POV

The old saying that “nobody wants to know how the sausage is made” does not apply to B2B marketing. As more of the B2B buyer journey goes online, data and technology become more necessary but also more complex. Knowing how the sausage is made is exactly what defines a great B2B marketer – digging into data, testing new technology and new strategies is what delivers incremental improvements. 

Luckily, just as B2B buyers are moving more online, two ingredients have emerged that can help marketers reach buyers more effectively in their online journey. In particular, intent data and AI work together to identify intent more accurately, drive more relevant messaging and move faster to get in front of buyers at the right time. 

Unlocking Billions of Intent Signals

More business buyers are conducting their buying journey online, according to Gartner, tapping into a variety of resources before visiting a B2B vendor’s website. One way that B2B marketers can better understand those phases of the buyer journey and get in front of buyers during the entire online purchase process is through intent data. Intent data helps B2B marketers map the buyer journey to deliver relevant messaging at the right time.

However, the sheer amount of intent data being created by online research is staggering. With more and more of the buyer journey happening across digital channels, the number of signals continues to expand.

That’s a good thing, because it provides better insights into the research activity of prospects and contacts, but it is also difficult to deal with. Processing billions of signals quickly and accurately enough to ensure that B2B marketers get access to timely insights is nearly impossible without AI. AI opens the door to process billions of signals a week, accurately assign the topics that they are associated with, link them to a company and produce the file.

Marketers can also apply AI analytics to their intent data to get a few benefits. AI can help leverage new sources of data, allowing companies to leverage transcribed sales calls and other unstructured data. Rather than having to read through individual transcripts of sales calls manually, AI can quickly review thousands of transcripts and easily mine them for insights and trends. For example, marketers could look for signals that someone is about to buy, or look for patterns in the sales conversations that can be associated with higher or lower intent.

AI can also help marketers better understand relevant and related topics to the ones they’ve identified themselves. AI can “read” the content across the web, compare it to the topics the marketer is already tracking and recommend adjacent topics that can open up a new angle for marketers to reach prospects in ways that their competitors aren’t. 

A Deeper Understanding of Intent

Knowing what makes a good prospective buyer requires a deeper understanding of the customer journey. AI can be used to score and evaluate intent signals more accurately and in new ways. Every company is different, and the buyer journey is constantly evolving. For one company, an intent signal that indicates someone is about to make a purchase might be the perfect time for a sales outreach while it might be too late in the process for another company.

Finding a “high intent” signal isn’t enough to know what to do. AI is able to understand the trajectory and the velocity of an intent score, so that B2B marketers can identify not only those important moments of intent but also where they are on the journey and how they are progressing. AI can quickly and accurately compare intent data to a “fit model” which provides a picture of the ideal customer profile and their actions at huge volumes.

With a good fit model, AI can also understand elements like capacity to buy vs. propensity to buy. Not every buyer who looks at enterprise cloud software has the budget or the resources to purchase and implement it. With a model that identifies that difference, marketers can prioritize the right contacts for their teams.

These benefits of applying AI to intent data are just the beginning of what’s likely possible in B2B marketing. The most important thing for marketers is to keep testing, and adding new ingredients to make sure they have the right recipe.