Picture the scene. You’re the Head of Marketing at a sub-200 employee company. It’s Friday after lunch. Your Chief Marketing Officer emails you to research a new AI Martech tool for the team. After spending a couple of hours comparing vendors on G2 and signing up for e-newsletters for three of them, you close the laptop, wanting to pick things up Monday morning. On Monday, one of the vendors’ emails arrives in your inbox. It explains the AI features which work best for small businesses like yours, and links to a couple of case studies on other small businesses in your niche that they’ve already helped. You sit back, surprised. Did they just read your mind? Not quite, no. And it’s not magic, even if it seems like it. And this is what the smart B2B marketers of today are doing with a specific kind of customer data to solve the biggest pain points in B2B marketing. The unholy trinity of modern B2B marketing pains Budgets are tight You know the cliche: “do more with less”. You’ve probably heard it so much over the past year or so that you’re sick of it. It’s a strange time, inflation isn’t going away, and no one seems to be sure whether we had a recession or not. Trump’s election means more growth, maybe, or not? Either way, companies are tightening their belts, and marketing typically is the first place companies look to cut. Now more than ever, return on investment matters. You need to justify every last marketing penny, and make a business case for everything. And yet 61% of US chief executives still anticipated higher revenues entering 2024, according to research by EY. In other words, sales and marketing targets have never been so ambitious while the investment needed to achieve them has never been so tight. Try squaring that circle. Cookies are crumbling We’ve been talking about the death of third-party cookies for a long time now in marketing. Due to stringent data privacy laws emerging globally, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), Google began phasing out the use of third-party cookies in 2024 As marketers, we should have figured out a better way to structure targeted groups for really effective prospecting by now. How do you identify who to market to? That is what this is all about. How to make sure you’re hitting the right audience at the right moment. How to ensure your content reaches the most relevant audiences. How to reach potential customers who have an actual interest in your products and services. None with a violation of data privacy laws. If this sounds impossible, of course it’s not. But there is a way for B2B marketers to still read their prospects’ minds without third-party cookies. It’s been something that smart marketers have been doing for years now, but not enough people seem to be aware of it. Even if you have heard of it, it’s a fair bet you’re not using it, or even have a full understanding of what it is and how it works. It’s known as intent-based marketing. How does intent data lead to better marketing? Let me explain. What is intent-based marketing? Intent-based marketing refers to the use of so-called “intent” data to target and optimize your B2B lead generation campaigns. Intent data are the signals — the breadcrumbs on the trail — that indicate who is most likely to be interested in what you’re selling. Remember the research story at the beginning of this article? As you browsed for features on G2 and browsed vendor sites, you left a trail of data marketers could track and and tailor their content to make it more relevant to your needs. Pros of intent-based marketing There are several important benefits. Not the least of which is the fact that you can successfully substitute the targeting you were able to do with third-party cookies with intent-based data that’s completely compliant with data privacy laws. You can learn who’s coming to your site and what they’re interested in. You can get a list of contacts who are searching for your products online. You learn where they are in their buying journey, how long they’ve been researching, whether they’re already a customer of a competing product – not to mention which of your competitors they’re also interested in. More simply put, you can reach the people who need what you offer, with the right content at the right time — and make sure that you are top of mind when they’re ready to buy. That way, you aren’t wasting time on leads who aren’t interested in your product and can dedicate more of your budget to the prospects most likely to convert. How intent-based data works Intent data falls into two buckets: first-party (internal) and third-party (external). First party data is data within your own CRM, the emails addresses and job numbers you collect from lead forms, behaviour on your website – such as a visitor repeatedly landing on the same page, or downloading an e-book – customer surveys, which ads you viewed, which of your social they follow, and how much interaction they had with it. If they subscribe to your email list, you can track which links they click. Third party data are the data gathered from other websites separately. This is where you normally have to work with a data supplier who has aggregated anonymized data for you. You can then combine this with a variety of other data, for example: Search intent data, which tells you how to write your content based around the keywords and phrases people are searching for in Google and Bing, that are relevant to your products and services. Navigational intent, which is when you can track whether accounts you’re