How to do more with less: Four ways Intent data can help you optimize a tight budget

There’s no question. Intent data allows businesses to channel their spending to the leads that matter the most to their bottom line. It encourages sales and marketing leaders to be smarter with their budget by doing more, with fewer people, in less time.

Doing more with less certainly isn’t new to marketers, but the end-of-year pressures are feeling a bit more intense this year. Cost-cutting measures are deployed across departments leaving a big hole in marketing budgets and more critically, fewer resources to spend on much-needed talent.

Yet, marketing and sales teams have to adjust to a new reality and move forward. You still need to generate leads, win customers, and hit monthly targets. Achieving these goals when budgets are tight is hard but not impossible. The key to success lies in optimizing your sales insights and marketing operations with Intent data.

How Intent data can improve your marketing budget

1. Smarter targeting in demand generation campaigns

Derived from web content consumption, Intent data sheds a bright light on the current interests of B2B decision-makers and their readiness to purchase specific products and services. These insights allow your team to identify and focus mainly on accounts engaged in an active research or buying process. As a result, you can increase the ROI on a range of sales and outreach efforts.

Furthermore, if direct mail, event invites, display advertising, and paid social media are all part of your marketing mix, a tight budget forces you to find resourceful strategies to target key prospects with precision. Now more than ever, every dollar counts for an expected return. So it comes as no surprise that many B2B marketing teams are opting for consistently refreshed Intent data to engage leads in real-time, with a personalized approach. Marketing spend can be allocated to the accounts with the strongest or most recent buying signals, so the most convertible accounts get prime attention versus being shared with prospects who do not have a genuine interest or intent to buy the product in question.

Hushly, a martech startup, has integrated Bombora’s Intent data into its LinkedIn marketing campaigns. This helped the team to decrease cost-per-click (CPC) by 79% and increase click-through rates (CTR) by 498%. And despite a limited budget, Intent data-based targeting has led this firm to outsized returns and a more effective Account-based Marketing (ABM) strategy.

2. Personalized emails, landing pages, and content pieces

Another way to make every marketing dollar count is by customizing all content and communications based on your audiences’ active interests. Intent data offers unparalleled buyer insights to help you do this. By integrating Intent data into your marketing automation platform, you can personalize landing pages, improve email segmentation, and even make use of dynamic content opportunities to drive better responses.

You’ll also get a better understanding of a prospect’s interests and a place in the B2B sales funnel, which you can use to create content pieces specially tailored to help sales leaders and marketers overcome the next hurdle in their decision-making. Providing precise answers to potential prospects while they are searching improves their trust and reduced distractions caused by irrelevant content. And with half of the buyers reading 3 to 5 pieces of content before even contacting a supplier, it’s vital to ensure your brand is in a client’s radar early on in their decision-making process.

3. Reduced churn and increased upsell opportunities

Repeat customers can be vital for growing your business with limited budgets. It costs 5 times more to win new customers than keep current ones, and existing customers are also more likely to buy from you again and again. Hence, marketing and sales teams should work hard to reduce churn and find upsell opportunities to ensure retained accounts are a core segment of their bottom line.

Intent data can be the customer signal ‘whistle’ you need to move fast when trying to attract new departments or growing existing business lines. It can signal when a customer is researching competitive products or looking for additional solutions your brand already offers. Armed with these insights, you can proactively approach clients and offer the solution, (you know they need), to their problems. You’ll also avoid spending energy on ineffective nurture campaigns and instead focus on accounts with specific, increased buying interests – right when they are signaling a need for attention.

4. Laser-focused outreach by sales and SDR teams

Tight budgets often mean that headcount is tight too, making it essential to ensure your sales and SDR teams spend their outreach efforts only on the accounts with active intent. And when B2B sales cycles can take as much as 12 months, it’s definitely in your best interest to shorten this period and thus reduce the cost of acquisition.

Intent data enables your SDR and sales teams to work on a prospect list that matters. By going beyond demographic or lookalike criteria and layering on Intent data, you minimize budget waste while giving your sales team the information they need to know which accounts to contact first. Bombora’s massive data co-op, with over 4000 websites analyzed, is the most reliable source of Intent data. To get the most value out of your sales efforts, you can combine Intent data with various B2B audience attributes such as seniority, professional group, functional area, business size, and others. Most sales leaders do this by bringing the Bombora data directly into their CRM or prospecting platform of choice through seamless integrations.

Explore Intent data with Bombora

Intent data makes your marketing and sales activities more precise and impactful. It enables you to win more customers, even with budget cuts and team downsizing. Instead of chasing accounts that are not looking to buy your products, you can focus on businesses that show active demand for your offerings. It doesn’t matter whether you’re running demand generation campaigns, crafting sales emails, cold-calling, or are trying to combat rapid churn, Intent data helps you make the most out of your budget.

As a leader in this field, we can help you take the guesswork out of sales and marketing. Bombora analyzes the content consumption of millions of B2B organizations and informs you which ones indicate demand in your products or services.

If you want to explore how Intent data can help your team, book a personalized demo, to learn more about Company Surge® data. We’ll also tell you about complementary solutions and how to integrate our technology into a range of martech and adtech tools like Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, 6Sense, LinkedIn, Rollworks, and many more. Reach out today.