050. Leveraging Buyer Intent Data to Engage Prospects

All right. Hello everyone, this is Milo Garcia. Welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. With me, as always, is Gabby. How are you, Gabby?

Hi, Emilio. Fine, how are you?

I'm doing good. I'm worried about this session because we were being talking like half an hour already about other topics. But, but I hope you know we have enough, enough energy for sure to, to, for this chapter, which by the way is as many of the other ones that I say all the time. Very interesting. So I'm really excited about it. So that's, that's great. Let us dive right away. Today we're going to talk about how do you leverage buying buyer intent data to engage your prospects, which I think is a very relevant topic for demand generation professionist professionals. Because intent is such an important thing, especially when you're, when you are trying to engage with accounts that are part of your ICP and you want to prioritize, where do you start? Right. Especially if you have a large market or a large total addressable market. Even if you make segmentation, it's always helpful to understand which companies are showing intent so you can focus more of your efforts in the companies that are closer to the sell. Right. So I think it's going to be a very interesting one.

Yeah. And actually something that I like about it, it's the, like in the process of doing this, it's the, not only the way that you understand how people are trying to or want to reach out to you, it's the timely outreach. It's just the way that you try to actually be there in the right time just for them. Like buyer and intake data will help you to, it's, it's not, you're not shooting in the dark like you, you will, you will not know how to engage to those with those prospects. You are actually catching those prospects at the right time or in the right moment. And that's something that is really interesting because you know how to, because you already gather that information and that's something that, that has a lot of value on nowadays.

Yes, it's true. And so I think the, the very first question that we need to answer is understanding what, what do we mean by buyer intent? So buyer intent is a, it's a, a catch all phrase to describe how do you measure when someone is interested about a topic. That topic can range from problems or potential solutions that are related to your products to actually your products, your own brand or brands of your competitors. Right. And it has grown in, in, in relevancy because of, for digital interactions. Right. So some Sources to put some examples. Imagine for example that you have great analytic implementation on your website. So you are capable through your CRM of matching when someone visits your website, who that person is, what company do they work for and what pages they are browsing and how much, how long they are staying on each of them and kind of how they are engaging and all that sounds pretty creepy, but. But it's pretty much, you know, if you combine the right, the right technology, you can accomplish that. And so the definition of intent will be, for example, if you have multiple resources and some of them talk about specific topic that is relevant to your product, that company or that person is showing intent about that topic in your website or clearly showing intent about your brand. Right? So that will be the simplest way to define intent. Now extrapolate that and think that if you have companies or places or platforms where you can do the same thing, but not just for one website, but for multiple ones, right? Think about for example Google that is able to see the volume of searches and match the searcher to their profile to some extent. And then maybe the anonymized or anonymize all that traffic though, so it's not abused. But at the end of the day they have the access. So you can surface intent from multiple sources. Because what people search, because the time that they expend watching certain assets like a video, an image, because of the things that they write about. Imagine when someone is tweeting or I don't know how they're going to call it nowadays, when, now, the year is X, I don't know exactly. But if you are writing short texts on the X platform, all of that data can be organized and indexed to gauge intent. Right. So that is the idea behind it. So if you can organize that data and then construct or compare your buyers against the topics that are relevant to you, you can get a sense of the intent of an account. And we will, we will discuss in more detail how you use that, but obviously you will use it to prioritize that. That will be one key component of the actions that you can do. With that, to prioritize your actions and second, to better segment your audience and present them more relevant information or content because you know their intentions, right? So you can gauge your approach based on if you are truly interested right now, then I will be, if not a more aggressive, at least more forward looking into action. And if you are not, then I can step back and wait for the right moment or present information that will make more sense to someone that is not showing Intent. Right.

Yeah, yeah. I like how like in the modern now for marketing and sales strategies, now that we can actually tailor this, it's that for at least for B2B like for business to business, it will help companies to figure it out when other companies are in the market and for their services, like what they're trying to like the intent of buying. Right. And I would like to give you an example of it. It's just like, I don't know, just think about knowing when a bakery needs a fresh batch of flour and you offer it right. When it's going to start baking.

Right.

It's just, you know when. Exactly. Yeah, it's, it's exactly when it will start just doing their business. Right. And you have that solution for them.

