How to Use B2B Engagement Data to Optimize Your Revenue

Have you ever thought of leveraging B2B engagement data or first-party intent data to maximize your business bottom lines? Or have you done everything right including AB testing and optimizing your campaigns and allocating funds for search, ads, and partner promotion, and are yet struggling to accomplish your sales targets?

With B2B engagement or first party intent insights, you can amass important insights about your customers and can better target your prospects to serve their business interests. Marketers must be very respectful of people's time and privacy and should adopt data-compliant manners to capture and leverage the prospects' personal data for marketing.

Here are four tactics to use B2B engagement or first party intent insights to optimize your revenue goals:

1. Leverage Data

When determining the best way to tell your story to a B2B prospect, there are three kinds of data to consider:

• User-Provided – Basic information such as name, physical address, email address, telephone number, and company details can be tracked by the marketers as and when applicable.
• Supplementary – This data involves information that can be inferred from data service providers whether it’s requested directly or researched. This can include country, industry, annual revenue, and even more in some cases depending upon the sophistication of the service purchased.
• Qualifying – Data that infers readiness is often the most critical and often overlooked aspect of understanding your prospects. Many things need to be considered in such a situation:

1. Does the prospect need this and
2. If the prospect can afford this

Timings and authority are significant factors, and these and many other details can be identified as the dialogue progresses.

Customer Journey

B2B marketers not only need to have an in-depth understanding of what they are doing, but they also need to make their prospects understand it. A single tactic or a piece of content is very unlikely to help your prospect make a buying decision. Additionally, a single engagement doesn't deliver the necessary data to determine qualification. Strategists must align a content path with different media and varying levels of engagements to gauge the level of personal investment that a B2B prospect is willing to make.

Prospects investing time into multiple pieces of content indicate heightened interest as well as need. As the pathway is established, it becomes critical for marketers to layer in the data elements referenced above to build their understanding of the prospect as a potential B2B customer.

3. Tracking

The third most impactful way to use first-party intent data is to identify qualified prospects. Marketers must focus on measuring progress, and that begins with the tracking of the effectiveness of every tactic, as well as through the marketing and sales funnels.

In isolation, each step through the funnel requires a unique set of metrics to determine the tactics that are having the greatest impact. Together, tracking elements through each step in the customers' funnel journeys allows marketers to gain visibility into their performances. Some key elements and transition points include:

1. Including ads with custom links that contain Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) and related data elements to pass through to identify how users arrived at your site and other related elements of tactics that resulted in the visit
2. Sites from where B2B prospects self-identify and the key elements are captured from the tracked links to information sources and other origination elements need to be identified.
3. Once such sites have been identified, the data elements described above can let you know all about the story of the prospect and how you can benefit from their assistance
4. Engagement activity associated with the prospect can be tracked and put to play
5. Pipeline progression can be measured as the activities of several campaigns are tracked & the key advancements in the prospect progression can be attributed to the corresponding activities to determine the points of impact and advancement.

Reporting or Dashboards

Visualizing the metrics at each step of the customers’ journeys allows marketers to determine if the individual elements are successful.

The entire task of utilizing data to convert more B2B prospects into customers involves a lot of iteration and monitoring to ensure that the plans are principled and the desired outcomes are being achieved at every level. The idea of baby steps is important to keep in mind. To start with everything begins with a single report and as marketers monitor their strategy at each level, every report speaks of your marketing & advertising performance and of the progression to your goals.

Wrap Up

Utilizing B2B engagement or first party intent insights allows marketers to narrate an accurate story so that they can confidently evaluate their success and determine the impact of their marketing and advertising efforts on customers' journeys. As marketers gain confidence in metrics at each level, the progression and success of their overall effort become clearer and more reliable, resulting in actionable analytics that inspires key decisions on the appropriate use of investment.

Valasys Media is a pioneer B2B Media publishing company, rigorously helping marketers execute campaigns that generate qualified leads and optimize audience engagement. Our services: Lead Management, Data Solutions, Sales Pipeline Management, and Business Intelligence Solutions are focused on driving your brand and revenue growth through integrated insights to help you maximize the revenue from your sales pipelines.

Contact us to create actionable and data-driven campaigns wherein you can continuously measure your marketing & advertising outcomes and can continuously tweak and optimize them.