targeting are searching for your brand – or a competitor brand. Firmographic data – the size, industry, location and revenue of your ideal customer, based on the profile of your existing customers cross-referenced against LinkedIn research, online business directories or prospecting tools, and via third-party intent data providers. Technographic data, or what technology (software/hardware) a company has in place – particularly important if you want to know if a company needs your technology, or uses other tools in its tech stack that are compatible with yours. This data is usually captured via surveys and questionnaires, and again often via third-party intent data providers. Combine all of this, and you have a good dataset at your disposal which you can leverage in multiple ways. If intent-based marketing is so great, why aren’t more people doing it? To sum up, the reason is that using intent-based data is time consuming on the one hand if you do it on your own, and expensive on the other hand if you go for a good and GDPR-compliant third-party intent data platform. After all, an intent-based intelligence platform can: Turn anonymous traffic into company names and specific roles Reveal the behaviour and actions of the companies visiting your website Tell you – with your input – if those companies match your ideal target profile Share these companies’ technographic data or – if you feed in your technographic criteria – provide you with a list of target companies that fit those criteria and have visited yours or your competitors’ websites or downloaded relevant content Help to identify companies by name even if their employees work remotely. If you consider how much potential value lies in all this data, it doesn’t come as a surprise that even some organizations with just 200 employees can be paying as much as $40,000 per year to access these platforms. With such a hefty price tag, it’s natural that even those marketers who have heard about the potential of intent-based marketing want to be confident they can prove the ROI before they invest. While under pressure to hit ever-more-ambitious targets with ever-tighter budgets, many marketers are running just to stand still. They don’t have time to do the research you need to justify such a purchase. How to use intent-based data in your business Understanding the potential for huge time savings and a boost in lead generation with intent-based data, I can say with confidence that almost all B2B marketing teams would benefit from using it. However, there are several specific ways to use intent-based data that will see you generate value much faster. Don’t waste time trying to do this yourself. Research the available data intelligence platforms – the likes of 6Sense, Cognism, Demandbase, and ZoomInfo. I’m not here to shill specific providers, so do your own research. But take the plunge, work out which one is best for your brand, and let them do the heavy lifting for you. Make your ideal customer profile (ICP) sharper. You have to be super clear on who you’re targeting. You absolutely can use intent-based data to do this. Alternatively, if you know your current customers, you can do lookalike modelling to identify more of the same. Either way, intent-based data exists to help sharpen your focus, not spray and pray. Know how you qualify your leads. We’ve all been there, entering prospects’ data into the CRM after they’ve downloaded their first piece of content from you site, and BAM – Sales hit then up with a call next day. Sales don’t get a conversion to a demo, and you get it in the neck for providing poor quality leads. Have a rigorous lead qualification process and buy in from the C-suite to help enforce it. Use intent-based data to iterate and refine your qualification criteria. With so much information at your fingertips, you really should be able to generate and nurture warmer leads when you know what topics they’re interested in, which channels they prefer, when they last visited your website, and so on. Use intent data for Account- Based Marketing. Just like Love and Marriage or Fred and Ginger, or Dracula and Van Helsing, intent data and ABM simply go hand in hand. If ABM targets specific companies with personalized campaigns rather than targeting an audience as a whole, then what better way to personalize your marketing than with intent data? And last, how to sell your boss on why intent-based marketing is a good idea So, you’ve got this far. You’re a little clearer on why intent-based marketing is so effective, and you have a general idea on how you might go about using it for your brand. What’s stopping you? Oh yes, that pesky C-suite. You have to validate that investment. For that, you have to present a strong business case. In this case, figure out: What you’re spending on marketing. What’s the length of your average customer journey? How much could you reduce that journey if you were able to use intent data to bring in more people who are further along in the buying process? How much would that save you? How much marketing content do you produce across different channels? What if you were able to leverage intent data to prove that your highest converting or highest value prospects come in through two or three channels? How much would you save by not spending the less effective channels? How much could you save by doubling down on your most effective content? Or by stopping putting out the content that intent data tells you isn’t working? Continue this exercise until you’ve identified all the potential savings