B2B marketing and sales are complex, and the challenges multiply for technology vendors in highly specialized niche markets where the list of target accounts is small (e.g., under 50) and the sale cycle is lengthy.
How can you expand your reach and strengthen existing relationships to build brand awareness, uncover hidden opportunities, generate more qualified leads, re-engage known contacts, increase your marketing-generated pipeline, and drive demo requests?
Why Is Marketing to a Specialized, Niche B2B Audience So Challenging?
The small target accounts list means an even smaller subset is in-market. Traditional broad-reaching strategies often result in wasted resources and the complex buying group dynamics increase the difficulty of identifying and reaching the right decision-makers at the right time.
The lengthy and non-linear sales cycles make it harder for sales teams to recognize shifts in buying stages to perform outreach promptly. These long sales cycles may strain available resources, while the lack of timely insights may hinder the ability to allocate resources to accounts most likely to convert.
How Intent Data Helps B2B Marketers Target Niche Audiences
Intent data helps B2B marketers expand their target account lists and identify in-market accounts to focus their resources. Intent-activated content syndication enables you to reach target audiences across trusted platforms to drive interest with tailored content. Meanwhile, intent-activated ad solutions reinforce messaging to keep prospects engaged throughout a long sales cycle.
Sales teams may use intent signals to pinpoint shifts in buying stages and deliver a timely, personalized experience. AI analytics and automated insights flag accounts showing purchase intent to minimize manual efforts, so sellers can promptly engage the right contact at the right moment to shorten the sales cycle.
How to Leverage Intent Data to Drive Engagement and Sales
Identifying the right accounts and contacts is just the first step. B2B marketers must meet them where they are, capture their attention, nurture relationships, and progress them through the buyer journey. Here’s how to leverage intent data and signal-based marketing to reach influential stakeholders in each account:
Step 1: Create an Intent Model
Create a target account list and identify buying group personas. Then, let Intentsify’s AI algorithm interpret and weigh topics and keywords specific to your solution, organizing target accounts by research stage.
Step 2: Execute Content Syndication
Generate net new leads from the target account list and retarget and re-engage existing contacts to attract more high-quality leads through intent-activated content syndication. The data-driven approach delivers the right content to the right people based on their buyer journey stages.
You may need to create multiple pieces of content to sustain the conversation through the customer lifecycle. For example, one asset may target top-of-funnel interest to educate the audience, and another may serve lower-funnel interest with insights from an independent research company to validate your solution’s value.
Step 3: Complement Content with Display Ads
Intent-activated display ads increase brand awareness among contacts on your target account lists. They help convert strategic accounts, reach a global audience, and entice the audience to take the next step (e.g., request a demo). In markets with robust analytics capabilities, you may monitor the campaigns with high granularity and allocate your budget strategically to reach the highest-value accounts.
How Accelya Grew Its Account List and Reached the Right Audience with Intentsify
Accelya, a software provider for the airline industry, used Intentsify to help them launch a new product for smaller airlines in a sector with around 500 companies.
Using Intentsify’s AI-driven intent models and intent-activated ad solution, Accelya uncovered new contacts and grew its target account list from 37 to 100. It also identified the best keywords to reach high-quality leads and targeted influencers in high-value accounts to generate a high-quality contact list.
Additionally, our data-driven approach and granular analytics helped the Accelya team understand their campaigns’ impacts across regions, gaining in-depth insights about each account and persona to tailor the messaging. They also reactivated and re-engaged existing contacts, resulting in more demo requests.
Want to see how Accelya grew its target account list and amplified its messaging to reach more high-quality prospects? Read the case study for an insider look at intent data in action.
