Add Data Intelligence
As you approach the 60-day mark in your transition to precision demand marketing, you’ve hopefully had a chance to get your data right and connect your demand channels. The next step to consider is adding intent data to your demand efforts. This will help your teams become smarter by identifying the accounts showing interest in your product or service.
Traditionally, when using marketing automation systems, marketers accomplished this task with an arbitrary two-dimensional lead scoring system created by marketing and sales that focused on the individual. But when accounts are showing intent, it’s marketing’s time to shine.
We call it fishing in an oxbow. Intent signals allow marketing to successfully engage an interested audience early in the process. But it’s not enough to implement an intent provider, hand off a list of accounts to sales teams and say, “good luck.” Marketing needs to send sales reps warm, engaged accounts, as well as people on those accounts; not just a list of accounts showing intent.
Think of Intent data as ammunition for marketing, and not a sales tool.
Intent data is a tell. It gives you clear insight into an organization’s interest. The data represents a surge in activity from the account around key topics. It doesn’t mean the account is ready to buy. It doesn’t even mean the account knows who you are.
What B2B marketers need to do is pair intent data with engagement data. This combination of two data sets enables marketing, SDRs and sales to quickly prioritize the accounts you should pursue now.
Think of these two critical types of data this way:
1) Is the account researching topics that your business addresses? Intent data answers this question.
2) Does the account know who you are? Web, social or email engagement answers this question.
Our Approach
So, how do you actually do this? First, identify both new and target accounts that are showing intent around topics that align to your business. We use Bombora and G2 to identify accounts that are in market. If a net-new account has intent data only, it is marketing's job to generate engagement prior to handing the account off to sales. We do this through precision demand marketing, a multi-channel buyers journey approach. We use both 1st and 3rd party sources to get engagement. From our own ABM platform to our demand generation content syndication marketplace. This ensures that we are surrounding the account with relevant messages and driving the right contacts from these accounts into our demand funnel. We also feed those accounts with intent to our SDR team for continued buildout and outreach.
For customer accounts, we send the information directly to the customer success team. And for target accounts, we notify the reps much sooner. To give you a sense of what this might look like, here is an example of a report we create to show the intent data and the topics, as well as the impressions from the ads with which we are surrounding the accounts.
The second step is to organize resources and teams around these accounts and topics and deploy a multi-channel precision demand marketing program. Once we have identified the accounts surging on topics that we care about, we put together a precision demand marketing program that spans all channels. We turn on content syndication campaigns through the Integrate platform, ensuring that we will drive the people we want to talk to from these accounts. We then surround those accounts with a progressive display advertising program, via Integrate's ABM platform and LinkedIn, and we drop the key personas into email and targeted nurture programs. Finally, we build custom landing pages to enable bingeable content opportunities and deploy topic-aligned bots to maximize our conversion rates. Each channel can hand off the person and keep the content relevant and progressive.
Once we have engagement data on an account, we move to the next step: we bring in our SDR team. We use different sequences that align to the intent topics and begin engaging via emails, LinkedIn, and Sendoso, and by calling. We enable our SDR team with the proper messaging and scripts. Our SDR team then begins building out the accounts within our CRM, ensuring that we have the right personas and buying units on each account. This not only helps with the current engagement, but also begins to lay the foundation for expansion into other teams or buying units within an account.
Finally, once we have intent, engagement, and a connection, we bring in the sales team to create, confirm, and move the deal forward.
By using both intent and engagement data, we dramatically lift our overall engagement within each target account. This enables us to provide a better end user experience and allows our SDR and sales teams to have more meaningful conversations. I’ve seen this approach generate double digit increases in digital conversion rates on our web properties.
In my next blog I will talk about the technology stack to make this happen. In the meantime, for more information, you can check out my previous posts on Precision Demand Marketing.
