Turn Intent Data Insights Into Action: 9 Strategies for Success

Today, data opportunities are plentiful, but identifying and implementing the best strategies can be overwhelming. Recent Forrester research findings point to a major disconnect between marketers and behavioral data, noting that 75% "generate insights from signals collected, but more than 60% do not incorporate customer behavioral signals into their customer engagement strategies."

Intent data is one area where marketers see real value, especially for customer acquisition, which is our domain at OMI. Speaking from experience, I've seen how intent data can significantly impact lead gen, ABM, personalization, and other areas of sales and marketing – and Forrester agrees. A recent study from the research firm indicates that 85% of companies using intent data report achieving business benefits, and DemandGen Report says that as many as 65% of B2B companies in a recent poll plan to invest more in intent data.

What’s driving the increased interest and the results? These nine tips, best practices, and strategies for success will show you what intent data can do:

• How It Works: Potential customers actively search for solutions to their challenges every day—browsing online, reading articles, downloading white papers. This online behavior reveals your prospects' intentions to buy a product or service. Intent monitoring tools track the behavior, enabling you to find those potential customers even before they find you and your solution.

 

• Marketing Benefits: From a marketing perspective, intent data aids in identifying early opportunities and drives more effective lead scoring. It distinguishes serious buyers actively researching solutions from those just doing "window shopping” by identifying the prospects most ready and most likely to buy. This allows marketers to focus their efforts on high-potential leads. As a result, it enables more targeted marketing efforts and more efficient use of advertising budgets.

 

• How Our Clients Use It: At OMI, our intent data is used by clients for:

 

• Campaign analysis
• Programmatic ad campaigns, where our data is tied to IDs
• Social and email marketing, using HEMS
• Postal delivery and geolocation: All data is CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System) certified and verified with the NCOA (National Change of Address) database  

 

• Unification of B2B and B2C: When working with intent data, tracking the “universal person” is critical. This means knowing who they are from both a personal and a professional perspective. By linking the interest paths of the individual as both a consumer and business professional, you gain a more complete view of your prospect, which improves targeting and personalization. All intent signals are uncovered anonymously, based on web search behavior at the contact ID level.

 

• Fresh and Customized Data Feeds: To ensure the most up-to-date insights, we ingest as many as 14 billion digital intent signals each week. And to identify the in-market prospects who most closely align to our client’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), our intent monitoring search topics can be highly customized.

 

As a data feed, OMI offers fresh intent signals each week, and as a campaign trigger for intent signal execution across channels, we deliver 24-hour feeds.

• Deep Intent Insights: OMI links a prospect’s web search history to company-level behavioral pathways. The intent signals we source aren’t based on the websites that are being viewed but on the content that’s being consumed on those websites. This provides deeper insights into the prospect’s interests and preferences.

 

• Filtered with NLP and AI: All signals are filtered using natural language processing (NLP) and AI to enable tremendous speed and scale during the intent monitoring process.

 

• Combine with B2B Business Contact Data: Our unique approach at OMI involves combining digital intent signals with our high-quality Living File® business contact data, which consists of 140+ million contacts with email addresses. Bringing together these two large data sets allows you to identify prospects by company and job function—people who not only align with your ICP but who have also done online research or engaged with online content related to your solutions.

 

• Audience-Building Expertise: As we combine the two data sets, we also tap into our team's audience-building expertise—drilling down by firmographics, such as manager-, professional, and director-level and above titles—to further fuel precise targeting and improved personalization.

 

As a B2B marketing leader, even with a sea of data surrounding you, your mission in this data-driven world is simple: leverage the most impactful data assets available to you. The way we see it, intent data is a clear winner. It offers assurance that you are targeting the highest-quality prospects, which in turn ignites business growth.

 

Connect with our team for more information.