Welcome back to the second installment of our Q&A series with the knowledgeable Ellie Cary, Head of Revenue Operations (RevOps) at Unreal Digital Group. With her wealth of experience and keen insights, Ellie dives deep into the significance of intent data, its crucial role in shaping the trajectory of contemporary marketing, and its profound implications for businesses aiming to stay ahead of the curve. Join us as we delve into this important conversation and unravel the nuances of how intent data is revolutionizing the way we approach marketing in today’s digital age.
Q. According to Demand Gen Report surveys, B2B marketers are focusing heavily on intent data, with 65% of B2B marketers planning to invest more in it this year. But only 18% of B2B marketers are currently executing a fully developed, measurable intent data strategy. What are the most important factors marketers should consider when developing an intent data strategy?
Ellie: As a tech/data person, I’ll always default to leveraging clean data across your tech stack. What are you doing with this data? How does it flow into your different systems? Is the data triggering workflows? How does it tie to your key processes around lead management? (lifecycle, scoring, attribution, marketing-sales SLAs)
The second is how do you leverage this type of data in your customer journey touchpoints? Are you marketing to people based on how they’d like to be marketed to? Are you contextualizing the data where it makes sense for the buyer?
Q. Given that many marketers are facing budget cuts and staffing cuts, how can intent data help them do more with less?
Ellie: Intent data makes GTM efforts more scalable, improves conversions and increases sales through AI, but the rub here is the initial investment and resources to properly stand up systems for intent data, and it’s hard for businesses to prioritize this type of spend unless you have the right people in place who understand its value. If you do, and you make intent data a priority and leverage it effectively, you are shoring up the longevity of your business.
Intent data can help you more quickly prioritize leads and inform sales on who to target and which leads are more likely to convert, identify a client flight risk, and also provide valuable context to help close a sale.
Your source of truth should be zero and first-party data. Second and third-party data augment and support your data sources of truth, but you really need to know what data sets you are going after with second and third-party data and understand how “good” those data sets are.
Q: What trends or changes have you seen in how marketers use intent data in the past year?
Ellie: Intent data makes GTM efforts more scalable, improves conversions and increases sales through AI, but the rub here is the initial investment and resources to properly stand up systems for intent data, and it’s hard for businesses to prioritize this type of spend unless you have the right people in place who understand its value. If you do, and you make intent data a priority and leverage it effectively, you are shoring up the longevity of your business.
Intent data can help you more quickly prioritize leads and inform sales on who to target and which leads are more likely to convert, identify a client flight risk, and also provide valuable context to help close a sale.
Q. How are B2B marketers using AI and other technology to automate the process of collecting and maintaining intent data?
Ellie: Intent Classification (intent recognition) leveraging NLP analyzes intentions behind texts and categorizes them such as requests or approvals, Unified ID 2.0 is also a key factor to look into (especially around moving towards a cookieless world).
Q. How can marketers use intent signals to guide their content and ABM strategies and identify the most effective messaging for each buyer or account?
Ellie: Intent data at its core starts with ABM accounts. Aligning your intent data to your ideal ICPs, with an open mind that ICPs may shift based on what intent and AI is providing, is critical to your ABM long-term strategy. It also helps you target specific keywords/intent data points in your other GTM strategies that leverage content.
Q. How are increasing privacy regulations and Google’s plans to deprecate third-party cookies in 2024 affecting the way marketers collect, maintain and use intent data? What steps can marketers take to stay ahead of these changes and remain in compliance?
Ellie: This is a huge hot-button issue right now. The shift is now to prioritize zero and first-party data and invite customers to provide data on their own terms, which is great for the consumer. This is also driving the need to have more tech (and data centers) to be able to house more and more data within an organization, such as AKA CDPs, Data Lakes, DMPs, etc.
To stay ahead, really start shifting your marketing efforts to be more collaborative and invite the user to provide their zero data. That’s why quizzes, surveys and interactive digital experiences are valuable content formats now and in the future.
Also making sure you have proper data governance around compliance is key. If you don’t have this clearly defined and easily trackable, you are behind.
Q. How do you expect the role of intent data to evolve in the next few years?
Ellie: If you aren’t set up to start using AI and intent data within the next year, you risk losing out on business, and you will fall behind as other businesses leveraging it will be working smarter, not harder, at scale.
If you’d like to learn more about our RevOps services, please click here or contact us for a discovery call at hello@unrealdigitalgroup.com.