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Comparison of Tools for Using Intent Data in B2B Companies.

Written by Simon Kostelny | 11/6/23

Unlock the secrets of utilizing intent data in B2B marketing. Dive into strategies that refine and enhance Account-Based Marketing (ABM), ensuring targeted, effective campaigns which strategically navigate through the complex buyer's journey.

Content

Introduction

B2B Application of Intent Data

Nurturing Leads with Intent Data

Tools for Handling Intent Data in B2B Marketing

Conclusion

FAQ

Introduction

Intent data helps businesses predict their customers' future buying habits. It makes marketing and sales more effective by focusing on areas with the best potential for success. Think of intent data like a marketing guide. It uses online user actions to show the best ways to engage with customers, especially in Account-Based Marketing (ABM).

ABM is known for its custom, focused approach. With intent data, it becomes even more powerful. It helps businesses target customers who are not only a good fit but are also looking to buy. This means companies can be more precise in their marketing and sales, making the most of their resources and having a bigger impact.

B2B Application of Intent Data

The digitalization of B2B interactions has surfaced an invaluable asset for marketers: Intent Data. Understanding and leveraging this intricate web of digital footprints left by prospects during their online explorations can bolster various facets of B2B marketing endeavors, leading to highly insightful and impactful strategies.

Lead Scoring

  • Insightful Prioritization: Intent data brings an additional layer to lead scoring by not only assessing a lead’s demographic fit but also evaluating their online behaviors and engagement with content.

Integrating intent data, businesses can proficiently discern the readiness of a lead to convert, thereby ensuring that marketing and sales efforts are precisely channelized towards the most potential prospects, refining resource allocation and efforts.

Content Personalization

  • Enhanced Relevance: Employing intent data, content creation transforms from being generic to being a mirror, reflecting a lead’s specific inquiries, interests, and pain points.

When content resonates with the exact questions and needs that prospects have, it becomes a pivotal touchpoint in their buying journey, enhancing brand credibility and trust, and hence, amplifying conversion possibilities.

Targeting & Segmentation

  • Audience Insight: Intent data provides a unique look into the digital journeys of prospects, aiding marketers in creating sharply targeted and insightful marketing campaigns.

Segmentation now evolves into a highly nuanced strategy that doesn’t just bucket prospects into broad categories but considers their varied digital behaviors, ensuring messaging is timely, pertinent, and incites engagement.

Predictive Analysis

  • Proactive Strategy: Intent data allows marketers to decipher patterns and predict which leads or accounts are more inclined towards conversion.

Leveraging predictive analysis, marketing, and sales strategies can be realigned to proactively nurture leads that showcase higher conversion potential, thus ensuring that efforts are not dispersed but are sharply focused on driving tangible results.

Nurturing Leads with Intent Data

Lead nurturing, at its core, revolves around developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and throughout the buyer’s journey. Intent data, in this context, acts as a compass, pointing marketing and sales endeavors in the direction of genuinely interested prospects and allowing businesses to tailor their communication in a way that resonates.

Identifying and Understanding the Leads

Your journey begins with identifying leads that exhibit potential buying signals. These can be expressed through various online behaviors, such as visiting your website, downloading resources, or engaging with your content. Intent data enables marketers to pick up on these digital breadcrumbs, understanding not just who the leads are, but also what they are looking for, and how they navigate their purchasing journey.

Personalizing the Communication

Once you've identified leads and gauged their interests, the next step involves personalizing communication to meet their specific needs and pain points. Here, leveraging platforms like LinkedIn, where a plethora of professionals actively engage and seek solutions, can serve as a goldmine for pinpointing and engaging viable leads.

Utilizing intent data to discern topics and solutions that pique lead interests and crafting messages that address their specific challenges not only enhances engagement but also fortifies trust in your brand. This practice elegantly intertwines with content marketing strategies, ensuring the message delivered is not only pertinent but also compelling and conversion-oriented.

Timing is Everything

Equally crucial is the timing of your communication. Insights gleaned from intent data can provide clues into when a lead is most likely to convert. Recognizing where they are in the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, or decision stage) enables you to deliver timely and relevant content that nudges them closer to a purchase decision without coming off as pushy.

Developing a Lead Scoring Model

Developing a lead scoring model that takes into account the intent signals your prospects are sending also becomes pivotal. This involves assigning values to different behaviors and engagement levels, which becomes essential in ensuring that leads aren’t just identified, but also meticulously ranked and engaged in a manner that’s strategic and impactful.

Continuous Engagement and Retention

But the journey doesn’t end once a lead converts. Intent data can also be instrumental in post-purchase engagement and customer retention. Understanding and acting upon customers’ ongoing interactions with your brand allows you to keep delivering value, whether through relevant content, product updates, or new offerings, ensuring that customers remain satisfied and engaged.

Utilizing Multichannel Strategies

Implement a multichannel strategy to nurture leads where they are most active. Whether it's through email campaigns, social media, or content marketing, ensure that your messages are consistent and coordinated across all channels. In the future of B2B lead generation, it becomes imperative that a coherent and unified dialogue is maintained across all customer touchpoints, aligning with evolving market trends and customer needs.

Tools for Handling Intent Data in B2B Marketing

Apollo.io

Apollo.io is renowned for enabling swift access to valuable contact information and creating detailed customer profiles using various data sources. It’s a platform that marries various functionalities – CRM, lead generation and enrichment, and sales automation, to name a few.

