The state of Intent data: 6 trends for 2023

Marketing and sales teams are always looking to do more with less. But as we verge on the cusp of a potential recession, we must be even more deliberate with (possibly diminished) resources. 

Now more than ever, leaders are asking, how we can adjust our GTM strategies given the expected market conditions for 2023?

Most businesses are focused on better understanding their customer experience across the buyer’s journey. How? When flooded with massive amounts of prospect and customer data, it can be overwhelming to figure out what to focus on with the first-party data you’ve collected. That’s where Intent data can help you gain a competitive advantage and build a comprehensive view of your top customer profiles.

Here are the six B2B Intent data trends and predictions to keep your growth strategies fueled in 2023.

Intent data tactic trends B2B marketers need to know in 2023

Major business investments usually begin with team members reading articles, blog posts, product specs, and reviews, and comparing solutions. This content could be on your site, your competitor’s site, social media, or other unowned digital resources. To give your team the best opportunity to start engaging prospects with the highest propensity to buy your solution, we’ve found these six trending Intent data tactics to be effective (and too often overlooked):

1. Rely on buyer behavior to reduce customer churn and increase upsell opportunities

Customer acquisition is expensive. Bain and Company found that a 5% increase in customer retention increases company profits 25–95%, and Harvard Business Review reported that it’s 5–25 times less expensive to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one. So it’s a no-brainer that we expect businesses in 2023 to focus on keeping their customers happy and increasing cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Intent data allows you to target your current customers when they’re researching other players in the field, enabling you to reach out to them proactively before they leave you for someone else.

The right search data can also help you track current customers researching service expansions and scouring your website to learn more. It can help you understand the array of tools in customer tech stacks that work in your ecosystem. Combined with your first-party data, this insight helps you bring more value and trust to the buying journey and provides a complete picture of what types of relevant content customers are looking for.

2. Use Intent data to understand what your prospective buyers are looking for and how your competition stacks up to their needs

Find your top prospects and convert them before your competition does will be one of the unwritten objectives of your 2023 efforts.

With the average B2B sales cycle being upward of 4–6 months, Intent data can give you the right insight to see your customer’s buying journey through their stages of research, product review, team analysis, purchase, implementation, and retention. Intent data lights the path toward the most persuasive personalized messaging across every channel to show target accounts that you understand their problems and how to solve them.

If you’re not making Intent-driven marketing decisions based on behavioral data insights, such as what they’ve read in your latest blog post and where they are in the buying cycle, you’re missing key opportunities to maximize your marketing spend.

Learn how to build an enterprise marketing strategy with Intent data.

3. Leverage Intent data to build your ideal customer profile (ICP)

If your marketing team doesn’t know who they’re speaking to, how will they know what to say? That’s why an ICP is essential when designing new lead-generation campaigns to engage your target market in the new year. Using advanced algorithms and pulling from multiple sources of information to help you laser-focus your marketing and sales efforts (and dollars), Intent data can help you attract prospects by tuning in to the topics they’re most interested in.

But what pain points do your potential customers face every day? And how often? What do you really know about their general purchase intent and how your product or service can fit into (or improve) their workflow? Intent data gives you a corner seat in their office to help identify their problems and goals. Your sales team can get specific and relevant information and build long-term relationships with this type of information.

Learn more about the benefits of customer retention.

4. Target prospects researching at the edge

Of course, websites remain the most-used source of product and service research. But according to research from the Pew Research Center, we are increasingly turning to social media as a trusted source of news and facts. One-third of U.S. adults get their news from Facebook. A quarter regularly get news from YouTube. And smaller shares get news from Twitter (14%), Instagram (13%), TikTok (10%), or Reddit (8%). As these non-branded content sources gain consumer trust, they also become a trusted place for candid product reviews and brand discussion.

To give your brand the edge with Intent data, use intent-driven insights programmatically to ensure you’re communicating the right messages to the right audience.

5. Personalize the buyer journey

In business, teams buy by committee, and their priorities and goals are diverse. But you need to win approval from everyone. Sales want to increase conversions and simplify sales cycles. IT wants security and ease of integration. Finance has its eye on ROI and recouping the investment. Each decision-maker requires different ads, different media, and a unique sales approach. With Intent data’s guidance, you can create a personalized message that resonates with every potential buying team at the right time.

Lean on Intent data to help you create multiple personas and meaningful messaging in ads, on the web, in sales collateral, and throughout the entire customer journey. Prospects in every department will feel both seen and heard — and more confident as they get closer to purchase.

Learn more about Intent data for personalized messaging.

6. Improve lead scoring with engagement data

Regarding scoring prospects with the highest sales potential: “There is no use in having all of the ideal criteria and yet none of the engagement,” reports Digital Marketing Institute. “Equally, there’s no point in having all of the engagement and yet none of the criteria. It just doesn’t work. You want someone who fills your ideal criteria and is highly engaged.”

But how do you find these unicorns? This is where Intent data shines. For the year ahead, turn to data that tracks attribution reports so you know which pages or blog posts your prospects engage with as they move into the pipeline. Incorporate first and third-party Intent data to have a holistic view of your prospects and customers.  Keep an eye on how your data changes every few months.

Check out our ungated eBook to make sure your internal systems are in check: The Intentional Lead Scoring Workbook

Intent data predictions for 2023

With Intent data, businesses can do more with less. Leveraging Intent data is the secret sauce to growth in 2023 to attracting, retaining, and targeting the right organizations actively pursuing your solutions and the data tells us so. A few examples of Intent data at work:

• Salesforce experienced a whopping 271% increase in paid social and a 33% reduction in the sales cycle.
• IBM saved 41% in cost-per-registration while retaining high-quality leads.
• Data cloud company Snowflake achieved four times the sales development representatives (SDR) benchmark meeting rate.
• And SugarCRM customer relationship management platform found $2m in pipeline.

In 2020, 51% of B2B leaders indicated using Intent data to better identify and assess prospects during the buying cycle. For 2023, the B2B industry can expect a more unified team approach to resilient growth and churn reduction. It all goes back to alignment and being as efficient as possible.

We predict:

• Performance marketers focusing on identifying data-backed segments when launching dynamic campaigns across major social media platforms, community forums and search.
• SDRs and sales teams being excited about the leads they’re connecting with because their accounts are scored and fueled by Intent data.
• Using Intent data to increase the efficiency of organizational KPIs such as customer satisfaction, top-line revenue growth, and sales and marketing alignment.
• Establishing benchmarks and focusing on the importance of operations and enablement. Measuring every activity is critical to the overall performance of all sales and marketing activities.

Intent data is valuable across all teams, from marketing to SDRs to sales to customer success. What’s key is enhancing your strategies with both first-party and third-party data to truly give you a complete view of your customers’ and buyers’ journey. 

By focusing on the top accounts with the highest propensity to convert (or upsell and cross-sell!), businesses can learn what product and marketing experiences they need to build, showcase and improve to push through 2023 no matter what the year will bring.