The data that indicates that your buyers are likely to make a purchase soon is the Intent Data. It includes consumer behavior like viewing product or service detail pages, patterns of browsing service offerings, etc. and gives incredibly useful information to digital marketers. With the capability to show which leads or accounts are conducting research online, it also alerts sales and marketing teams of those high-quality leads that are already in the buying mode. When appropriately utilized, intent data can play a vital role in boosting conversions and increasing sales.
Best Ways How Marketers Can Make Use Of Intent Data
1. Mapping the Customer Journey
Intent data is valuable for digital marketing, and what many marketers may not realize is that intent begins before the buyer even docks on your website. It can be challenging for digital marketing teams to know how much aware the potential customers are when they first visit a brand’s site, but this can dramatically impact decision-making. Therefore, intent signals and the customer journey can vary greatly. And that’s where personalization comes in. With a unified view on intent data and analytics, marketers can be proactive and predict and respond to the audience’s intent in a contextually relevant manner-despite where the customers are in their journey. And that’s why mapping intent data to specific points along the customer journey is crucial. Nowadays, businesses are applying AI and advanced analytical models to cultivate value-generating behaviors and prolong the customer’s lifetime value.
2. Hyper-Personalizing the Digital Experience
Intent data can be used by the digital marketers to trigger hyper-personalize the marketing campaigns. Someone visiting the same product or service detail page multiple times is a signal that they may be interested in that product or service offering. It’s handy to have a system in place that automatically triggers a cross-channel campaign that pushes for a conversion. But this is made possible only when you have detailed and accurate intent data.
3. Optimizing in Real-Time
When your customer is evaluating your brand, intent data, and precise analytics can help you adapt marketing efforts to the customer response in real-time. Today’s marketplace is dynamic and fast-paced, and marketing teams need to stay focused and agile to meet the rapidly evolving customer demands. With the help of intent data, marketing teams can automatically optimize the product or service offers, for instance, based on past behaviors or purchase decisions. High-quality intent data enables marketing teams to enhance and optimize their efforts in real-time.
4. Finding Out Patterns and Retaining Customers
Intent data and analytics help you find out patterns of user behavior and drive customer engagement in the post-purchase stages of the customer journey. The customer journey doesn’t end with making a purchase, and especially B2B, customer retention is critical for maximizing the ROI of their marketing efforts. Customer retention is imperative and should be the focus of every business owner because it’s way more economical and cost-effective to retain already existing customers than to find new ones. Consistent focus on existing customers can significantly boost your ROI.
Another important factor and a big trend in 2020 will be to understand the emotions of the customers during the decision-making process. The kind of questions that run in their minds are based on emotions, and not only on satisfaction or analytical thinking. Although the role of emotions in sales and marketing is not new, and until now, it had only been an opinion and not a fact. However, 2020 is has been a year where more B2B businesses understand that. As a result, they have been able to measure and analyze them to change the emotional data into a digital form, which is easier to comprehend and to use. A deeper and better understanding of the data about the customers’ decisions and the emotions that drive them to make those can give companies an edge and an advantage to grow and succeed.
Final Thoughts
The role of marketing is to gauge the intent. B2B marketers have done that for years by creating pipelines of content and scoring lead prospects on internally biased assumptions. Now, it should be done on the websites to enable a lot of preliminary desk research of prospects. People are looking for diversity in the content and validated thoughts and opinions. In B2B, where there are unusually long lead cycles and multiple decision-makers, it is highly unlikely that a prospect reads a piece of content on our site, and requests a demo that ever reaches an opportunity. The application of intent leads to more influential marketing, enabling contact earlier on in the buying cycle. It also allows more informed marketing—advertising, which can be scattered if improperly rolled out. If you know what people are looking for, it makes the process of advertising a lot easier. Intent data enables companies to overcome content deficit and saturation. Rather than having to produce a full portfolio of content, we can now create assets that help persuade and convert.
B2B businesses today cannot afford to ignore the customer intent data while developing their digital marketing strategies for 2020 and beyond. It’s essential to see the world as your customers view it as and then shape the customer journey accordingly with data and analytics. The rewards will be revenue and cost improvements and lasting competitive advantage over your peers.