Today on the Demand Gen Pod, Episode 13, Ryan discusses the importance and uses of intent data for sales and marketing. He explains that intent data helps understand customer needs and preferences, enabling personalized messaging. The two types of signals are explicit (web searches, content downloads) and implicit (social media interactions, online behavior). Intent data can be collected from various sources such as website analytics, CRM data, social media monitoring, and third-party providers. Ryan emphasizes using intent data to personalize marketing campaigns and customize content offers based on interests. It also helps prioritize leads by assigning scores to indicate buying signals. Sales teams can integrate this data into their processes to gain real-time insights on prospect behaviors and tailor messaging accordingly. Data privacy and compliance are important considerations when dealing with intent data. Measuring effectiveness is done through lead conversion rates, revenue generated, customer engagements, high- intent leads generated, increased satisfaction, and improved sales productivity. Challenges include multitouch attribution, integrating different datasets, and aligning with other marketing efforts.
Summary notes from Episode 13:
Intent data can help understand what someone intends to do based on their current actions, such as web searches, content downloads, social media interactions, and online behavior. Understanding intent data involves analyzing explicit signals (e.g., web searches, content downloads) and implicit signals (e.g., social media interactions, online behavior) using specialized software, algorithms, or segmentations. By analyzing the pages visited by individuals, it is possible to infer their likely actions and behaviors. To understand intent, analyze the journey of closed won customers, including the assets and emails they engaged with, web pages visited, and the number of touches from both sales and marketing. Similar analysis can be done with closed lost customers to identify any patterns or similarities. Consider the job title and fit into developed personas to determine how intent data aligns with customer profiles. Intent data can be used to personalize marketing campaigns, customize content offers and messaging, and segment high-value prospects with strong buying signals. Map content to different stages of the funnel by analyzing the engagement of individuals in each part of the funnel, starting from closed won or close lost and working back up. Assign lead scores or dollar values to assets based on their impact on conversions and ROI. Intent data can be integrated into the sales process to provide real-time insights on prospect behaviors and interests, allowing sales reps to prioritize high-intent prospects.
Full Transcript:
00:00
Welcome to the demand gen pod. My name is Ryan. Today we are talking about leveraging intent data for both sales and marketing. So let’s get into it. If you haven’t already, I would really appreciate if you subscribe either to the podcast or if you subscribe to us over on YouTube. You can also find us on TikTok and Instagram, and that would be great in data. Intent data is information that indicates a person’s or a company’s intent or interest in a particular product or service, their intent to buy. And it’s valuable in marketing and in sales because it helps us to understand our customers needs and preferences, enabling more personalized and targeted messaging.
00:46
The reason why this is kind of neat is because we can use it in a way which will help us to better understand what somebody intends to do based on what they’re currently doing. So what do they intend to buy? Possibly based on what they’re looking at or what they engage with. Understanding intent data really comes down to two separate signals, explicit and implicit. This includes things like web searches, content downloads, social media interactions, and online behavior. Explicit would be something like a web search that we can go back and tie to a person, or a content download, where social media interactions and online behavior may be slightly more implicit, but it’s collected through various channels and platforms, and then we can analyze it using either specialized software and algorithms, or you can use it through segmentations and such.
01:37
Common sources of intent data would include things like website analytics, our CRM data, social media monitoring, and also third party data providers as well. Right. So one of the ways that you can certainly use this, and you almost certainly already are, particularly if you have either a CRM or a marketing automation tool, is that if it’s linked to your website through a website tag, you would be able to see each person’s behavior, which websites they visit. Obviously, if they download a form or something like that, or pages they visit, I shouldn’t say websites, not necessarily outside of your domain, right. But on your website, which pages they visit. And then we can infer, based on the pages that they’re visiting, what are they most likely to do? How do we do that?
02:25
We can figure it out by looking at what our conversions have done. So if we look at closed one customers and start looking backward at the journey that they took, what were the assets that they engaged with? What were the emails that they engaged with? What were the web pages that they looked at? What are the number of touches that sales had? What are the number of touches that marketing had? How long did it take them to go from a lead in our marketing automation tool to an account or a contact in our CRM tool to an opportunity, and then to closed one. You can do the exact same thing with close lost. So what happened through all of those steps before they got to close lost? Do we see any sort of similarities?
