A big part of every marketer’s job revolves around ensuring a healthy lead pipeline while finding new tactics that can help sales teams convert more deals from those leads.

B2B lead generation is a crucial activity for any marketing and sales team. Quality leads serve as the backbone of any marketing or sales strategy. To ensure that there is always a steady flow of leads that are a good fit for your product and moreover, that they are leads that are ready to buy involves a lot more.

In today’s data driven marketing and sales environment, it is not enough to just map your prospects behavior. Enriched insights from buyer intent data are now becoming a necessity to not only identify more about prospects but to gauge more on user’s current and potential buying behavior while also helping to identify potential best-fit prospects and customers.

Buyer intent data allows marketers to tap into their prospects buying journey at a fairly nascent stage thereby giving them the ammunition they need to influence buying decisions with the right value-add and messaging.

Here’s why marketers and salespeople of today need buyer intent data to boost their marketing and sales ROI.

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Intent Data Helps Put in Place a More Targeted Lead Generation Strategy

It’s already been established – no marketing team can carry on activities without first ensuring that they have a strong lead generation plan in place. But without a targeted lead generation approach, marketers are wasting their time on prospects.

In order to achieve a more targeted and ROI-driven lead generation strategy, it is crucial for marketers to identify quality leads that have a higher chance of converting. Buyer intent data that allows marketing teams to track buying triggers and signals from their prospects and further score leads based on their past and current buying behaviors and market activity can help marketers derive a more well-rounded lead acquisition approach that meets customer and prospect mindsets, while influencing their buying decision at the right time.

Most marketing leaders use intent data to register the actions prospects take when on their website, when they show interest in a product, to analyse the time spent on reading or learning about a particular product or service. Enterprise marketers will also assign scores to these activities to help segment leads based on their level of interest in a service or product.

Intent Data Gives Rise to Impactful Personalized Campaigns and Marketing Messaging

In order to drive a more personalized marketing campaign, marketers need to use data to tailor messaging for individuals and different buyer segments. 77 percent of B2B sales and marketing professionals believe personalized campaigns create better customer value and retention.

This is where buyer intent data can further step in to help marketers with the insights they need to address key pain points of their prospects. Given the array of marketing technologies today, marketers can personalize campaigns across social media, email, calls, while even customizing website visits to dovetail messaging that speak to their audience’s specific interest.

Intent Data Provides Better Insights on Potential and Future Customers

Staying a step ahead of the competition is one part of the story. In today’s competitive business environment, it is also crucial for marketers to stay a step ahead of their prospect’s journey and preempt their buying needs.

Data that provides a comprehensive view of your prospect and customer base while also helping marketers breakdown their interest, past buying behaviors, current buying trends and future interest in related services can empower marketers to not only define who their ideal prospects are but also which segment of that audience should be allocated more marketing effort and time to. Buyer intent data allows marketers to reach these audiences at a time when they are thinking about similar products and services and are already in-market for it.

This cuts down the buying journey and with the help of personalized triggers and messaging marketers can then work in tandem with their sales team to drive more interest and move these prospects through the buying journey a lot faster.

Intent data is known to help marketing teams target leads based on every stage of the typical B2B buying journey and can quickly help them move prospects from the product awareness and interest stage to consideration and purchase stage more effectively.

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Intent Data Helps Tailor your Content Marketing Efforts

Marketing teams who are adept at running multiple content marketing campaigns at a time already know how much time and effort goes into creating relevant cadences and automating campaigns to achieve scale and ROI.

Without the right data and buyer insights or intent, the overall content marketing efforts of a brand can suffer because there will be a lack of relevance in the overarching theme and messaging. Intent data allows marketers to know what can help drive action or reactions from their prospects.

Intent data also allows marketers to know what their prospects would need in the future or what kind of solution would be ideal to them because it gives insights into their current pain points. This itself can allow marketing leaders to take the right action, to choose the right terms and keywords and enhance the array of content via blogs, emails, social posts, etc to suit a certain buying segment or prospect base. Backing content marketing efforts with a good tracking system that analyses what is resonating with prospects further helps marketing teams to optimize every outreach and messaging to cater to specific interest and needs.

In Today’s B2B Marketing and Sales World, Buyer Intent Data is a Must

The benefits of buyer intent data are not limited to a set of points, in fact they can prove to be limitless if used in the right manner, with the right tacking tools and business intelligence systems. Intent data allows marketers to boost their customer retention rates as well. Marketers who are adept at analyzing buyer intent and who fuel their core marketing strategies with intent data can analyse when their prospects or customer visit a competitor’s website, whether they are thinking of unsubscribing from a service, whether they are showing interest in other features offered by other product innovators.

These signals can help marketers take corrective steps or preventive measures, as the case may be, to retain customers with the right campaigns – a discount, an additional offer for example.

In today’s largely online business to business world, intent data plays a crucial role in identifying the right prospects while giving marketers the fodder they need to inform prospect journeys and influence quicker buying decisions. Enterprise marketers who have backed their marketing plans with intent data have adopted sophisticated strategies over the years that allow them to track and breakdown their customer and prospects online behavior from the start. This is what helps drive impactful, targeted and ROI-driven marketing campaigns that will have a higher chance of helping marketers convert leads.