that intent data could make for you. Then work out the ROI. That’s your business case. It is a new era for data-driven B2B marketing with intent-based marketing. Join us sooner than later and you can enjoy the benefits too. Picture the scene. You’re the Head of Marketing at a sub-200 employee company. It’s Friday after lunch. Your Chief Marketing Officer emails you to research a new AI Martech tool for the team. After spending a couple of hours comparing vendors on G2 and signing up for e-newsletters for three of them, you close the laptop, wanting to pick things up Monday morning. On Monday, one of the vendors’ emails arrives in your inbox. It explains the AI features which work best for small businesses like yours, and links to a couple of case studies on other small businesses in your niche that they’ve already helped. You sit back, surprised. Did they just read your mind? Not quite, no. And it’s not magic, even if it seems like it. And this is what the smart B2B marketers of today are doing with a specific kind of customer data to solve the biggest pain points in B2B marketing. The unholy trinity of modern B2B marketing pains The unholy trinity of modern B2B marketing pains Budgets are tight Budgets are tight Budgets are tight Budgets are tight You know the cliche: “do more with less”. You’ve probably heard it so much over the past year or so that you’re sick of it. It’s a strange time, inflation isn’t going away, and no one seems to be sure whether we had a recession or not. Trump’s election means more growth, maybe, or not? Either way, companies are tightening their belts, and marketing typically is the first place companies look to cut. Now more than ever, return on investment matters. You need to justify every last marketing penny, and make a business case for everything. And yet 61% of US chief executives still anticipated higher revenues entering 2024, according to research by EY. In other words, sales and marketing targets have never been so ambitious while the investment needed to achieve them has never been so tight. Try squaring that circle. Cookies are crumbling Cookies are crumbling Cookies are crumbling Cookies are crumbling We’ve been talking about the death of third-party cookies for a long time now in marketing. Due to stringent data privacy laws emerging globally, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), Google began phasing out the use of third-party cookies in 2024 As marketers, we should have figured out a better way to structure targeted groups for really effective prospecting by now. How do you identify who to market to? How do you identify who to market to? How do you identify who to market to? How do you identify who to market to? That is what this is all about. How to make sure you’re hitting the right audience at the right moment. How to ensure your content reaches the most relevant audiences. How to reach potential customers who have an actual interest in your products and services. None with a violation of data privacy laws. If this sounds impossible, of course it’s not. But there is a way for B2B marketers to still read their prospects’ minds without third-party cookies. It’s been something that smart marketers have been doing for years now, but not enough people seem to be aware of it. Even if you have heard of it, it’s a fair bet you’re not using it, or even have a full understanding of what it is and how it works. It’s known as intent-based marketing. How does intent data lead to better marketing? Let me explain. What is intent-based marketing? What is intent-based marketing? Intent-based marketing refers to the use of so-called “intent” data to target and optimize your B2B lead generation campaigns. Intent data are the signals — the breadcrumbs on the trail — that indicate who is most likely to be interested in what you’re selling. Remember the research story at the beginning of this article? As you browsed for features on G2 and browsed vendor sites, you left a trail of data marketers could track and and tailor their content to make it more relevant to your needs. Pros of intent-based marketing Pros of intent-based marketing There are several important benefits. Not the least of which is the fact that you can successfully substitute the targeting you were able to do with third-party cookies with intent-based data that’s completely compliant with data privacy laws. You can learn who’s coming to your site and what they’re interested in. You can get a list of contacts who are searching for your products online. You learn where they are in their buying journey, how long they’ve been researching, whether they’re already a customer of a competing product – not to mention which of your competitors they’re also interested in. More simply put, you can reach the people who need what you offer, with the right content at the right time — and make sure that you are top of mind when they’re ready to buy. That way, you aren’t wasting time on leads who aren’t interested in your product and can dedicate more of your budget to the prospects most likely to convert. How intent-based data works How intent-based data works Intent data falls into two buckets: first-party (internal) and third-party (external). First party data is data within your own CRM, the emails addresses and job numbers you collect from lead forms, behaviour on your website – such as a visitor repeatedly landing on the same page, or downloading an e-book – customer surveys, which ads you viewed, which of your social they follow, and how much interaction they had with