Intent-Driven Marketing – An Advanced form of Marketing

 Increasingly, companies worldwide are collecting huge amounts buyer behavior data for routine functioning. This offers a great opportunity for B2B marketers to strengthen their marketing campaigns. The collected data is a pool of knowledge and can do wonders if used in the right manner. Marketers who have access to this data can use intent-driven marketing to generate high quality leads. The following write-up will explain what intent-driven marketing means and how it can prove helpful for businesses.

What is intent-driven marketing?

Intent-driven marketing is a marketing strategy that helps businesses predict customers' purchase intent through an in-depth analysis of user behavior. It can be described as tailoring marketing campaigns to customers’ needs with specific intentions. Typically, it involves marketing a service or product based on a customer’s online activities that indicate their choice to purchase or consume that particular product or service. With this method, organizations junk the guesswork and make more effective marketing and campaign decisions for their brand.

Gone are the days for days of ‘spray and pray’ marketing as intent-based marketing, aka intent-driven marketing,  has gained traction, and for good reasons. This methodology is beneficial for marketers as it helps them increase the quality of sales leads, landing page conversion rates, which ultimately increases revenue. Marketers have already made the shift from traditional and have included intent-based lead generation solutions into their marketing mix.

Why intent-driven marketing?

Buyer intent is one of the crucial elements of intent-based marketing. It answers three questions - what customers are interested in buying now, what they want, and where they want it. In many organizations, marketing teams focus on giving customers what they want, but intent-driven marketing takes a step ahead: Intent-based networking and intent-based branding help enterprises gather a tremendous amount of information about buyer behavior and activity to get a bigger picture of what they want. 

Consumers today no longer follow a linear path to make a purchase. In fact, they are very specific about their choices. They want instant answers on their devices, look for precisely what they want, and expect brands to be able to provide it. Every time consumers search for a particular product; they express their intent.

This form of marketing takes the time factor into account. This means organizations need to be vigilant and take action as soon as someone expresses a strong intent. The key is to understand when someone is taking action that showcases a strong intent to transact with your business. This empowers the marketing teams to focus on the right customers and reach them at that apt moment when they’re most likely to make a purchase.

A good synergy between the sales and the marketing teams is essential for organizational growth. It’s also essential for the marketing teams to win the trust of sales. Intent-based marketing significantly helps with sales prospecting as it ensures only marketing qualified leads trickle down the sales funnel.

With intent-driven marketing, businesses can maximize their spend by driving more conversions than they would with more general tactics like demographics-based targeting alone. Businesses who incorporate data to understand consumer intent better and then align marketing to business outcomes can reach customers at the moment that matters — and drive sales as a result. 

Where to reach out for intent marketing data 

Some companies analyze the digital footprints of buyers. They gather information related to the content the person is consuming online. The following factors can help gather customer intents effectively -

·         Product reviews;

·         Website visits;

·         Time on pages;

·         The content topic on web pages;

·         Downloads such as whitepapers.

Benefits of intent-driven marketing

·        Reduces marketing costs

With intent-based marketing, companies can direct their marketing campaigns to people who have shown intent to make a purchase. This ultimately leads to minimizing the amount spent on broad-based marketing.

This means that enterprises can achieve their commercial goals with less budget. The remaining budget can be directed at other marketing campaigns to overscore their other targets. Many successful B2B marketers are not satisfied with achieving their target. The  focus should be to outperform and generate the most value for the company.

·        Makes campaigns more effective

Many marketers are already using a simple form of intent-driven marketing strategy. When selecting the keywords for Search Engine Advertising, organizations want particular ad groups to show when people search for certain keywords. This is a form of intent-based targeting. It is considered one of the simplest forms of intent-based marketing.

The next step, programmatic advertising, is a more advanced way of intent-based targeting. With programmatic advertising, one can place dynamic ads to people depending on the content they are reading, as an example. Moreover, people can see these ads only if they read a certain number of articles.

Here, the buying intent will be higher, and then it might even make sense to increase the bid for the ad space. Programmatic advertising is an automated process and is the best example of intent-based targeting. The money needs to be spent only once for the people with a buying intent.

Intent-driven marketing will help businesses reach greater heights

In today’s competitive environment, businesses need to make extra efforts to attract more customers. They need to state compelling reasons so that audiences trust their products and services.

Intent-based marketing is often challenging, but the results are worth it. It’s essential to follow the data. It must also be ensured that the data is of good quality. Organizations must also have good analytics to ensure sound decision making. Partnering with demand generation companies and or those providing marketing qualified lead services is a great idea, too. hey possess a deep understanding of the buyers' pain points; they can deliver on what they need and at the right time to help cut competition. 

We are a demand generation company working as an HQL service provider and PBM Service provider, we provide B2B companies, like yours, with lead generation solutions.