03:17
There’s a lot of assumptions that may need to be made, particularly with closed loss. But even with closed one, where you’re looking for things not necessarily on the closed loss side, what did they look at? It would be weird, I think, if your content was actually actively driving somebody away, but that could be something to consider. But rather than that, what about who they are? Who are they? What’s their job title? How long have they been in the position for? What kind of company do they work for? How big is that company? How does that fit into the personas that you’ve developed? If you have developed them and if you haven’t developed them, feeling a little bit off track here? Head back over to that closed one data to understand what your personas could look like.
04:00
Once you’ve identified what your personas can look like, you can then look at the close loss to say, who do we know will not buy from us? Who is a bad person for us to market to now? Just because ten people who meet general criteria end up not closing does not mean that anybody who meets that criteria will not close. But it is something that you need to keep in mind while you’re developing campaigns for the future. So how can you use this? Intent data can be used to personalize marketing campaigns, emails especially, and customize content offers and messaging based on interests and needs. If we know that you’re interested in product a, we can display emails and send you emails on product a.
04:45
If we see that you visited the wedge pages for product a and product B, well, we could maybe send you an email that gives you both products stacked on top of each other with a primary offer and a secondary offer, and then see what you click on. If you click on both of them, then we keep sending you those offers. If you click only one and you don’t click on the other, then you could start sending only the one that they clicked on, say product B, for example. Okay, some other really good ways that you can use it is inside of segmenting. So not necessarily dynamic content like what kind of I was just talking about, but segmenting customers based on their purchase intent and then retargeting ads based on browser behavior and sending those personalized emails on top of it.
05:26
Intent data helps us to identify those high value prospects by prioritizing leads with strong buying signals, and then that improves the lead qualification. So one of the exercises that I really like to do is to map content that you have as a business to the funnel. So what part of the funnel does each piece of your content align to? You can start to do that accurately by looking at, again, people who are in various parts of the funnel at the time. Easiest, I think, to start with closed one and work your way back up to the top, right, or even close lost, and work your way back up to the top. Because theoretically, closed lost means that they got far enough in the sales cycle to be a prospect, right? To be a contact or an opportunity.
06:10
So you can look there too, and then start going back up to say, what did they engage with? What did they open, what did they download, what did they read again, how many contact points did they have with sales? How many did they have with marketing? And then you can start to assign either dollar values to get to ROI or simply. Not simply, necessarily. But you could also assign lead scoring to each of those assets as well. So if they download a particular asset that you have been able to associate with people who have closed and converted to customers more highly than others, you might want to give that a bigger boost in lead scoring than anywhere else. A contact us form should have a much harder, higher lead score than an ebook, right?
07:02
Or a conversion for something really low or really high in the funnel, rather. So relatively low lead score is high in the funnel, bigger lead score adding on lower in the funnel. What about sales? So you can definitely leverage this in sales too. You can integrate that data into the sales process by providing sales team with real time insights on prospect behaviors and interests. And this is so important and somewhat anecdotal here, but one thing that’s kind of interesting, I think, is that I recently bought a guitar. I play guitar and I bought it from a company called Sweetwater. And I’ve bought stuff, I’ve been buying stuff from Sweetwater for, I think it’s close to 15 years now. And I have had, in my time there, I have had two sales reps, and you get a dedicated sales rep.
07:49
So one of them, I think, moved on totally fine. The other one though, Ed, I’ve had, I think for ten years I’ve been talking to Ed, which is crazy. I don’t think that I know anybody else, very few people, certainly on a professional level outside of Ed for that long, that I never see or have never met before. I guess that I should really say so. With that said, Ed gets through the Salesforce CRM. They use Salesforce. So through Salesforce, Ed gets insights into the pages that I visit. So what instruments am I looking at? What searches am I searching for? They get all of that put into an object and that shows up on my, I would assume, account record. I don’t really know exactly. I’ve never seen it on their side before, but we’ll just say the account record.
08:37
So if Ed goes and he says, oh, hey, I’ve noticed that Ryan has been really hammering through searches. Let’s go take a look at them. I get a call from Ed a day or two later saying, hey, I just thought I’d see, can I help you at all? And the answer is most likely yes, because I have been actively searching for certain things like, wow, yeah, your timing is really good. Actually, I was looking at this stuff. What are your thoughts? And let’s get an order done. And that’s exactly how I bought my last guitar, like last week from him. So it’s been excellent though for Ed and for sales to be able to see in real time what our leads or existing customers searching for and using that in their ability to be able to reach out and talk to the lead.
