Exploring Intent Data for Account-Based Marketing Campaigns

This is a guest post from Susan Xie who works in marketing at Triblio—an account-based marketing platform steeped in a rich history of martech innovations. Triblio’s founders, Andre Yee and Mike Ball, led product at Eloqua, helped with its $1B exit to Oracle, and started Triblio to build a next-gen martech solution. Triblio partners with PMG to design and deliver end-to-end programs to help clients succeed with ABM.

What is intent data?

Intent data refers to any information gathered about a prospects’ purchase journey. Following the boom in content marketing used to fuel inbound strategies, buyers have more access to vendor information online than ever before. The digitization of B2B buying and selling makes it possible for marketers to see and leverage purchase intent to help inform content strategies.

Today, you may not know your buyers’ names or what they do, but you can follow their digital footprints across the web. Each known and unknown buyer leaves a unique trail of pageviews and downloads. By harvesting this information, you’ll know quite a few things about buyer interests and needs, long before they’re ready to talk to sales.

Where is intent data found?

Intent signals can be found across the purchase journey. For a holistic view of where to find purchase intent, let’s start at the bottom of the funnel and work our way to the top. Chances are, you’re pretty familiar with the intent data found around contacts and leads. It’s when we move into anonymous activity and pre-form-fill behavior where you’ll find martech vendors developing the most innovation.

• • CRM – a system of record for sales meetings. Here’s where sales reps have been and continue to manually input the information they’ve gathered from meeting with prospects. With a little trust and persuasion, they have everything they need to figure out BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs and Timeline) and close the deal.

• • Sales Automation – a history of conversations via email, social, chat bots, the phone, all recorded digitally. These are the tools that BDRs (business development representatives) use to outbound at scale and fill up their AEs’ calendars. The more responses, the more likely to take a meeting and eventually close the deal.

• • Marketing Automation – a trail of email opens and onsite activity for existing lead. Marketers can set up lead scoring to track onsite engagement from key individuals.

• • ABM Platforms (such as Triblio) – a trail of onsite activities for known and unknown visitors by account. The account-based view allows for account-scoring, which sums up the level of onsite activities for each target account. When account activity levels are high, marketers can trigger sales plays that encompass entire buying groups.
    

• • External Intent Data – a record of who is interested in relevant keywords across the web. External intent data providers scour publisher networks to link relevant keywords from article views and site searches to IPs and cookies. Marketers can use this information to see who’s interested in their category and decide which accounts to target.

Watch: How ABM can boost your pipeline by as much as 55%

Why collect intent data?

Here’s the vision: structure external intent to shape early marketing strategy and kick start campaigns. When target accounts start visiting your site and engaging with campaigns, combine internal and external intent data to nurture campaigns and trigger sales campaigns. Then, by the time an opportunity opens, the AE will have access to a live map of each opportunity’s complete digital footprint, right in their CRM.

Since most of us aren’t running fully integrated marketing and sales funnels—where we measure everything using all the latest tools in the market—here are a few practical tips:

1. Get your brand out there. According to SiriusDecisions, the top three assets during the educational phase of vendor research are podcasts, analyst reports, and articles/publications. Therefore, when buyers conduct research about your category, make sure your name is in the game. Get yourself published where your buyers are consuming media. Find out which analysts they trust, and make sure they’re covering you.

2. Personalize your website. According to a survey by Accenture, 83% of buyers used vendor websites to learn about a solution, making vendor websites the most popular channel for conducting B2B research online. Google came in second at 77%. Therefore, make a good first impression and put your best foot forward with web personalization. Personalization improves conversions, whether it’s 1:1 or 1:MANY. Clients like Trapeze Group, which won DGR’s award for Best ABM Campaign in 2018, targets their top 10 accounts with deep 1:1 personalization. They create custom messaging for each top tier account and CTAs that link to each account rep’s calendars. Other clients swap out industry-specific case studies or geo-specific events across hundreds of accounts.

3. Reinforce messaging across ads, web, and sales campaigns. Triblio conducted research on hundreds of thousands of form-fills on client sites. We found that by the time they’ve completed a form, 45% have already spent 90+ days on the vendor’s website. Therefore, look at purchase intent on the account level. Deliver consistent messaging across all marketing and sales channels for the entire purchase group. Then trigger sales outbounding early, at the point of interest, when you see that an account is engaged.

There are limitless ways to build an ABM program that can roll out as an intuitive next step in evolving your demand generation strategy. But, to truly reap the rewards of ABM, it does require significant investment. If you are interested in learning more beyond just the basics of account-based marketing, check out our comprehensive Quick Start ABM Guide for B2B Demand Generation.

Citations
SiriusDecisions, “State of ABM Study Findings,” 2017
Accenture, “2014 State of B2B Procurement Study,” Accenture Interactive – Point of View Series, 2014