Sometimes marketing can feel like a shot in the dark, as if you’re looking at some data and just trying to make the content stick. You chase the trends and try to keep up. But, what if you didn’t have to shoot in the dark? What if you could flip a switch and see exactly where the net was, take a shot, and make it almost every time?
Turning on that light as you take the shot comes from knowing the Intent of your potential buyers. Intent is important because it gives you signals for when your ideal customers are ready to purchase.
Marketing with Intent Data
“You can certainly operate without intent data, but you just aren’t seeing the whole picture.”
The old way of catching clients came from cold calls, following up when someone requested a demo, or took some sort of action on your site. Knowing when someone is actually ready to purchase, cash in hand, that’s something you can’t see with traditional data collection platforms. Any behavior going on outside one of your web properties or your monitoring channels, is so completely invisible, you might as well be flailing around in the dark again.
Plenty of marketing directors go to bed each night, knowing there are companies out there searching for their product or service. They lay awake wondering how to make these companies aware of their existence. They ponder the best ways to find them and reach them, trying to figure out how to “fish where the fish are,” as well as figure out where the fish usually go.
By monitoring intent and effectively integrating the data directly into a CRM makes it highly actionable for a sales and marketing team. The data helps your go-to-market team make sure that they aren’t missing anything or anyone.
Unless you are supremely confident that your brand is big enough and well-known enough, then you should be looking at intent data as a way to find those people who want to know you, but don’t know it quite yet.
Uncovering Hidden Opportunities
Check out this video to learn about fit and intent.
Imagine there’s a company that wraps cars and trucks in full-scale graphics. They can also wrap boats with the same material, but they’ve never written any content about the service, because according to their traditionally-collected data, no one is interested. No one has visited the website for that service, so they conclude no one wants their boats wrapped.
However, after monitoring intent data, the company finds there are numerous prospective clients searching for this type of product or service. This moves the company to produce content about boat wrap graphics, including white papers, videos, and even a podcast episode. In the following months, that content becomes widely viewed and is some of the most popular on their website.
Without analyzing intent data, the vehicle wrap company would’ve continued to shoot in the dark and missed out on this lucrative business, simply because their prospective clients didn’t even know this company had this service.
You can certainly operate without intent data, but you just aren’t seeing the whole picture. Intent data is akin to adding color to film or television. If you are just looking at how someone is engaging with your brand on your own platforms, like the traditional data methods, then you’re seeing things in black and white. Once you include intent in your marketing analytics, you’ll see the bigger picture and understand all the nuances.
If you would like to learn how you can use Intent data to find in-market accounts, request an intent assessment.