Marketing with Intent Data: 10 Key Things You Need to Know

Intent data is a powerful tool that can revolutionize your marketing strategy. Marketing with intent data involves understanding what your potential customers are searching for and researching so that you can deliver highly targeted and relevant messages at the right time. Let us understand how to use intent data with marketing.

10 Key Points to Keep in Mind When Using Intent Data

Point#1: Understanding Intent Data

Let’s start with the basics of marketing with intent data – working on the foundations of Intent Data can build a strong base for our subsequent points. To begin with, Intent data is information collected about a prospect’s online behavior, indicating their interest in specific products, services, or topics. It provides insights into their buying journey and their ‘intent’ to purchase. It’s almost like having a real-time map that shows you what your potential customers are looking for at the moment, allowing you to quickly guide them toward the right path – i.e. your solution!

There are so many activities that generate intent data. These can include web searches, downloads of whitepapers, clicks on advertisements, engagement with content on social media, and even participation in webinars. By aggregating and analyzing this data, businesses can gain a clearer picture of what their potential customers are interested in and how close they might be to making a purchase.

Point#2: Types of Intent Data

It can be broadly categorized into two types based on how the intent data is collected:

First-party intent data: This is data collected directly from your website and marketing activities. It includes information like pages visited, time spent on the site, content downloaded, and forms filled out. First-party data is incredibly valuable because it is specific to your business and indicates a direct interest in your offerings.
Third-party intent data: This data is gathered from external sources such as search engines, social media, and industry-specific websites. It provides a broader view of a prospect’s behavior across the internet, offering insights into their interests and activities that may not be captured by your own digital properties. This type of data can help you identify new prospects and understand their broader interests and needs.

Point#3: Identify Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs)

The third point you should know when marketing with Intent data is its role in refining your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs). By analyzing the specific topics and keywords your target audience is researching, you can develop a more detailed and accurate picture of who your best prospects are. This can help you tailor your marketing efforts more precisely and focus on the prospects most likely to convert.

For example, if you notice that a significant portion of your high-value leads are researching certain industry trends or challenges, you can use this information to refine your ICP and develop intent-based marketing campaigns that address these specific interests and pain points.

Point#4: Optimize Content Creation

One of the perks of marketing with intent data is its use in optimizing your content creation efforts. By understanding the pain points and questions revealed by intent data, you can create content that is highly relevant and valuable to your audience. This not only helps attract more qualified leads but also positions your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

If your intent data shows your audience is searching for specific technology or solutions, create content like blog posts, whitepapers, and case studies on those topics. This ensures that your content resonates with your audience and helps move them further along the buying journey.

Point#5: Personalize the Buyer’s Journey

Personalization is key to modern marketing success. Using intent data, you can tailor messages and offers based on a prospect’s buying stage. Analyze intent data to identify their stage and deliver the right information at the right time.

If a prospect is early in the buying cycle, provide educational content to explain the problem and solutions. For those further along and comparing options, offer detailed product info, case studies, and competitive comparisons to support their decision.

Point#6: Improve Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a critical component of marketing effectively with intent data. Intent data helps prioritize leads by their intent signals. It guides your sales team to focus on the most likely prospects. Using intent data in your lead scoring model assigns higher scores to leads with strong purchase intent. This allows you to prioritize them for aggressive nurturing.

If a lead is researching your products and visiting your pricing page, it shows strong purchase intent. Assign a higher score to this lead. This ensures they get prompt follow-up from your sales team. It increases the chance of conversion.

Point#7: Enhance Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a highly targeted approach that focuses on specific high-value accounts. Marketing with Intent data can help you identify target accounts exhibiting high purchase intent and tailor your ABM campaigns accordingly. By understanding the specific interests and needs of these accounts, you can develop personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with key decision-makers and drive engagement.

For example, if you identify that a target account is researching a specific solution or technology, you can create customized content and offers that address their specific needs and pain points. This not only helps you stand out from the competition but also increases the likelihood of winning the account.

Point#8: Data Quality and Accuracy

One of the key challenges of using intent data is ensuring its accuracy and reliability. The quality of your intent data can significantly impact the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Therefore, it’s important to consider factors like data sources, collection methods, and data enrichment.

To ensure high-quality intent data, work with reputable data providers and use advanced data analytics tools to clean and enrich your data. This will help you avoid the pitfalls of inaccurate or incomplete data and ensure that your marketing efforts are based on reliable insights.

Point#9: Privacy and Compliance

As with any data-driven marketing strategy, it’s crucial to adhere to data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA when collecting and using intent data. These regulations are designed to protect consumers’ privacy and ensure that their data is used responsibly.

To stay compliant, make sure you have clear consent from your prospects before collecting their data and be transparent about how you plan to use it. Additionally, work with data providers who are compliant with these regulations and have robust data protection measures in place.

Point#10: Integration with Existing Systems

To maximize intent data effectiveness, integrate it with your CRM, marketing automation, and sales tools. This gives your teams the insights they need for informed decisions and targeted campaigns.

Integrate intent data with your CRM to give your sales team real-time visibility into prospects’ intent signals. This lets them tailor their outreach. Similarly, connecting intent data with your marketing automation platform triggers personalized email campaigns and nurture sequences.

Conclusion

By using intent data, you can boost your marketing ROI. It helps to speed up sales cycles and strengthens customer relationships. Intent data reveals your prospects’ interests and behaviors. This allows you to deliver targeted and relevant messages at the right time.

Refine your Ideal Customer Profiles. Optimize content creation. Personalize the buyer journey. Enhance Account-Based Marketing. Intent data can revolutionize your strategy and drive better results. Ensure data quality and accuracy. Adhere to privacy and compliance regulations. Integrate intent data with existing systems for maximum effectiveness.

In your intent data journey, keep these key points in mind and make the best of the data to tap better opportunities and drive business growth.