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Intent data allows marketing teams to gain a deeper understanding of their customer’s online behaviour and pain points.
As a result, they can create more effective campaigns and target customers more accurately, generating higher-quality leads for the sales team.
And while it’s positive to see that 98% of marketers are confident using this data as part of their strategy, our research has revealed that measuring the ROI of their efforts remains a key challenge for 37% of marketing professionals.
This is a problem for those who want to evaluate and prove the value of purchase intent, as well as those who want to make more informed decisions about where to allocate their budget.
If this sounds familiar and measuring the ROI of your intent data is an ongoing challenge for your team, you need to address this right away.
Let’s take a look at how you can perfect your marketing campaigns and use intent data as effectively as possible, in order to increase sales and achieve proven results.
Establish clear KPIs
You can't expect to accurately measure and improve the ROI of your intent data without clear metrics in place.
So the first step is to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you measure the effectiveness of your intent data initiatives.
For example, you might wish to track metrics like lead conversion rates, customer acquisition costs and revenue attributed to your intent-driven campaigns.
Source high-quality intent data
With the large majority (95%) of marketers revealing they use more than one source to gather intent data, ensuring the accuracy and relevance of this data across multiple vendors is crucial.
Maximising ROI on intent data comes down to clearly understanding intent data. Within the industry, there are a range of lead generation providers that range in credibility. Insight into how your intent is generated and applied to leads is key in being able to optimise your ROI. You must understand the sources and signals that are aggregated, is there a weighting between these signals?
- Kevin Ellis, Senior Sales and Strategy Director
The accuracy and relevance of your intent data will directly impact how effective it is in predicting buyer intent, and therefore how you target your audience and generate higher-quality leads.
So, in order to get more for your money, it’s important that you assure the quality of your data and that you only use reputable sources.
With 85% of B2B marketers relying on either external or a combination of both internal and external intent data sources, it's important to speak to your third party vendors, content syndication partners, or lead generation providers and establish where their intent data comes from.
As well as investing in top-quality data sources, you must also get robust data cleansing processes in place and regularly update your data sets. This is another way to ensure accuracy and better results.
Recommended reading: How do I fix inaccurate marketing data?
Analyse and segment your data
By carefully analysing your intent data, the marketing team can identify patterns and segment the audience accordingly based on their buying intent.
This allows you to tailor your marketing campaigns to each segment, increasing the likelihood of them converting to a lead. And it can also help the sales reps to approach each lead with the correct messaging.
It's key to understand that true intent only exists if somebody says “I'm looking to buy a product like yours”, other than that the intent that we gather is implied intent.
If intent is considered a content download that took place a number of years ago then the quality of that intent is pretty much non-existent.
But if the implied intent of an individual is gathered from multiple sources taking into account sentiment and looking at the relevance of the individual's profile, job role and vertical, then that would be considered far higher intent and much more likely to generate a return on your investment.
- Kevin Ellis, Senior Sales and Strategy Director
Make the most of predictive analytics
Based on these insights, you can also use predictive analytics to forecast future in-market buyers based on historical intent.
This is a proactive approach that enables you to anticipate your customer needs and actions. It also gives you valuable insights on how to better target potential buyers by showing them relevant content, ads and product offerings. This can increase lead generation and boost sales, improving the ROI of your intent data strategy.
In fact, intent-based ads have been proven to be 2.5 times more efficient as they receive 220% higher click-through rates.
Ensure alignment between sales and marketing
A successful account-based marketing (ABM) strategy that utilises purchase intent will only be effective if there's alignment between sales and marketing; these two teams can't operate in a silo if they hope to generate quality leads and increase sales.
This will ensure intent data is seamlessly integrated into processes across both departments, enhancing your lead nurturing efforts and improving conversion rates.
Integrate intent data with your CRM
A key way to better align sales and marketing strategies and to improve the effectiveness of your intent data is to integrate it with your CRM system, as well as any other marketing automation platforms you may use.
This enables you to track leads through the sales funnel, segment them accordingly and automate personalised communications based on their intent signals.
Personalise your content and campaigns
It’s no secret that personalisation is critical in today’s digital landscape. With customers bombarded with adverts and digital content every day, you need to do more to cut through the noise and grab their attention.
That's why 80% of potential customers are more likely to buy from you if you offer a personalised experience.
Using intent data to personalise your content and messaging across different touchpoints and platforms can increase engagement and conversion rates. For example, using this data to generate personalised marketing campaigns, emails, web content, pop-ups, adverts and suggested content.
As tailored content can generate more high-quality leads, which in turn, are more likely to convert to sales, you can instantly boost the ROI of your intent data.
So if you’re not already generating personalised marketing campaigns using these insights, this should be a key focus over the next year.
Recommended reading: 7 simple ways you can use intent data in your marketing campaigns this year
Monitor your intent data in real-time
By implementing real-time monitoring of intent signals, you can quickly identify buyer behaviour and signals as they occur. Or at the very least, within a few hours of these actions taking place.
This allows you to target potential customers much quicker, providing them with content or information while it's still very relevant.
This also allows your sales team to prioritise the leads with the highest intent and engage with them promptly to increase sales.
Continually optimise your intent data strategies
Finally, in order to improve your ROI, you need to continuously monitor and optimise your use of intent data.
By measuring your chosen KPIs to determine areas of success and areas that may need improving, you can experiment with different techniques and continue to improve your intent strategy.
The buying cycle was originally considered to be a linear funnel journey but evolved studies imply that this is very much a non-linear process.
When somebody is close to that point of purchase, intent insights can be used to better understand the pain points and behaviours of individuals. This helps drive better communication, highlighting the relevant value of your products in relation to their needs and leading to a higher likelihood of conversion.
- Kevin Ellis, Senior Sales and Strategy Director
For example, you can experiment with different variables such as messaging, targeting criteria and content formats to identify what resonates most with your audience.
By continually analysing and optimising your intent data strategy, you can leverage this data more effectively to enhance your ROI and drive sales.
It’s time to use intent data to close more sales
Intent data should be a go-to source for both the marketing and sales teams, but leaders want to know that it's worth the investment. It’s also important that you get the most from your strategy, increasing leads and closing more sales.