Get in touch with us to give your sales a boost.

B2B Lead Generation Solutions That Drive Leads and Grow Your Business

If businesses are booming today, it’s probably because they have effective data management services and lead generation solutions in place. And one thing to highlight here is that data management and lead generation are directly linked.

The idea of lead generation is all about collecting a list of prospects or generating a database for your business with the hope to convert them into high-paying customers. With a list of highly converting prospects in hand, marketing teams can focus their efforts and bring high quality leads every month. With these leads being pursued to the fullest, it will boost confidence and allow organizations to make decisions, increase the chances of trying new initiatives and help put the budget where it matters the most. However, it’s often challenging for businesses to optimize lead quality as they struggle with data management.

Let’s discuss in detail how data can become the cornerstone for your business operations.

Data plays a significant role in the lead generation process

While running a business, data helps market strategies, target customers, make smarter business decisions, and predict future outcomes. A data-driven process can bring drastic improvements from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel – and lead generation is no exception here. Businesses must establish a process for working leads - right from the awareness stage to final closure, sales. With lead generation solutions, both marketing and sales teams stand to benefit.  The latter can convert more leads into sales, and the former can identify content and campaign opportunities.

But to be successful in making sales, businesses do not just need to gather data on products, services, and the target market. The setting up of a full-proof data management system is a sine-qua-non for organization because it can literally make or break any enterprise.

The data collection process can be endless but what’s most important is to optimize your data services. Customer inquiries, advertisements, and other feedback-related information may take you to a better level. But often, some of the data may be irrelevant and others that are important may be put in the back burner. Business managers may also not be able to maintain a good pace with the environment and value the data at the right time. There are reasons why lead capturing fails:

Let’s take an example: The email addresses of people who wanted your newsletter might be used for your next online marketing campaign. Similarly, mishandling and discarding valuable data can cause problems later. One of the reasons why businesses do not generate good leads is their failure to process data adequately. This is where B2B lead generation services may help where the concerned agency will understand your business in detail and extract valuable information for lead generation.

What is the right way of data handling?

Lead generation and data management work hand-in-hand. The days are gone when it was difficult for organizations to process every bit of data that entered their door. Data entry operators tapped on the data for so many hours and yet did the same job every day with another bunch of data. The transition to automated systems helped organizations keep track of all the info that came into their office.

Companies must invest in automated tools and know the way to use them. Automated tools can help streamline campaigns and measure leads. These tools can also assist in tracking the ROI on specific marketing campaigns.

B2B lead generation and demand generation companies can do the task well. What is needed is to learn about the intentions of the consumers. One has to also dig deep to learn about their buying criteria or intentions. This can be determined from the background data collected from the target market. To collect this data, one may use social media accounts to ask a few important questions to understand the customers’ viewpoints. A poll, too, can be conducted. Gather the information, analyze and process it. Technology makes it easier to collect and ascertain the meaning of data faster than ever before, yet we often fail to do it. In order to generate more leads, lead generation companies that provide B2B Lead Generation Solutions that can help you understand what the customers think and what pushes them to do the spending. 

Here’s a simple guide that can be followed:

·         Set a goal for lead and sales generation.

·         Determine your funnel based on needs or customers.

·         Eliminate bad or poor-quality leads.

·         Make pre-requisites for the kind of leads you want.

·         Retest and optimize the lead generation process timely.

·         Creating engaging CTAs for easy conversion.

·         Increase lead data in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM). 

How far have we come?

Today, lead generation solutions are no longer bound by traditional sales methods. Instead, they now benefit from an increasing number of automated tools that help them gather valuable data.

A lead generation approach driven by data is the only way forward for businesses today to stay competitive. But there’s a catch: To be effective, it’s not just important to gather data, organizations must put it to use aptly.  The best way to optimize your lead generation process is to improvise on your data management services by putting the right data in the right place.

Wrapping up

Lastly, if you want to scale yourself on the mark of effective data management for lead generation, ask yourself these questions: Do you use your CRM's data for lead generation and targeted marketing? Does your CRM bring the right quality and quantity of data? Can you generate leads based on your data?

If the answer to any of them is No, then you need to re-strategize your plan. Or you may as well get in touch with B2B lead generations company to avail their services. Be sure that they nurture the leads based on accurate and updated information for your organization. Let no opportunities slip from the cracks.

Learn How to Grab high-quality for Your Business.

Generating leads is a priority of every B2B business – it is a fundamental part of the sales process that ignites the sales engine. With B2B sales being all about leads, it’s often difficult for businesses to maintain a fine balance between quantity and quality. There’s no point filling the sales funnel with low-quality leads as the sales team will ultimately end up wasting time. In reality, they need fewer yet high-quality leads that can help them strike relevant conversations.  The process of attracting new and high-quality leads in itself seems to be challenging as it’s easier said than done. It calls for a mix of inbound and outbound strategy that works well.

