You know that sensation of smoothly cruising through a series of green lights, each one seamlessly transitioning to the next? Or the moment when a new checkout lane opens up at the grocery store just as you’re about to reach the front of the line?

The feeling is pretty good right?

Now imagine giving this feeling to your potential customers by delivering the right marketing message at the exact moment when they are actively seeking your solutions.

This is where ABM intent data comes into play.

Marketers can find this sweet spot with intent data. While Account-Based Marketing allows you to apply tailored marketing tactics to drive leads to conversion.

Together, ABM and intent data form the perfect combination to drive tangible business results.

Intent data unlocks the full potential of ABM

This form of marketing provides valuable insights into the online behavior of targeted buyers, indicating their interest and readiness to engage with specific products or services. It reveals their interests and readiness to purchase, allowing businesses to tailor their marketing efforts accordingly.

This data is categorized into two types:

• First-Party Intent Data: Collected directly from your own platforms and interactions.
• Third-Party Intent Data: Gathered from external sources, offering a broader view of buyer behavior across the web.

How ABM Intent Data works

Intent data works by analyzing the online activities of potential buyers to identify patterns and signals indicative of purchase intent.

This involves tracking various digital behaviors such as:

• Content Consumption: Reading blogs, whitepapers, or articles related to your industry.
  
• Search Queries: Keywords and phrases used in search engines that align with your products or services.
  
• Engagement with Competitors: Researching or visiting competitor websites.
  

Benefits of using ABM Intent Data

With so many benefits to discover, here are five key ones:

1. Dynamic Target Account Lists:

Traditional static lists become outdated quickly and can lead to missed opportunities. Intent data offers a significant benefit by allowing you to dynamically update and expand your target account lists with accounts actively showing interest in relevant solutions. This ensures you’re reaching the right companies at the right time, maximizing the effectiveness of your outreach.

2. Precision in Demand Generation:

Accurate targeting is essential for demand generation. With intent data, you can tailor your messaging based on real-time insights into what prospects are currently interested in- increasing engagement rates and shortening sales cycles.

3. Enhanced Lead Scoring:

Integrating lead scoring systems with intent data for lead generation helps prioritize high-intent accounts, allowing sales teams to focus on leads with the highest likelihood of conversion.

By leveraging these insights into buyer behavior, marketers can assign points based on a prospect’s demonstrated interest in relevant solutions, ultimately identifying the hottest leads for immediate outreach.

Must Read: How to Collect B2B Intent Data?

4. Personalized Content Creation:

With insights into what prospects are searching for, you can create highly personalized content that addresses their specific questions and pain points, leading to higher engagement.

5. Reducing Customer Churn:

By monitoring online behaviors, intent data enables you to uncover potential churn risks. Additionally, if your customers are searching for additional solutions, you’ll be able to proactively cross-sell opportunities.

Implementing ABM Intent Data in Your Strategy

Dynamic Target Account Lists:

One of the biggest B2B ABM mistakes is failing to maintain a fresh target account list. This can lead to repeatedly marketing to accounts that aren’t ready to buy, ultimately annoying the prospect and wasting valuable time and budget.

An effective ABM strategy requires continuous evaluation and refinement of your target list to ensure you’re focusing efforts on the most relevant accounts with the highest buying intent.

Remember this is not a one-and-done activity. You must refine, refresh, and reengage with your fresh intent data contacts quarterly. This approach helps concentrate your resources on high-potential accounts. The result: You continue to watch your sales cycle and cost per lead drop over time.

Precision in Demand Generation:

Accurate targeting is paramount in any demand-generation efforts, especially for companies in their growth phase. Going beyond segmenting audiences in broader terms, intent data enables you to target based on vital and recent behavior signals across the web.

While ABM vs. demand generation strategies differ in approach, intent data is valuable for both. While demand generation casts a wide net to attract a large pool of leads, intent data allows for a more targeted approach.

By understanding what prospects are currently interested in you can increase engagement rates and shorten sales cycles.

This focus on qualified leads aligns with an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, enabling marketers to prioritize high-value accounts with the greatest conversion potential.

Enhanced Lead Scoring:

Integrate intent data with your CRM and marketing automation tools to refine your lead scoring process. This allows you to prioritize accounts with higher purchase intent, optimizing your sales efforts.

And if you are a marketer, it’s likely that you are already using the marketing automation tools to enable the score account based on the prospects’ recent online behavior. An excellent intent data provider integrates CRM, marketing automation tools, and lead generating tools acting like a compass to direct your outreach decision holistically,

Personalized Content Creation:

With insights into what prospects are searching for, you can create highly personalized content that addresses their specific questions and pain points, leading to higher engagement.

This targeted approach, informed by ABM content syndication, positions your brand as a trusted advisor and a valuable resource for high-value accounts.

What next? Integrate this data into your CRM and marketing automation platforms. This allows you to create a comprehensive view of your prospects’ interests and tailor your outreach strategies more effectively

Customer churn:

Congratulations! You have got a new customer. But this does not mean you should overlook your existing customers. Because you have already put efforts to win them. Nurture them. Understand their buying journey and keep them helping to what they need next.

Sales Activation:

One of the hardest parts of the sales professional’s job:

• Knowing how to spend their time.
• What accounts are actually involved.
• What’s the best strategy to nurture them?

Thankfully, intent-based sales activation gives the sales team the ability to know which accounts to target.

Furthermore, sales automation tools can alert your sales team when an account is highly active. And insights into this account help you identify hot, ready-to-buy customers.

Unfortunately, so-called hot deals can be lost when full context is not communicated to the sales reps. Unless the sales rep has a clear picture of the leads, your sales team won’t properly engage with your buyer.

Future Trends in ABM Intent Data

• The integration of AI and ML is enhancing the accuracy of intent data predictions, enabling more precise targeting and personalization.
  
• As privacy regulations evolve, the methods of collecting and utilizing intent data will need to adapt, emphasizing the importance of ethical data practices.
  
• The scope of intent data is expanding, with more sources providing richer insights into buyer behavior, further refining ABM tactics.
  

Maximize your ROI with ABM Intent data.

Intent data when paired with ABM, allows you deliver the personalized messages to right audience at right time

Correctly using ABM intent data in your marketing and sales efforts, from the top of the funnel to post-sales, enhances precision and results in tangible business benefits.

So, incorporate ABM intent data into your marketing arsenal to bolster your marketing efforts and help you stand out from your competitors.

Vikas Bhatt

Vikas Bhatt is the Co-Founder of ONLY B2B, a premium B2B lead generation company that specializes in helping businesses achieve their growth objectives through targeted marketing & sales campaigns. With 10+ years of experience in the industry, Vikas has a deep understanding of the challenges faced by businesses today and has developed a unique approach to lead generation that has helped clients across a range of industries around the globe. As a thought leader in the B2B marketing community, ONLY B2B specializes in demand generation, content syndication, database services and more.