- March 1, 2018
- ABM, Demand Generation, Intent Data
Harness Third-Party Intent Data to Drive Real Marketing ROI
Every year, there’s a new buzz-phrase or innovative strategy poised to set the B2B marketing world on fire.
Social selling, account-based marketing (ABM), predictive analytics. These are just a few of the ideas that promise new levels of success. And yet, despite any hype associated with new strategies or technologies, success will always be contingent on executing on certain fundamentals.
Intent may seem like a good example of a new “hot technology,” but you’ve actually been using it for years.
Intent data is all around us. It’s simply a name for buyer behaviors in response to our inbound and outbound marketing efforts. The concept itself isn’t new; but the need to capture intent data more efficiently and use it properly is.
With so many sources of intent data available to you, it’s time to branch out from traditional first-party intent insights. If you can harness the power of third-party intent data, you can unlock new competitive advantages that deliver the marketing ROI your business needs.
3 Ways Third-Party Intent Data Can deliver the marketing ROI your business needs
Here are 3 ways that third-party intent data can take your marketing efforts to new levels.
#1 – Improve Lead Prioritization
If you have qualified leads in your internal system, you have first-party intent data. You know enough about a certain account or individual to warrant some action from the sales team.
However, your internal data does not provide a full enough picture of the account to help the sales team understand specifically where and when to focus its efforts. Understanding what the account is interested in with you as well as what they are showing interest in outside of you, competitive vendors they are researching and downloading content from, etc. helps to understand if that account is truly in-market now.
With quality third-party intent data, you can paint a clearer picture of true account purchase intent. And when you have this picture for your target accounts, you can provide sales with proper guidance on who to go after immediately.
#2 – Make Inbound Insights More Actionable
As inbound activity has become increasingly important for B2B businesses, marketers have used multiple tools to unmask anonymous website visitors. In theory, identifying these visitors gives you an initial foothold into an account and provides certain intent insights.
The problem is that this data is often too imprecise to justify any sales actions.
Third-party intent providers can augment what you see in your website data, and good providers can deliver opted-in contacts from the same accounts exhibiting purchase intent on your website in order to make your efforts more actionable and productive against inbound traffic.
#3 – Identify and Engage More of Your Total Active Demand
At any given point, there is a total addressable market for the solutions that you sell. Your own systems will only show you a very small part of that market. Third-party intent will help you identify active demand in your market that you cannot see in your own systems. But when working with suppliers, make sure that they are not just merely adding incremental insight to interactions you’re already seeing in your systems or simply putting new accounts on your list.
Good sources of intent will show you both the in-market accounts that are active, and will provide you with actual named buying team contacts from those accounts, not just 3rd party appended contacts or personas who may not be involved in the buying decision. The best sources will also provide intelligence you can immediately use to improve your content effectiveness or sales outreach approach so that you are better positioned to convert more of the total active demand.
Choosing the right intent provider
Third-party intent data has been around for many years. But in the past, B2B marketers couldn’t see the clear path to ROI when compared to internal efforts to identify purchase intent.
Third-party intent providers are more capable than ever of harnessing intent data to help brands sell more effectively. The only thing left for you to do choose the right provider.
Understand that not all intent data is created equal. Choosing a trusted provider should be an in-depth process that answers key questions. What real value can the provider’s data deliver? Is the provider an expert in your space? How will the intent data fit into your existing marketing workflows?
If you’re ready to harness third-party purchase intent insights for better results, contact us today to learn how TechTarget can help.
Account-Based Marketing, Active Demand, demand generation, lead generation, purchase intent data, purchase intent insight
