While intent data is incredibly useful for lead scoring, account prioritization, and more targeted marketing campaigns, another powerful use case is to leverage it to reveal market trends, solutions and competitors your target accounts are researching, and your competitors' strategies. Intent data, gleaned from online activities like keyword searches, content downloads, and website visits, provides invaluable insights into what B2B companies are interested in and considering right now.
Imagine knowing when your target accounts are researching one of your competitors, understanding their top needs and priorities, and running interference with the right messaging, content, and engagement tactics when they are most likely to engage. And that’s just one way to leverage your intent-driven intelligence.
With the right approach, intent data can unlock a powerful competitive advantage, enabling you to outmaneuver your competitors and win in this competitive market.
So exactly how can you accomplish this with intent data? Let's get into it.
How to Leverage Intent Data for Market & Competitive Intelligence:
Intent data can be an effective tool to gather insights that help you uncover what’s trending across your industry, what buyers are interested in, and opportunities to outmaneuver the competition. Here’s how you can leverage intent data to achieve this:
1. Identify Emerging Trends:
a. Analyze intent data across your industry to detect early signals of new pain points, interests, and solution preferences.
i. By tracking keyword surges and content spikes, you can identify trending topics before they hit the mainstream, allowing you to adapt your offerings and messaging accordingly.
2. Track Competitor Strategies:
a. Monitor the topics and solutions your competitors are actively promoting by analyzing the content and messaging your target accounts are consuming across the web.
i. This reveals their areas of focus, allowing you to anticipate their moves and tailor your own messaging to stand out.
3. Uncover Market Gaps
a. See what topics and solutions your competitors aren't addressing.
i. Analyzing competitor blind spots through a lack of intent signals around specific topics or keywords can reveal lucrative opportunities for your own differentiation and messaging.
4. Identify In-Market Accounts
a. Use intent data to pinpoint companies actively researching your competitors and what topics or keywords they are researching.
i. This allows you to intercept your competitors with targeted messaging around each account’s unique buying needs and research behaviors, giving you a competitive edge and increasing your chances of conversion.
5. Monitor Customer Churn Risk
a. Track which customers are researching your competitors to identify accounts at risk of churning.
i. If you engage quickly enough, you can uncover the reasons why the customer is dissatisfied and tailor your talk track to highlight why your solution is better than the alternative.
Best Practices for Intent-Driven Competitive Intelligence:
Prioritize Data Quality
Ensure the accuracy and reliability of your data sources. Partner with reputable intent data providers and leverage multiple third-party sources, as well as your own first-party website and marketing data, for a holistic view of your audience's online activities.
Focus on Your Top Competitors
Monitoring online activities across too many competitors can get overwhelming. Start with your top competitors (3-5) and once you master your competitive intelligence strategy, you can expand the competitor list from there.
Leverage Actionable Insights
Because intent data can be very nuanced, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details. Having a dedicated analysis team or intent data partner that can quickly translate raw intent data into actionable insights will allow you to focus on the most important takeaways and quickly take action across your marketing, sales, customer success, and product development teams.
Break Down Departmental Silos
Share intent data insights with marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams to create a unified front, drive a consistent buyer experience, and maximize the impact of your intent data strategy.
By harnessing the power of intent data, B2B businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their target accounts and competitors, paving the way for smarter strategies, informed decisions, and a stronger competitive advantage.
Whether you are new to intent data or are already an avid user, if you are ready to unlock the secrets of your buyers' minds and take your company strategy to the next level, leveraging intent data to gather market and competitor insights is a great place to start.