Yeah, I agree. Now obviously there are, especially nowadays with all the privacy concerns around, you know, users being exploited basically because of what they do online by ad platforms or platforms in general online. We, we have to have those ethical considerations in mind when, when sourcing this data. I think it's the, a trade off that happens all the time. It's not actually new. I, I wouldn't say that it's, you know, it happens because digital had happened before. Right. Even the traditional mediums, there's some measurements that can be done and some of them are not ethical for sure. So there's gonna be a trade off there. Of course. All that I have to say is that I don't think that it's going to stop either. Right. The search for looking for intent is a never ending thing. Let me put you an example right now. Yes. Now that we have stronger privacy laws and best practices for things that happen on websites, for example, and cookies. But all the augmented reality and virtual reality plus AI is allowing companies to actually guess with a pretty good sense of accuracy. Physical information about users, for example. I was reading actually this a couple of days ago. If you combine something like a VR set, imagine meta quest, right. With AI after just a few actually seconds. Right. So we're talking about a couple of minutes of usage from the person. Imagine they're playing one of those games. We're trying to target something with their. In the virtual world, AI can guess the height, the weight, the age of the user and even some weird things like marital status and political inclination, which is. I, you know, I have no idea how it is capable of doing that. So obviously all of that is not regulated currently. Right. And it's going to be explored for sure for some time. So I don't think it's necessarily something that should happen, but it will. New opportunities to measure intent will always come in handy. And I think the, the responsible thing for companies to do is to make sure that if they take advantage of that the knowledge is anonymized so we don't put on the spot a specific person and even if they are getting economic advantage of it that the user is knowledgeable consent and even you know, be properly compensated. Right. Because sometimes people is like yeah, I don't mind like the models that are surfacing right now on on content is I want to consume this this content and I want to see ads because I don't mind right not paying for the service for, for without ads in this case I don't want my data be sold or I don't want to be the product. Then I pay full description and I don't see any ads. Right, but if you're not willing to do that yeah show me some ads and I want to recoup a benefit not paying you know, for watching that content. So I think models will bring on but in all cases having advantage or getting advantage of intent is continue to go forward for sure.

Yeah, I think it's really important to care that because it is sometimes even annoying when you're in a website, right. And you just start like seeing all the pop ups on the cookies thing like the ones I show. But now like if I, if I compare it to like the way it works before you will just try to accept all the things that the website is showing because it's, it shows right away. And just because you want to see the content that is in the, in the page. Not not even because you already know or you actually are aware about the, the data privacy and all the things that that it has website to gather that information from you. And now it is not only that you accept the cookies, it's just you actually read the implicit into it because now you don't want to that your information could be even sell or shared to third party data right places and you actually are aware now that you even though I, I it takes time to actually read all the implicits that it has. You, you don't want that information to just go around in the Internet because it is your behavior on the Internet. That's the way that, that you actually use your information, how you consume it and that's valuable insights and valuable information for other places that want to know about you as a customer, as a person that drives in the Internet.

Yeah.

And, and it's really important to me to have the right way to telling people that you, you know, everything is secure here in this website and, and your information is secure and that gives the. Just, just you can relax. Even though in those websites sometimes you, you're not even, I don't know, you don't like to be in a website that doesn't show you that your information is not going to be like I said, sell to other places or just share into other places.

