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Lead generation is a critical factor in the success of any business. While pay-per-click ads and cold outreach are popular methods for generating leads — the future of lead generation lies in buyer intent data.
Studies show 89% of people conduct independent internet research before making a B2B purchase — the good news for you is, the research that most people are already doing can actually help surface new, qualified leads. Tracking lead activity on and off your site allows you to collect intent data that can help you better understand your prospective customers and capture their interest, ultimately helping you close more deals.
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What is buyer intent data?
Consider buyer intent data as an innovative means to identify your ideal customer.
Buyer intent data offers insights into user behavior and helps businesses identify potential customers. By leveraging intent data, you can become a part of your buyer’s journey at an early stage and earn an edge over your competition.
In this article, we will break down how you can boost sales by leveraging buyer intent data to:
Establish a targeted lead generation strategy
The best use of buyer intent data is to help you identify qualified leads.
A good set of data can find the buying signals coming from prospective customers and score leads based on their actions through the buying journey.
Here’s a simple breakdown of how lead scoring looks in action:
- Add five points when a prospective buyer lands on your website
- Add another five points when the buyer revisits the website in a specified timeline (i.e., 48 hours)
- Add an additional 10 points if the lead puts an item in their cart
Buyer intent data takes into account every action a lead takes and assign these points per your scoring model. Based on each lead’s scores, you can build an effective sales strategy that includes sending targeted and customized prompts to help convert prospects into customers.
Using a score-based lead gen strategy and buyer intent data also helps you segment your leads. If you sell different kinds of apparel, your intent data will inform you about which products your leads are attracted to. This information can be used to position those products with the right audiences and drive more sales.
Generate personalized messaging to boost outreach
Personalization is your key to stand out in a crowd of generic sales pitches and marketing messages.
You have a higher chance of converting leads when you tailor your messaging to their needs. Buyer Intent data can help with this process by providing insight into your prospect’s needs — allowing you to personalize your messages and pitch them precisely what they want at the right time. Buyer intent data can help:
- Address prospects’ pain points
- Show prospects how your solution can help
- Build relationships before prospects become customers
For example, if you are marketing a skincare brand, buyer intent data will help you focus only on acne treatment when reaching out to someone looking for acne removal. By analyzing and using intent data, you can influence a buyer’s decision-making process.
Acquire knowledge about potential customers
From awareness to conversion, staying a step ahead of your prospective buyers during their journey will help boost your sales.
If you have a clear picture of your customer base, marketing efforts will automatically become easier. Buyer intent data empowers businesses to define their ideal customers and consequently look for them in the right places.
Intent data essentially helps you target every lead based on their stage—awareness, interest, consideration, intent, and purchase—during their buyer journey.
Gartner shows people spend half their time reviewing your brand on third-party platforms. This is crucial to find those interested in your business, target them with your sales message, and monitor their movement throughout their decision-making process.
Create consistent monitoring to minimize low-impact activities
Buyer intent data essentially records users’ behavior in terms of online searches, engagement, and interest. Not only can marketers use this data to target leads, but they can monitor and qualify leads for specific intent signals.
By consistently monitoring target users’ behavior, you can focus your marketing activities around these intent signals. Intent monitoring helps you find that perfect spot of relevance, timing, and context to start any marketing activity. This will help in minimizing low-impact campaigns and create greater engagement with more targeted initiatives.
Intent monitoring tools make this process easier. You can use tools like Crunchbase, Bombora, Segment, Hotjar, and Reply for specific needs.
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Optimize content marketing efforts
Intent data boosts the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and enables you to create content that hooks your audience — making potential customers want to take action.
The knowledge of what your prospects need will help you customize your marketing efforts. Intent data can help you choose the right keywords, enhance your blog content, create catchy ads, and build greater accuracy.
While working with buyer intent data, it is also crucial to use a tool that can help you organize your analytics.
Combining good data and an intelligent system will allow you to complete your conversion funnel with the best possible framework and results.
Enhance customer retention rate
The benefits of buyer intent data are not limited to generating leads. It is equally helpful in retaining your existing clients through targeted efforts.
Intent data can help capture customer dissatisfaction by analyzing their actions. If a customer visits the cancel my subscription page at any point, they are most likely considering stopping using your services. Equipped with this crucial information, you can pay special attention to unhappy customers and create strategies that may help retain them.
Leveraging buyer intent data to boost sales
If you are building an online business, utilizing buyer intent data is a widely popular solution to generate more leads.
There is no better sales strategy than using intent data to identify your prospective customers and taking the right steps to help them. The data helps you find your leads, offers you the key to convert them, and allows you to retain them throughout their journey.
Use these points as guiding factors to include buyer intent data in your sales and marketing efforts to make your campaigns targeted and results-optimized.