it. If they subscribe to your email list, you can track which links they click. Third party data are the data gathered from other websites separately. This is where you normally have to work with a data supplier who has aggregated anonymized data for you. First party data is data within your own CRM, the emails addresses and job numbers you collect from lead forms, behaviour on your website – such as a visitor repeatedly landing on the same page, or downloading an e-book – customer surveys, which ads you viewed, which of your social they follow, and how much interaction they had with it. If they subscribe to your email list, you can track which links they click. Third party data are the data gathered from other websites separately. This is where you normally have to work with a data supplier who has aggregated anonymized data for you. You can then combine this with a variety of other data, for example: Search intent data, which tells you how to write your content based around the keywords and phrases people are searching for in Google and Bing, that are relevant to your products and services. Navigational intent, which is when you can track whether accounts you’re targeting are searching for your brand – or a competitor brand. Firmographic data – the size, industry, location and revenue of your ideal customer, based on the profile of your existing customers cross-referenced against LinkedIn research, online business directories or prospecting tools, and via third-party intent data providers. Technographic data, or what technology (software/hardware) a company has in place – particularly important if you want to know if a company needs your technology, or uses other tools in its tech stack that are compatible with yours. This data is usually captured via surveys and questionnaires, and again often via third-party intent data providers. Search intent data , which tells you how to write your content based around the keywords and phrases people are searching for in Google and Bing, that are relevant to your products and services. Search intent data Navigational intent , which is when you can track whether accounts you’re targeting are searching for your brand – or a competitor brand. Navigational intent Firmographic data – the size, industry, location and revenue of your ideal customer, based on the profile of your existing customers cross-referenced against LinkedIn research, online business directories or prospecting tools, and via third-party intent data providers. Firmographic data Technographic data , or what technology (software/hardware) a company has in place – particularly important if you want to know if a company needs your technology, or uses other tools in its tech stack that are compatible with yours. This data is usually captured via surveys and questionnaires, and again often via third-party intent data providers. Technographic data Combine all of this, and you have a good dataset at your disposal which you can leverage in multiple ways. If intent-based marketing is so great, why aren’t more people doing it? If intent-based marketing is so great, why aren’t more people doing it? To sum up, the reason is that using intent-based data is time consuming on the one hand if you do it on your own, and expensive on the other hand if you go for a good and GDPR-compliant third-party intent data platform. After all, an intent-based intelligence platform can: Turn anonymous traffic into company names and specific roles Reveal the behaviour and actions of the companies visiting your website Tell you – with your input – if those companies match your ideal target profile Share these companies’ technographic data or – if you feed in your technographic criteria – provide you with a list of target companies that fit those criteria and have visited yours or your competitors’ websites or downloaded relevant content Help to identify companies by name even if their employees work remotely. Turn anonymous traffic into company names and specific roles Reveal the behaviour and actions of the companies visiting your website Tell you – with your input – if those companies match your ideal target profile Share these companies’ technographic data or – if you feed in your technographic criteria – provide you with a list of target companies that fit those criteria and have visited yours or your competitors’ websites or downloaded relevant content Help to identify companies by name even if their employees work remotely. Turn anonymous traffic into company names and specific roles Reveal the behaviour and actions of the companies visiting your website Tell you – with your input – if those companies match your ideal target profile Share these companies’ technographic data or – if you feed in your technographic criteria – provide you with a list of target companies that fit those criteria and have visited yours or your competitors’ websites or downloaded relevant content Help to identify companies by name even if their employees work remotely. If you consider how much potential value lies in all this data, it doesn’t come as a surprise that even some organizations with just 200 employees can be paying as much as $40,000 per year to access these platforms. With such a hefty price tag, it’s natural that even those marketers who have heard about the potential of intent-based marketing want to be confident they can prove the ROI before they invest. While under pressure to hit ever-more-ambitious targets with ever-tighter budgets, many marketers are running just to stand still. They don’t