Yes, and obviously again, I think it's, that's a debate that will continue to evolve and we need to strike a right balance because people have to have a choice. Of course they have to know about it. I think as long as we have those, that criteria, we're going to be okay there. Now how do we implement buyer intent solutions into our marketing strategy and specifically demand generation? While I'm sure there are going to be many, many different ways, there are a couple, actually. I'm thinking about three that make total sense where you can take advantage of intent data that you have either from third parties or from your own in your implementation. So let me put some examples. The first one is maybe you have access to a channel that have very good information about intent, but you have very poor information about context, meaning who is the person or what is the company. The typical example is you can create campaigns on Google Ad and target a specific keywords, actually very narrow ones that have clear buyer intent. One example that I use typically imagine that you say, well I want to show up for or searches around IT managed service providers, right? Clear intent. Because that person is searching for a provider that offers it managed services. And if you are IT managed service company, then you might be interested on that person. So clear intent there. However, you don't know if it's a decision maker, if it's the company that is the right side, the right revenue in the right country, all of those things. And while you can narrow down on a platform like Google Ads to certain demographies or regions, you still don't have knowledge about who that person is. So if you have a campaign like that where you have access to intent and they visit your website, now you can map the visits of your website to another platform that have access to context and then choose who you continue the conversation with. And this example is LinkedIn ads, right? So in LinkedIn or any other platform they have access to the buyer profile, right? I know the company they work for, I know the their job title, I know their seniority. And you have a framework for that. You can say, well now I will have a campaign on LinkedIn where I will retarget the people that have visited the website, but not everyone with intent. Only people that have intent that happens to match my icp, right? So it's a combination of intent data coming from a place like Google. You map that information on your own property, right? So that's first party information, not you're not sourcing outside. And then you map the information about the context and then you have a great combination because then you will follow just the people that have shown intent on your website that match your icp. I think that's a great combination of, to. To take advantage of, right? So if you are implementing for example just intent based efforts that you combine them with something, they have access to ICP data, some even sometimes you can do it on places like display or formats like display if you have access to, to that map. For example, we use a, a tool called roworks that allows you to advertise best based on criteria like the company and, and the buyer itself. So if you, if you have access to that intent data front to begin with, you can leverage in that way. So that's that quick example that you can use to match intent. The second one is similar, but in the other way around, right? Is imagine that you have a very clear definition of your ICP and buyer and then you pick a platform like LinkedIn but you have access to an auto tool that is following intent for those accounts. For example, imagine that one tool that I can think about right now is G2 website where you can search for solutions and services related to mostly technology. And so users go there and search for potential solutions. They look for providers. Think about Asana or Monday or so if they're searching those tools, clearly they're showing intent for project management, for example software or if they're looking for HubSpot or Salesforce, clearly they're showing intent for CRM solutions and so forth, right? QuickBooks for zero for accounting, et cetera. So if you can source information from G2, G2, which actually they do, right, they, they can give you access to intent and you and they have access to what is the, the company and the role of the person, then you can prioritize your outreach efforts. Because if you say well I want to reach out to 1000 accounts, if you reach out to 1000 accounts at the same time, independent of intent, then you run the risk of being very relevant to some of them and very relevant to others because they are not in the search for it. You can say, well Emilio, what if they are right now you know, not interest. But if they see my ass or they see me or they listen to my outreach, they show some intent. Yeah, that can happen, right? I'm not saying that it won't. But if your budget is limited, which is usually the case, and you want to optimize the impact impact that you will have, probably you want to be a little bit ahead on the intent because in that way you can say, well, out of the 1,000 accounts, I just want to show off to accounts that are showing some high intent, some spike. Even if he's not visiting my website, maybe they're visiting other websites. And so your campaign becomes dynamic, right? Yes, you are targeting the 1000, but you're always more focused on the few ones that probably is that 20% or 10% of that account number that are showing intent right now. And if they, they don't show intent anymore, then you stop advertising to them and then you start showing up for the ones that are showing some intent. So you are always, you know, one step ahead of a competitor, let's say that is trying to advertise to everyone and diluting their efforts because they are putting a lot of effort as well on people that is not right now in market, if that makes sense. So that's another way that you can use intent to match what you have and reach out. And finally, the third way that I can think about is that this information that typically source for marketing efforts can be leveraged by the sales team, right? In a very similar way, you have your database where you have your accounts and buyers, people that have shown interest in the past, people that have had opportunities in the past, plus all the leads that sales have identified. And you are you working on outreach efforts from your sales team, maybe your SCRs, right? You have a list and you have your marketing efforts and all that. So yes, your SDR is going to follow through all that list. But what if you can start with the ones that are showing some intent either because you know they are visiting your properties or because you have these combinations that we were talking about before and you are able to surface intent for that for, for some of the accounts. Wouldn't that be better, right? That your SDR reach someone that actually searching for what you offer right now and you postpone the engagement for the ones that are already so you don't know, you don't annoy them with phone calls and emails when they are not really searching for your solution, right. So you maximize the impact that the outreach will have and you minimize the, the brand impact of Reaching out to someone that is not ready to buy right now. So I think the third way that you can take advantage of intent is that it will better inform your sales outreach efforts if you have something like that, right? If you don't, if you're not doing anything, any sales outreach effort, then probably the best way that you can leverage that information is through remarketing. Right? But again, it's a smart remarketing. It's not just re advertising to anyone that is visiting your website is really focusing on the few that match your criteria for, for both intent and ICP or buyer Persona, if that makes sense. Right? So I think that's some ideas there that they can be implemented. I want to close with looking ahead. What is, what is the future of buying intent? And as I was saying at the beginning, I think that new, very interesting and weird ways will continue to pop up to discover intent, right? The frontier right now is on the mediums that are evolving, right? That do not necessarily have access to advertising or marketing in this moment, but eventually will, right? Think about voice search, right? Your Alexa, your Siri, all that information will describe intent for users. Think about VR, augmented reality, all of that is also fertile ground for matching intent and definitely AI itself, right? Right now is not happening. But eventually Bard and Chat, GPT and all of those will probably start offering an option where some of those answers are sponsored by right companies. I'm not saying that it has to happen. You know, it is interesting that every time that you have a new medium, there's this competing force of getting access for. For a fee versus jumping into the advertising world. But it had happened in every medium, right? If you think about radio, if you think about tv, both offers exist and in markets develop for both ideas. You have open TV and radio where you have free content sponsored by advertising that is catered based on channels of intent, right? So if you have a channel of radio for pop music, then you have a profile of user and then you show some ads. They're going to be different from country music or rock, right? Rock and roll. And the same happened for tv, right? The channel and the program defines the audience and therefore the advertising. But you also have subscriptions. You have serious fm, right? Where you don't necessarily listen to ads. You have HBO Max and you have, you know, all these other subscription channels where you don't see advertising because you're willing to pay. It had happened to reading content in newsletters, right? Or newspapers, sorry, the same, right? You have newspapers that are free, newspapers that require subscriptions, magazines and there's always a medium. So those phenomena, that phenomena will continue to happen in these other mediums of exchange and they will more and more leverage intent. And we markers have to be you know, in the know, if you want to call it that way to continue to look at sources of intent. Right. I feel one of the most prominent right now in terms of actual just raw intent for me is Reddit because the way the, the subreddits are organized describe intent. Right. So I think that's an another platform that is going to source intent heavily and that is worth, you know, keeping an eye on.

