“We only want to target CTOs… at Financial companies… with 5000+ employees… in EMEA… and we need 1000 leads this quarter.”
I appreciate every company has an ideal customer profile but it’s important to realise the limitations of focusing all of your marketing efforts and budget towards the same group. The key issue being the majority of people who match your ideal customer profile are not interested in buying from your sales team, right now. Over time, the success of firmographic and demographic targeting has diminished.
The modern approach to lead generation is to say, “I want to engage with companies who are interested in making a purchase, regardless of their customer profile.” This enables companies to capture revenue from more businesses than before, whilst speeding up their sales cycle and improving the efficiency of their demand gen operation. Thanks to the abundance of intent data we now have at our fingertips, we can easily and seamlessly do this.
For those unfamiliar, intent data is a collection of behavioural datasets that highlights when a company is “in-market”. Whether that be from content consumption, research activity or install data, behaviours are tracked and AI can predict where a company is in the buying cycle. Marketers can now purchase redacted intent data (GDPR compliant) that tells you which companies are actively shopping for your solutions. This is excellent news!
There are a number of intent providers out there (not all are equal). Bombora, HG Insights and TechTarget’s Priority Engine are to name a few but there are many more. They all work in different ways and depending on your requirements, target audience and desired outcome, I would suggest one over the other. The thing they all have in common though, is that they provide account intelligence that helps guide our nurture process.
While these companies are fantastic at providing the data, it is still up to us to work this data into a marketing strategy and generate leads from it. Once we’ve obtained an intent list, we can run tailored ABM campaigns and nurture these accounts until they are ready for a demo or sales call. Although social, email and ads will improve brand recognition, content syndication is the go-to lead generation activity for many tech companies.
I’m Ryan Young, Managing Director at My Outreach, a lead generation company helping B2B tech marketers to generate demand and grow their customer base. We use a hyper-modern approach to lead generation utilising the latest technology available to the industry including intent data from a number of sources. If you need support with your demand gen goals, get in touch today and I’ll be happy to talk with you directly.