09:22
So you can also use all of that information to prioritize your leads. And you can do that by assigning the scores that we talked about earlier on the strength of intent and then allowing sales reps to focus on high intent prospects. And I think the big part here is that lead scoring and lead mapping and funnel mapping is crucial with sales teams to be working with marketing. So marketing and sales has to work together. It usually starts on like a vp level has to work together to say, marketing says, we would like to know from you, sales, what has the best conversions for you. Sales says, we’ve noticed that these things matter. Okay, if you know what content makes a difference in terms of defining intent, we can take that and start to assign lead scores.
10:15
Marketing says, okay, we’ve assigned these lead scores, or we’d like to assign these lead scores bumps to all these various points for these different pieces of content. Sales, do you agree? Sales says, yes. Looks good enough for us. Let’s give it a shot. We start implementing that, all of that data starts moving over into the CRM from the marketing automation platform, whatever you may be using. And then from there, sales tries, they try to use it. How does it work? Do they notice that they’re getting more phone calls answered? Do they notice that they’re getting more leads converted into opportunities or into contacts? Do they notice they’re getting more contacts converted into opportunities? Are they closing more? Are they closing less? Are they getting angry phone calls or angry responses?
11:02
And that goes back to marketing to say, okay, this part’s good, this part’s not good. So let’s make an adjustment. How do we adjust it there? But the intent data helps sales teams to tailor their messaging and our approach by understanding those specific interests and the pain points of each prospect. And we can kind of gather that and infer that from the data that we can see based on what they’re actively looking at. So a couple of other things to consider here, data privacy and compliance. So, ethical considerations include obtaining consent for data collection and usage, ensuring data accuracy and security, and respecting customer privacy. Now, on a high level in the US, we have the right to collect data on someone, even if we don’t know who they are.
11:50
So just by you visiting a site, you can have data collected on your browsing habits on that website. Now, outside of that, small companies are not required, even with GDPR and CCPA, smaller companies are not required to ask you to accept cookies. Larger companies definitely are. Most companies inherently do. And I think that’s a good practice. However, it’s not a requirement now, good practice, because if you do grow, you’re not having to go back and work on consent issues, which can really hold up marketing, especially if legal is getting involved. But just something to consider. The best thing to do, though, is to implement data protection measures, like different levels of encryption and access controls to safeguard customer data, and then make sure that you do stay compliant with relevant regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
12:47
And that’s really important when you do end up using intent data, including obtaining that proper consent and providing opt out options. But I think that the big thing here is that, again, at least in the US, what you’re allowed to do is you’re allowed to track people, what they do on the website, and then the marketing automation tool can track that tied to an IP address. Now, when somebody at that IP address submits a form, all of that browsing history is converted and added to the record on the account. So now we know that all the things that you did before you converted, we can tie that to you as an individual. And that’s really helpful for marketing, it’s really helpful for sales. And that’s usually what you’re opting into when you’re clicking that button saying, I accept to have my cookies tracked.
13:37
That’s what you’re allowing a company to do is to track you on a website before they know who you are. But once you raise your hand, you submit a form and say, this is my email address, this is my name, this is my company, here’s my phone number. Whatever you submit that translates over and pulls all of that browsing data into the account record, and then we’re able to leverage that. So very powerful stuff. Some companies, especially larger companies, won’t do that at all. So they have that shut off until they get a conversion and then they start tracking, because now you’ve explicitly opted in to tracking through a form conversion. So what about measuring? How do we know that the data that we collect and the data that we leverage to measure intent helps us?
14:25
So businesses can measure the effectiveness and roi of intent data using different tracking metrics like lead conversion rates and revenue generated and customer engagements. And key indicators to evaluate intent data’s impact include the number of high intent leads that we generate, increased customer satisfaction, and improved sales productivity. So these are things that can be easy and also sometimes difficult to measure. But if you go into one of these projects thinking about what you want to take out of it, I always think of like, what are the KPIs that we’re starting with? What do we want? And then how do we build to those KPIs? It’s always how you want to be thinking.
15:03
And of course, some challenges in attributing sales and marketing success to intent data may include like, multitouch attribution, which gets very complicated data integrations, and also aligning intent data with other marketing efforts. So if you’re inferring intent from online activities, are you doing offline activities as well? I hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode. I think that it’s really fascinating to talk about intent data, how we can leverage it and how we can gather it. And there are lots of different ways to gather it. Obviously, we kind of discuss a lot of those. But if you have any questions, you can always reach out to me directly at hello@demandgenpod.com? My name is Ryan. I hope that you’ve had a great time today. We will talk soon.