B2B Intent Data: The Ultimate Guide for Emerging Entrepreneurs

As many company processes now become data-driven, B2B intent data comes into fair play as the foundation of any business. Without the correct data, incorporated in the right places, at the perfect moments, transpiring entrepreneurs will be able to grow their businesses in the blink of an eye. 

With even a quick analysis of the business landscape, we can notice that 40% of businesses are spending more than half of their marketing budgets on intent data, and over 70% of them plan to increase this budget. Intent data is a promising game-changer in the industry that holds the power of precise targeting and increased engagement. 

Let’s dive deeper into the basics of intent data, where is this data collected, how to empower it, and just some advice on how to make the most of it for an emerging entrepreneur. 

B2B intent data is a collection of digital insights that form a vision of a customer's intentions to purchase a product or service from your company or a competitor.

This type of data can be compiled in many ways to increase sales, make customers happier, and overall benefit the company's image. 

B2B data can be used to track prospects buying signals such as keywords relevant to your products, when they request a quote, schedule a demo, or sign up for a free trial. For even deeper insights you can combine this data with firmographic datasets or any other details of the customer profile, giving you precise targets for marketing campaigns. 

Buyers' B2B intent data is collected from several different pipelines that in some way analyze a prospect's actions and needs. Most of this encompasses their online activity, such as searches, product selection, and online reviews checked out. 

Let’s take a closer look at the three types of intent data:

Statistics show that over half of marketers choose to combine first-party and third-party data for better insights. Why so? Well in general first-party data is quite cost-effective and privacy-friendly, however, you won't get such a great scope of insights using it.

Whereas with third-party intent data, you’ll reach more levels of insights, however, you will need to do more sifting through loads of documents as well as checking if it is up to date, valuable, and safe to use.

In any business such as a B2B commerce, providing a personalized experience in the customer's journey is a critical element in closing a deal. Let’s take a closer look at how B2B intent data can be used in all stages of a pipeline to empower a business. 

One of the main ways to incorporate intent data is to use it to identify the genuine interests of customers. This will save emerging entrepreneurs from wasting assets for hit-and-miss projects. With a backed-up idea of how customers behave, these entrepreneurs will be able to place ads in places where leads will effectively interact smartly. 

Intent data doesn’t just stop at finding new customers, it can be used for further analysis and upselling existing customers. While new customers are always great, upselling to current clients and evolving your relationship with them is one of the best business intentions. 

Integrate data to prioritize leads that show high levels of interest and are more likely to engage.  74% of B2B customers conduct 50% of their research online before purchasing offline. That said, it’s best to find — and possibly nurture — them while they’re researching. This tactic will maximize the effects of your efforts and will increase sales activities. 

After applying intent data to score leads, you can still use the data to apply to sales chats and interactions. Make sure your sales management team uses intent data to focus on the pain points of their leads. They can pitch the ideal solutions to leads or even create targeted conversations which is known to increase satisfaction and upbring conversion rates.  

While it is best to use intent data to identify your leads and cater to them, a softer approach is to market outside of the intent data. This means you can also create content for an audience not in your route, even though this will have smaller conversion rates, there is still always a good chance of attracting a new audience base. 

Even though we have already discussed the ways to use intent data to empower a business, there are a few practices it is important to go over in order to get the best results from your campaigns and various operations. 

By summarizing the content of this article we can confirm that B2B intent data works for the benefit of the business. For the best results, this data can be used throughout all pipelines of a sales and marketing strategy, to increase the ROI of an emerging entrepreneur business. 

For optimal success, B2B intent data should be collected from all party sources and combined into one comprehensive model for best lead and factor analysis. This will give you the benefit of fewer cold calls and second guesses from customers since you will have the superpower of the best-catered campaigns, products, and solutions.