“Zero-waste” is a hot topic in marketing. It’s the notion of narrowing your campaign focus and targeting a more specific audience – reaching the only people who are in the market for what you have to offer. This means activity can be super-targeted to key decision makers, resulting in a pipeline of higher quality leads for far less expense.
The traditional pressure to deliver a greater volume of leads means that quality is often compromised, Forrester reported that less than 1% of leads generated via this method turn into customers. Creating personalised content that is relevant to the audience shows an understanding of your customers and prospects pains and problems, therefore a message that resonates is going to generate better results. Being more targeted means that you are truly adding value and being informative, which allows a brand to build trust and enhance reputation, enabling the creation of warmer leads as they progress through the buyer journey.
How to find that specific audience
Finding your audience shouldn’t just be driven by who you want to work with or who is a high value, under penetrated client. Whilst these accounts are potential candidates for ABM, wider demand generation activity should be targeted beyond job titles and functions, and more importantly targeted to accounts showing intent behaviour, a sign they are already in the buyer journey. Intent platforms help you uncover your best-fit customers, these are the accounts actively researching the problems you solve or the solutions you offer. These platforms are becoming increasingly popular, Gartner found that by the end of 2022, more than 70% of B2B marketers will utilise third-party intent data to target prospects or engage groups of buyers in selected accounts.
67% of the buyer journey is now done digitally, intent data identifies those accounts actively searching for your solution or service and highlights them to you, often before other indicators of interest like receiving top of funnel leads or inbound enquiries. It is essential to be delivering marketing activity to this audience, and it doesn’t stop there, here’s how intent data can define your audience, shape messaging and impact content creation…
- Audience targeting – as mentioned above, intent platforms indicate the accounts who are in your active market and are already searching for and consuming content around the problems you solve or the solutions you offer
- Audience expansion – intent platforms don’t stop at your target account list, these platforms take into consideration your ideal customer profile and identifies accounts that fit within this criteria and are also showing intent that might not be on your radar
- Campaign theme direction – intent platforms can go beyond just telling you who is showing intent, but also the top trending topics and keywords that the market is interested in, therefore this can guide the campaign themes you’re creating
- Message creation – when creating messaging weave in the keywords that are showing the highest levels of intent, this is a strong indicator of what really matters to the audience and will increase likelihood of getting their attention
- Buying cycle indicators – intent platforms can also segment your audience based on the buying cycle, keywords are segmented into early, mid and late keywords, early keywords are problem focused, with mid and late keywords transitioning to being solution focused. This is another way to segment the audience to create different messaging that will resonate based on where they are in the buyer journey
These factors can be used in tandem to create a hyper targeted audience for your campaigns which is more likely to result in conversions and subsequent higher quality leads. The use of intent data to power campaign audience segmentation and campaign creation is proven to increase engagement and click-through rates, ultimately delivering 3x ROI on average.
How can intent be used to further support marketing and sales efforts?
- Reduce churn – intent data can show you what your current customers are also searching for, right down to competitor keywords hinting at potential churn risk
- Cross sell opportunities – monitor intent levels of your current customers around your full value proposition, this works especially well if you offer a diverse portfolio of products or services
- Support outreach efforts – intent platforms are often branded as martech, but intent data can work for sales efforts too, for example, expanding target account lists, drilling down into a specific company’s intent signals to shape outreach messaging and identifying client growth opportunities
At Clarify, we have partnered with Cyance, an intent provider with a difference. Cyance tracks multilingual activity over 55,000 websites globally monitoring the visitors who consume the content rather than traditional search term monitoring, this provides a stronger indicator of true intent. Granular detail is uncovered matching to specific products, services and value-propositions, resulting in a bigger opportunity pipeline with less wasted resources.
This level of insight will further power our efforts, adding to the data and intelligence that has already generated hundreds of millions of pounds revenue for the world’s most impressive brands and brightest scale ups. It further sharpens our ability to craft differentiated propositions and go-to-market strategies that deliver highly valuable sales opportunities, leading to very significant ROI.
To chat more about how you could use intent data to target your efforts and reduce wastage, get in touch with David Hancock, dhancock@clarifyb2b.com.