Here, organizations are faced with numerous challenges such as strong competition, the pressure of ongoing projects, and high overheads to hire and retain good developers, among others. Lead generation companies or any individual HQLservice providers can help generate high-quality leads. Want to know about the Best B2B Lead Generation Solutions that can deliver high-quality leads for your sales team? Refer to our guide to gain insights into B2B sales leads. We also bring some great tips that can help you convert quality leads into prospects.

Get all details from the contact form

A contact form on the website is one of the Best B2B Lead Generation Solutions. One can enhance the quality of those leads by marking the “required” fields that a prospect must fill in. This will provide valuable data about the prospects that can be used later.

It’s important to get the full name and occupation of the people as it helps improve the quality of leads. In order to make your form fields “required,” one has to enter some coding into the form CSS. Else the development team can be roped in to help.

Ask for a work email

The next important thing is to ask for their email address. Specifically, ask for their work email and not their personal email. This is more true for a B2B company.

A business email address is a great way to get the company’s name. This way, marketing strategies can be directed to help you engage with them as per their needs and showcase to them that your company is the best fit. Email marketing will give you the chance to show up where your audience is hanging out and share your value with them. We spend a lot of the time and hours at work, so the chances are ripe that you will get a response from a work email rather than a personal one. People-based Marketing Solutions, online or offline, are the most effective strategy for generating leads.

Spot and work on the decision-makers

It’s common sense that nobody would want to waste time with people who can’t make the right decisions. But it’s easier said than done when it comes to connecting with the right group of people.  If you get a lead from someone who filled the form on your website, it’s a strong indication that that particular person could be your decision-maker, though not always.

What role does your decision-maker typically play? Write your emails based on the trend for who is the target, and then create emails that will open. Sales personnel should use the right approach and make use of advanced tools to ease the process. An HQL Service Provider or an HQL Service Provider Company can do the job well.

Go forward and create a buyer persona

If organizations get leads from their website regularly, it’s great, but how many of those leads actually get converted into ideal customers? This is why organizations must focus their marketing strategies on creating an ideal buyer persona. Wondering how do we create one? Businesses must characterize their ideal customers by defining the most relevant attributes for their business, such as job title and decision-making authority, and implicit attributes that describe the desired online behavior. Basically, personas are the people who are most likely to make a purchase from you and those who may be interested in your business.

The best and proven way to create high-quality leads is to create marketing strategies that focus on a particular persona. It is also called persona-based marketing. HQL service provider companies can help you target individual buyers.

Create your buyer persona profile to target your ideal customer and generate more leads. It will also enable you to measure and improve your sales and marketing efforts. Most B2B Lead Generation Companies rely on and practice this strategy for sustainable development.

Follow the buyer’s journey

Most Lead Generation Services Company take into consideration the buyer’s journey while creating marketing strategies. The buyer’s journey describes the process that most buyers go through before making any purchase.

To this end, there are three stages – first is awareness, second is the consideration, and third is the decision stage. In the first stage, the buyer is aware of a problem and is in the process of searching for more information. In the second stage, the buyer considers all options and looks for the best solution. In the third stage, they have decided what is to be bought and are ready to pay.

Understanding the buyer's journey can help determine your leads' stage. Buyers do not want to be nagged or be hassled and want to comfortably take their decision.

One should ask for more information about the buyer's journey in each contact form. As people climb up in their buyer journey, they tend to provide more details because they have almost reached the final decision stage.

The more information one gets about the lead, the higher is the quality of that lead.

Use workflows and marketing automation

Any effort to improve lead quality without marketing automation software will yield short-term results as you are not working smarter.  When a lead receives relevant emails from your marketing automation software, they’ll automatically get a greater understanding of your business.

You can do amazing things such as customize emails based on data collected from forms, plan the strategy and nurture the leads.

Follow-up emails are a great way to nurture leads by following up on a lead’s interest with other helpful resources. With the emails being relevant and engaging, contacts will get to know more about your business. They’ll be a higher-quality lead once a sales team approaches them.

It is a later stage for a new business, but marketing strategies can take this as an end step.

Get high quality leads for your new business within no time

Generating high-quality leads is a priority of every B2B business. There are various effective strategies that SDRs can apply to produce more B2B leads, and every year there are new ways to outpace past performances.

Someone new in the business cannot simply jump to the old ones’ strategies. HQL Service Provider Companies may just do the task right here. They can understand your timeline and suggest steps accordingly. Try improving your sales performance by redefining outbound strategies with solid techniques to generate the best quality leads for your business.