In a previous blog post, I discussed the benefits and risks of B2B intent data purchased from external providers, and included a list of questions you should ask before buying. Once you’re satisfied with the answers to those questions, you can get busy applying intent data to your marketing practices.
Intent data can accelerate many marketing efforts, from e-mail nurturing campaigns to programmatic advertising to channel partner support. But perhaps the most promising application of purchase intent data is to Account-Based Marketing (ABM).
In ABM, one of the biggest challenges to effectiveness is the account list itself. While the practice is thankfully waning, all too many organizations still build out their ABM target lists based on anecdotal sales feedback or account profiling.
With intent insights, you can take an evidence-based approach to creating, honing and prioritizing your ABM target list based on visibility into not only which accounts are actively researching your market, but when they are showing spikes in recent activity. At a minimum, intent data can help you validate whether you have the right targets at the right level of priority.
2 critical challenges of applying intent to an ABM strategy
There are two critical challenges when looking to apply intent data to an ABM strategy:
- Ensuring account list accuracy and relevance; and
- Getting beyond account-level information to the critically important contact level
For ABM, you should work with purchase intent partners whose intent methodology is grounded in more than just the predictive characteristics of account-level surges.
A supplier should:
- Provide you with known, demonstrable buyer activity
- Be transparent about the sources from which they pinpoint intent
- Offer insights and access to identifiable members of the buying team who are actually conducting the research activity.
Beware of solutions that use third-party services to append contacts to those surging accounts. While this sort of triangulation does produce named contacts at the accounts you’re after, it only coincidentally finds prospects actually conducting the purchase research relevant to you.
To learn how real purchase intent insight can fuel your ABM success, contact us today at [email protected].
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