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You have a list of companies to target with your ABM campaigns, but how can you know which ones are really ready to buy? The answer lies in intent data.
The first step to take in any B2B account-based marketing (ABM) strategy is to curate a list of companies in your target market. Thanks to online directories like Clutch.io and Crunchbase, that’s the easy part. But then the big question remains: which of these companies are actually ready to buy?
What is intent data?
Intent data is any information that indicates a potential customer’s interests, behaviors, and intentions based on their online activities. This helps sales and marketing teams identify the prospects who are showing interest in products or services like yours, thus allowing for more targeted marketing campaigns.
Intent data broadly falls into two main categories:
● First-party intent data includes any information that your company collects directly via its own digital channels. These include website navigation patterns and engagement with your content.
● Third-party intent data includes any data collected from external sources like trending topics on search or social media. While often limited due to privacy regulations, third-party data still provides context that first-party data might not capture alone.
Integrating intent data into your ABM campaigns is essential for ensuring you’re targeting the right leads. If you’re not making your targeting decisions based on intent, then you’ll inevitably end up wasting your resources on targeting companies in an uncoordinated manner. Given how competitive the B2B technology space is, these ‘spray and pray’ tactics are ineffective.
Ready-to-buy signals
Intent data provides further insight into your potential customers by helping you identify which ones are ready to buy – or are likely to be in the future. Let’s say, for example, that a potential customer visits your website and consents to tracking cookies when prompted. That in itself is a small indicator of their readiness to buy. If they then end up spending a significant amount of time viewing specific product pages and regularly returning to the pricing page, then there’s an even higher chance that they’re genuinely interested in your offer.
Now let’s imagine they provide their contact information via a gated landing page to download a whitepaper or brochure or sign up for a webinar. Not only does this mean they’ve explicitly agreed to receiving further communications – it also indicates a very strong interest and intent to buy. They’re the accounts you’ll want to prioritize in your marketing communications.
Future purchase intent
A comprehensive ABM strategy doesn’t just focus on immediate rewards. You also need to consider the long term, especially considering the relatively long purchase cycles in B2B. That means identifying prospects with future purchase intent, thus helping you develop a longer-term engagement strategy. After all, B2B companies that have a genuine need for and interest in a new product won’t always be ready to buy, since they often have to go through multiple layers of approval before a final decision can be made.
Consider, for example, a prospect who reads multiple blog posts about industry trends related to your product over several months. Perhaps they’ve even downloaded a whitepaper, viewed a few case studies, or signed up for a webinar. However, they haven’t yet visited your pricing page or requested a demo. This indicates their interest in your product, but not a readiness to buy. In other words, they’re still in the consideration stage of the marketing funnel. That means your prospects will likely be more interested in educational and authoritative content, rather than direct sales engagement.
Final words
The most important thing about intent data is that it helps you prioritize your marketing efforts and create personalized campaigns that target prospects at specific stages of their journey in a way that’s timely and relevant. No ABM strategy should be without these insights.
Ready to level up your customer engagement and boost your ABM success? Partner with Energize Marketing to reach key accounts faster and achieve higher conversion rates and revenue growth.
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