Capabilities in Handling Intent Data

  • Robust Data Collection: Gathers intricate data across multiple online platforms.
  • Rich Customer Profiling: Enables the creation of comprehensive customer profiles.
  • Lead Prioritization: Helps in identifying and prioritizing high-value leads.

Pricing and Plans

With a tiered pricing model that includes Free, Starter, Growth, and Enterprise plans, Apollo.io accommodates businesses of diverse scales and budgets.

ZoomInfo

A platform like ZoomInfo which is recognized for offering detailed information on companies and professionals, propels sales and marketing teams towards accurate prospect identification and engagement.

Capabilities in Handling Intent Data

  • Detailed Prospecting: Provides intricate details about companies and individuals.
  • Advanced Filtering: Offers refined search and filter options to pinpoint the right prospects.
  • Automated Research: Equips teams with automated research capabilities to swiftly access detailed prospect information.

Pricing and Plans

ZoomInfo provides flexible plans, with each dedicated to specific functionalities like sales, marketing, or operations, fitting various budgetary allocations and needs.

Clearbit

Clearbit offers a rich palette of tools for sales and marketing professionals, ranging from lead generation to customer segmentation, powered by data from numerous sources.

Capabilities in Handling Intent Data

  • Data Enrichment: Enriches CRM and other databases with fresh, accurate data.
  • Customer Segmentation: Facilitates segmentation with data on demographics, job titles, and interests.
  • Integration Capabilities: Seamless integrations with various CRM and email marketing platforms.

Pricing and Plans

Clearbit’s pricing model is constructed around three varied packages, each catering to different marketing aspects, ensuring businesses only pay for what they require.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator excels in aiding sales professionals to forge connections with potential customers by harnessing the power of LinkedIn's extensive network.

Capabilities in Handling Intent Data:

  • Advanced Search and Recommendations: Precision in finding the right prospects using tailored recommendations and intricate search functionalities.
  • Visibility into Key Decision-Makers: Reveals the crucial decision-makers within targeted companies.
  • Insightful Analytics: Analytics to help comprehend customer behaviors and devise impactful campaigns.

Pricing and Plan

LinkedIn Sales Navigator proffers a triad of plans: Core, Advanced, and Advanced Plus, each tier offering a slew of beneficial features commensurate with its price.

Cognism

Cognism employs artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to boost businesses' capability to discover and engage potential customers with an array of tools including lead generation, data enrichment, and email automation.

Capabilities in Handling Intent Data

  • AI-Driven Insights: Uncover deeper customer insights and preferences, propelling data-informed decisions.
  • Rapid Lead Identification: Swift identification of quality leads and tracking customer engagement.
  • Targeted Campaigns: Cultivating specialized campaigns that speak directly to the needs of the prospects.

Pricing and Plans

Cognism tends to keep its pricing under wraps, necessitating direct contact with their sales team for a precise quote, thereby tailoring offerings to specific business needs.

Lusha

Lusha specializes in providing comprehensive contact and company information, furnishing sales and marketing teams with pivotal tools for lead generation, data enrichment, and email verification.

Capabilities in Handling Intent Data

  • Extensive Contact Information: Provides rich contact data, such as email addresses and phone numbers.
  • CRM Integrations: Facilitates CRM integrations to streamline data management.
  • Predictive Analytics: AI-based predictive analytics to assist in automating lead generation and prioritizing leads.

Pricing and Plans

 Lusha presents four clear-cut pricing plans: Free, Pro, Premium, and Scale, each packed with an array of features to suit various business sizes and requirements.

IntentHub

IntentHub is a specialized tool designed to identify companies actively in the buying mode by aggregating and analyzing early buyer intent signals from over 1 million B2B websites. It translates this data into actionable insights, providing a peek into accounts that are presently in the market.

Capabilities in Handling Intent Data

  • Identify In-Market Accounts: Uncover companies demonstrating online research and buying intent.
  • Define Intent Topics: Allows users to specify keywords related to prospects' potential interests.
  • Robust Filtering: Enables the specification of search via intent locations, company industry, and more.

Pricing and Plans

IntentHub offers a variety of pricing options, starting with a 7-day free trial and extending to several tiered plans, such as the no-cost "Free" plan and more comprehensive "Individual" and "Business" plans, priced at $4,999 per year, each offering varying levels of access to topics, filter changes, and export capabilities.

Conclusion

Using intent data in B2B marketing is like having a secret map that shows what potential customers might do next. This powerful information helps businesses create marketing strategies that speak directly to their customer's needs and wants - when the time is right!

In the world of online-affected or online-led decision making, it's important not to just throw messages out there and hope they stick. Instead, using intent data allows businesses to craft each message to truly connect and make a lasting impact.

Interested in using intent data in your marketing and sales strategy? Let us know!

FAQ

1. What is Intent Data?

Intent data tells you what potential customers might want to buy based on their online activity.

2. How Does Intent Data Help Me?

It helps you target your marketing and sales better, so you're not wasting time on people who aren't interested.

3. What’s Account-Based Marketing?

It's a marketing strategy that targets specific customers from specific companies (or groups of companies) with messages tailored based on their specific needs.

4. Is It Hard to Use Intent Data?

It can be complex, but many tools make it user-friendly and you can learn how to use it effectively. The most challenging part is to correctly implement this in your marketing and sales strategy.

5. Can Small Businesses Use Intent Data?

Yes, small businesses can use intent data to help focus their marketing efforts effectively.