have time to do the research you need to justify such a purchase. How to use intent-based data in your business How to use intent-based data in your business Understanding the potential for huge time savings and a boost in lead generation with intent-based data, I can say with confidence that almost all B2B marketing teams would benefit from using it. However, there are several specific ways to use intent-based data that will see you generate value much faster. Don’t waste time trying to do this yourself. Research the available data intelligence platforms – the likes of 6Sense, Cognism, Demandbase, and ZoomInfo. I’m not here to shill specific providers, so do your own research. But take the plunge, work out which one is best for your brand, and let them do the heavy lifting for you. Don’t waste time trying to do this yourself. Research the available data intelligence platforms – the likes of 6Sense, Cognism, Demandbase, and ZoomInfo. I’m not here to shill specific providers, so do your own research. But take the plunge, work out which one is best for your brand, and let them do the heavy lifting for you. Make your ideal customer profile (ICP) sharper. You have to be super clear on who you’re targeting. You absolutely can use intent-based data to do this. Alternatively, if you know your current customers, you can do lookalike modelling to identify more of the same. Either way, intent-based data exists to help sharpen your focus, not spray and pray. Know how you qualify your leads. We’ve all been there, entering prospects’ data into the CRM after they’ve downloaded their first piece of content from you site, and BAM – Sales hit then up with a call next day. Sales don’t get a conversion to a demo, and you get it in the neck for providing poor quality leads. Have a rigorous lead qualification process and buy in from the C-suite to help enforce it. Use intent-based data to iterate and refine your qualification criteria. With so much information at your fingertips, you really should be able to generate and nurture warmer leads when you know what topics they’re interested in, which channels they prefer, when they last visited your website, and so on. Use intent data for Account- Based Marketing. Just like Love and Marriage or Fred and Ginger, or Dracula and Van Helsing, intent data and ABM simply go hand in hand. If ABM targets specific companies with personalized campaigns rather than targeting an audience as a whole, then what better way to personalize your marketing than with intent data? And last, how to sell your boss on why intent-based marketing is a good idea And last, how to sell your boss on why intent-based marketing is a good idea So, you’ve got this far. You’re a little clearer on why intent-based marketing is so effective, and you have a general idea on how you might go about using it for your brand. What’s stopping you? Oh yes, that pesky C-suite. You have to validate that investment. For that, you have to present a strong business case. In this case, figure out: What you’re spending on marketing. What’s the length of your average customer journey? How much could you reduce that journey if you were able to use intent data to bring in more people who are further along in the buying process? How much would that save you? How much marketing content do you produce across different channels? What if you were able to leverage intent data to prove that your highest converting or highest value prospects come in through two or three channels? How much would you save by not spending the less effective channels? How much could you save by doubling down on your most effective content? Or by stopping putting out the content that intent data tells you isn’t working? What you’re spending on marketing. What’s the length of your average customer journey? How much could you reduce that journey if you were able to use intent data to bring in more people who are further along in the buying process? How much would that save you? What you’re spending on marketing. What’s the length of your average customer journey? How much could you reduce that journey if you were able to use intent data to bring in more people who are further along in the buying process? How much would that save you? How much marketing content do you produce across different channels? What if you were able to leverage intent data to prove that your highest converting or highest value prospects come in through two or three channels? How much would you save by not spending the less effective channels? How much marketing content do you produce across different channels? What if you were able to leverage intent data to prove that your highest converting or highest value prospects come in through two or three channels? How much would you save by not spending the less effective channels? How much could you save by doubling down on your most effective content? Or by stopping putting out the content that intent data tells you isn’t working? How much could you save by doubling down on your most effective content? Or by stopping putting out the content that intent data tells you isn’t working? Continue this exercise until you’ve identified all the potential savings that intent data could make for you. Then work out the ROI. That’s your business case. It is a new era for data-driven B2B marketing with intent-based marketing. Join us sooner than later and you can enjoy the benefits too. It is a new era for data-driven B2B marketing with intent-based marketing. Join us sooner than later and you can enjoy the benefits too.
