers can use data to anticipate what buyers want and deliver it before they even ask.

 

• Identify prospects ready to buy.

In our digital and data-driven world, much of what a buyer does online can be viewed and analyzed. When looking at a prospective buyer’s online actions, individually they may not mean much, but when aggregated together they provide a fuller picture such as whether they are educating themselves or ready to buy. Website visits, content downloads, email marketing clicks, product reviews, and more are all tracked by IP address to reveal buyer intent signals The process is called intent monitoring and is valuable for digital marketers to reach new prospects that are ready to “buy now.”

 

IP address monitoring primarily provides company data. At OMI, we marry this intent data with high-quality business contact data to identify the people behind the online behavior that are most likely to buy. Our customers use these signals to fuel their marketing and sales, particularly Account-Based Marketing (ABM) programs. By recognizing which businesses are searching for your solution (or topics related to it) and when they are searching for it, IP address lookups can go a long way toward uncovering warm leads as well as prospects who are ready to buy now. This is also important for tracking prospects already in the funnel.

 

Because there is so much to say on this subject, we’ve divided the discussion into two posts. Coming up soon on the blog I’ll cover the other two key points I wanted to share:

• How to nurture prospects through the funnel by understanding their priorities.
• Knowing the triggers that indicate when the time is right to reach out again to the buyer to share more content, schedule a virtual meeting, etc.

 

As you’ll see when we wrap up this topic, it isn’t enough anymore for digital marketers to simply track digital interactions. They must be able to identify the decision-makers behind that behavior, determine their priorities, and interpret what those digital behaviors signify. The good news is, there are now modern and streamlined approaches for accomplishing this – and psychic skills are not required to get the job done.

 

Come back soon to read part 2 of this series.

 

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. Take a look at our case studies to find out more.