Only 25% of companies are currently using intent data and monitoring tools, according to an ABM Benchmark Survey.

This means that 75% of companies are failing to leverage the valuable intent signals they’re receiving from their audience.

On average, those researching a solution in the B2B space do 12 searches before engaging with a specific brand’s website. The way our audience interacts with resources and informative content on site provides us, as marketers, with valuable insight into what they’re looking for and what content topics may be useful to them.

As our prospects are gathering information and accumulating knowledge, they are making their way through the middle of funnel stage. Prospects at this stage in the funnel are not yet ready to engage with a member of the sales team but are active in our space.

Intent data informs marketing decisions

Understanding our prospects at the middle of funnel stage is a necessary step to providing them with useful content, and creating a positive user experience with our brand.

Interactions with the content on our site, or that of trusted partner sites, builds our understanding of what the prospect finds useful, informing our decisions to serve them future content and improving our ability to outreach effectively using a segmented nurture campaign.

Our Demand Generation Report found that prospects in the enterprise software market were actively engaged in six topic areas during their research. The breadth of research in this space supports Google’s findings that a prospect will have multiple interactions before engaging with a brand, but also indicates that prospects are interested in different areas and require tailored campaigns to effectively reach them.

Intent data allows us to segment our audience effectively

The way prospects engage with our content provides signals for purchasing intent, as well as what content we should serve them in future nurturing campaigns.

At Prospect Path, we use intent data to drive our nurturing campaigns by providing prospects with content that is relevant to their initial interactions. By creating our nurturing campaigns from the prospect’s interactions, we can understand and influence the prospect’s journey through our marketing funnel.

Further to this, we can work from historic prospect data to map a customer journey for a prospect who engages with this type of material creating more data-driven personas to drive our content creation.

Intent data leads our content creation

Identifying the key pieces of content that match our target audience’s needs drives our content creation. 

We use our prospect’s intent data to create tailored content around the topics that are relevant to them. We can also see which types of content are most likely to perform well, and replicate these across campaigns with similar prospect intent.

Gathering intent signals doesn’t stop at the type of content, but extends to user interaction on site including the number of sessions, the number of pages visited, tools used during the session, and most popular pages.

We can also work on a broader scale to see whether multiple people from the same organization have been interacting with content across the site.

Intent data informs account level marketing activities

Intent data doesn’t end at the prospect level.

Google Consumer Insights found 81% of non-C-suiters have a say in purchase decisions at B2B level. This is supported by our Demand Generation Report which found that 23% of decision-makers leading the software selection process were outside of the C-suite level.

From this statistic, we can derive that interaction with content on-site from non-decision makers can still provide valuable account level intent data for future purchase decisions.

Those who are actively researching in our space provide marketers with a great opportunity to build a relationship with the prospect, and the company, at the discovery stage.

Without utilizing the intent data at this level, we would miss out on opportunities and key signals of purchase intent from valuable prospects, who are ready to be nurtured through our marketing funnel like the 75% of companies not using intent data already.

Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts on intent data if you’d like to share your opinions on this topic, I’d love to hear from you. You can email any of your thoughts to me directly at: megan@prospectpath.com