If you're in the 87% of marketers who consider data your organization's most underutilized asset, this article is for you.
Intent data is an exciting prospect for marketers. If you publish content you have a lot to gain from incorporating intent data into your workflow.
But, is an intent data-driven content strategy right for you?
In this article, we'll show you some of the key benefits of using intent data in your content marketing strategy.
Incorporating intent data into your strategy won't require a complete strategic overhaul.
But, what it will do is provide you with new insight into your customer buying journey and decision-making process. You'll be able to improve your messaging, content planning, and promotion strategies.
Without wasting any more time on the introduction, let's jump right into the article and see why you should be using intent data in your content marketing.
Why Invest in an Intent Data-Driven Content Strategy?
Over half of marketers strive to deliver more relevant communications to their customers, including the content they create to attract new ones.
There are compelling reasons to use intent data in your marketing.
We'll look at the individual reasons in the next section, but all of them will help you gain a more in-depth understanding of your ideal customer, create content that's relevant to your audience, and find the best ways to get in front of qualified leads.
Barriers to Using Intent Data in Content Marketing
1. Lack of in-house resources
One of the major barriers to using intent data is the lack of in-house resources (or the perceived lack of resources).
Incorporating a new data source is always going to have a learning curve and your team will need to learn the ropes. As such, if you want to use intent data you may believe that it'll stretch your in-house resources and you won't have the bandwidth to use it.
However, the opposite often turns out to be true.
Intent data will simplify your team's workflow.
- Your content team will have new insight into what content they should be creating
- Your sales reps can focus on accounts showing high purchase intent
Rather than stretch your team's efforts, intent data can make everything simpler and provide an effective way to prioritize efforts.
You can also work with an external team like Internal Results if you want to get the benefits of intent data without the in-house work.
2. Complicated to understand
Intent data isn't complicated. Think of it as another key source of information to inform your marketing strategy. Once you start using it, any prior worries will fade as you see the benefits you can gain from it.
All good intent data providers like Internal Results will provide your data in a structured and easy-to-understand way.
There doesn't need to be a learning curve to using intent data in your content marketing. Rather than seeing it as a complication, intent data should be seen as a factor to help you make decisions (just like different metrics in your keyword research tools would be).
How to Use Intent Data in Your Content Strategy
1. Guide content creation
The first reason to use intent data is that it will help you create a content strategy that matches what your ideal customers want to see.
There is a wide range of keyword research tools out there such as Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, and they're great tools to help you create a data-driven content strategy.
However, when you incorporate intent data, you will have a whole new layer of detail that you can use to strengthen your strategy.
You can use intent data to identify keywords with high buyer intent and prioritize the content that has the best chance of bringing qualified leads to your website.
Once you have an intent data source there is no reason to guess or leave your content strategy to chance. You'll be able to discover what your audience is searching for, and answer those queries directly on your website to attract visitors to your site and solution.
2. Guide content syndication efforts
No matter how amazing your content is, you'll need to promote and syndicate it if you want to see big results.
There is a range of content promotion platforms available to you. It's worth investing in content promotion as it can be the difference between good and great results.
But, if you want to syndicate your content to the people who are going to get the most value from your content, then intent data will be key.
You can use intent data to identify the companies searching for content relevant to your solution, or reading content similar to the articles or whitepapers you've published. From there, you'll be able to actively reach out and send your content to leads, syndicating it through email, telemarketing, or even running ads to it in your Account-Based Marketing campaigns.
3. Overcome common sales objections
As you know, many buyers will have objections before purchasing your solution.
This could be due to cost, lack of perceived value, or because they have to talk to other decision-makers
Sales reps are regularly tasked with objection management, and will likely well prepared, but it's always possible to get caught off-guard by an uncommon question.
With intent data, your sales team will be able to identify the content that target accounts are researching in their buying journey.
How does this work?
Well, by tapping into third-party intent data sources you'll be able to see the content that is being read by leads on a wide range of publisher sites.
In practice, you can use intent data to identify target accounts searching for technical questions relating to common sales objections. Then, your team can reach out directly to answer any questions you know your target accounts have, putting you in a great position to make a sale.
4. Discover content gaps
Content gaps are when you don't have any content to answer specific search queries that are relevant to your ideal customer and solution.
You can use intent data to identify gaps in your website content and then create it accordingly.
Once you have data showing you what type of content your potential customers are reading, you can assess if you have content that answers the search query in the same way (or not).
Doing regular content gap analyses is an ideal way to continually build your content pipeline and never run out of content ideas that are going to help drive leads into your pipeline.
How Internal Results Can Help
If you're thinking of using intent data to increase the success of your content marketing, then we can help.
At Internal Results, we help B2B companies identify, create, and syndicate content that will drive qualified leads into your pipeline, helping fuel sales growth.
If you want to ensure that decision-makers within target accounts see and engage with your content, our multi-channel content syndication campaigns that incorporate intent data to optimize targeting will help you achieve ambitious growth targets.
Our intent data algorithm calculates how purchase-ready your leads are, based on a wide range of variables to ensure high levels of accuracy.
If you want to learn more about how we can help, then get in touch
Wrapping Up
Using intent data in your content marketing is going to pay dividends.
You won't need to create an entirely new content strategy or re-structure your team. Instead, you can use intent data to add another layer of insight that can help guide key decisions such as what content to create, how best to promote it, and how to nurture leads in your pipeline and overcome purchase objections.