Yeah, I got something to say about that. And actually something that happens all the time and even personal for, I mean meaning myself. And it's just like the way that we shop, right? This is for more to maybe be to see but it's something like happens and it's related to AI and it's how we. How, hey, how AI and transpersonal shopping. Because just imagine that every time that you buy online something I. I don't know, like imagine you're buying a shirt and then it's a red shirt and it's a specific brand, right? And you're buying in real time. Like the way that the future holds this information is that it will just not, not only learn how you're intent on buying a shirt that is red on a specific brand, it will start like. And it happens already. I don't know, go to some places that you find your clothes even sheen, something like that and it will start like showing all the choices or things that are related because that's, that's where the intent is. Like the way that you want to buy stuff. And it's I want a shirt and it's red and it's this brand. It doesn't matter if the model is any but it's the intent that you're trying to, to achieve. Right? And the algorithm will start even offering you outfits like all the way because it will, it will know what you're looking for even in real time is this is not like I already learned your history of purchasing. And it's not that. It's not that it will happen just in real time. Not only learning. And that's something that obviously will save tons of time of searching that people searching stuff online. And the way that other companies will actually take advantage of this.

Yeah, yeah, of course. Because that's the trade off. Right? Is tracking intent is creepy, right. And can be exploit but it's convenient for the user. Right? There's a, there's a convenient element that has to be balanced, right? Yes. If you don't have cookies, then you're not tracked. But then if you are in the website, you will have to fill that form again because I don't know who you are. Right. So there's a balance there, Right. As long as we have consent and we know the trade offs. But I think the trend will continue and we have to be mindful because if we don't lay your intent in our efforts for context, meaning, you know, social media platform displays, then we are in disadvantage against the companies that are using it. That's, that's the lesson, right? That the ones that are using it, they're being more effective and efficient with their spending than the ones that just target everybody that they deem fit for their offer. Right. So as much as possible, that you have access to it in an ethical way is important to take advantage. I think that that will be the, the lesson or the summary for today. So that's fantastic. As always, thank you for listening to this episode or watching it after it. Don't miss the next one. Join the Manchin Studio, right? Subscribe in your favorite channel or platform. We look forward to hearing from you in the next one. Thank you, Gabi.

Until next time. See you.

Yeah.