It’s Time to Do More With Your Intent Data

The pressure to prove your marketing efforts are driving value is on. With 41% of marketers feeling the squeeze to demonstrate value, having an ace in your marketing strategy’s back pocket is less a stroke of luck than a requirement to play the game. 

Leveraging intent data can be your ace. Not only do marketers who wield intent data say they’re more confident in proving the value of data-driven marketing programs (61% vs. 37%), they’re also more confident in delivering value with lead quality, refining their target audience, and content/campaign effectiveness. 

Despite the benefits, only 38% of marketers report using intent data. Clearly, intent data is a treasure trove of information just waiting to be plundered. As more sophisticated AI and machine learning (ML) technology becomes commonplace, intent data is only becoming more accurate and timely. 

Let’s examine what it is, why it matters, how to apply it, and how a data-savvy partner can help you increase your confidence and your results by applying intent data. 

What Intent Data Shows & Why it Matters

Intent data gives insights into customer behavior, preferences, and purchase intentions. It’s like a story drawn out from the amalgamation of a user’s online activity in order to predict what they’ll do next. And that’s not all. 

Quality intent data gives insights into a prospect’s research history, including specific competitors or products, and informs messaging strategies and marketing tactics to stay ahead of the competition. It also serves to define roles across marketing and sales functions, keeping both teams in sync when it comes to delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Awesome, right? But with so many other types of data out there, why does applying intent data matter so much? 

While it’s true that marketers who use data at all report a 3x increase in revenues and 78% increase in budgets, marketers using intent data see even better results.

Intent data is highly impactful if you want to drive more pipeline with more high quality leads:

  • 97% of marketers said intent data drives more pipeline than non-intent data leads. 
  • 94% of marketers said intent data leads are high quality.
  • 35% of marketers who experienced significant revenue growth in the last year said intent data had the biggest impact on driving leads.

Using intent data is an untapped opportunity that more and more marketers are planning to invest in — 63% to be exact. To stay ahead of the competition and compete in today’s economic climate, using intent data is table stakes. 

Apply Intent Data to These 4 Areas to Unlock Growth

This begs the question, “how and where can I use intent data effectively?”

We’re so glad you asked. Intent data provides an opportunity for sales and marketing teams to go beyond account identification and prioritization. The difference is using intent data to identify and align your buyer’s needs with customized and contextual messaging when they’re ready for it. 

Here are four different use cases to consider for your intent data:

  1. Demand Generation Campaigns: Intent data can be used to create personalized and targeted campaigns along the buyer journey.
  2. Lead Generation: Intent data can improve lead generation and customer acquisition efforts by accurately identifying potential customers who are actively searching and tailoring messaging to resonate with their specific needs. 
  3. Retention and Upselling: Intent data can be used to monitor signals indicating a customer’s likelihood to churn or add more products or services. This enhances customer retention and upselling, making it easier for marketers to strengthen customer loyalty and increase revenue passively.
  4. Content: Intent data is a gold mine for fueling content marketing strategies. Creating compelling content that speaks to your customer’s pain points increases visibility, improves trust, and attracts the right type of buyer in the first place.

How Inverta Can Help You Apply Intent Data ASAP

When it comes to choosing a data partner, marketers care twice as much about finding a partner who can deliver across a breadth of topics rather than delivering results in one area alone. Inverta is a well-rounded martech agency with the capabilities to help you find intent data as well as put it to use.

Learn More About Inverta

  • If you’re ready to invest in a player, coach, and trusted advisor who can move the needle for your demand generation campaigns, contact us here.
  • Get more insight to intent data Click here to access a unique asset experience that is a compilation of thought-leadership tactics, helpful tools, and useful reference guides

Give Marketers Back Time With Smart & Efficient Campaign Planning

If your marketing activities these days feel more like a giant game of whack-a-mole than a series of intentional strategic moves, you’re not alone. In an economic climate that’s so up in the air, it’s common for marketers to shift their focus to projects that need more attention in the moment over long-term strategic planning for the future.  

After all, without quick wins to remind leaders of their importance, marketing budgets can easily find themselves on the cutting board. Gaining and maintaining stakeholder support is a concern for 16% of marketers in 2023, demonstrating just how important it is for marketing to prove its worth in the midst of uncertain times. 

However, the frenetic focus on day-to-day activities leaves little room to think about long-term strategy. Without a way to implement smart and efficient campaign planning, building for the future can seem impossible without additional headcount. 

Let’s break down the most common challenges facing marketing campaigns today, as well as Inverta’s new Campaign in a Box solution that can launch demand generation campaigns in as quickly as eight weeks.

Challenges Facing Marketers in 2023

Marketers have their work cut out for them in 2023. With increasingly limited budgets, leaders are being forced to get creative and do more with less. Indeed, 17% of marketers anticipate pivoting on strategy as their biggest challenge this year. Making changes at the drop of a hat and doing them well is especially difficult when it comes to driving traffic and putting data to good use.

Driving Traffic, Pipeline, & ROI Is Becoming More Complex

  • A 2022 CMO survey found 80% of marketers see generating predictable pipelines as their top challenge in 2023. 
  • 19% of marketers say generating traffic and leads are the biggest challenge of 2023.
  • 20% of senior marketers say proving ROI on marketing expenses is one of their top challenges.

Siloed Data & Processes Are Limiting Productivity in 2023

  • 17% of senior marketers say they need more actionable insights from their data.
  • Focusing on retention in addition to upselling and expansion is becoming more important.
  • Too many tech stacks are built in silos, and focusing on meeting business needs rather than features will be the key to success this year.

The challenges facing marketers this year are many and varied. In order to succeed now and in the future, finding a way to address these challenges in a cost-effective and timely manner is essential.

How Inverta’s Campaign in a Box Can Help

Inverta’s team of marketing consultants have been in your shoes. We know what challenges are headed your way in 2023, and that’s why we asked ourselves, what if our clients had a turnkey solution at their disposal for their next demand generation campaign? 

That would be a pretty useful tactic to have in their toolkit.

The result? Inverta’s Campaign in a Box. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a tailored and customized campaign designed to boost your pipeline without exhausting your internal resources. 

What does it include? We’re so glad you asked.

  • Program Design: Account selection, personalized messaging, customized channels, and tactics
  • Technology Augmentation: Buyer intent surge data, keyword optimization, targeted display advertising, and more
  • Program Setup and Launch: Full-service execution of the program design
  • Monitoring and Optimization: Weekly assessment of campaign performance and engagement data
  • Performance Reporting: Visibility into engagement data and content intelligence, rolled up to socialize with stakeholders

Campaign in a Box can help if:

  • You need to generate revenue, quickly
  • Your campaigns aren’t benefiting from technology
  • You don’t have the data you need to optimize your demand strategy
  • You’re under pressure to demonstrate ROI
  • You need to stretch your budget
  • Your teams are feeling overwhelmed
  • You need a new way to inject life into your pipeline 

In short, if you’re feeling the heat of increasing your pipeline without the budget to up your resources, Campaign in a Box is a great solution to work smarter when it comes to campaign planning.

Launch a Demand Gen Campaign in Just 8 Weeks With Inverta

The best part about Campaign in a Box? It’s fast. In just eight weeks, we’ll have your campaign ready to launch. By six months, you’ll start seeing tangible results reflected in your pipeline.

Learn More About Inverta

  • If you’re ready to invest in a player, coach, and trusted advisor who can move the needle for your demand generation campaigns, Inverta’s new Campaign in a Box offering can deliver. Contact us here.
  • Learn more about our new campaign in a box solution – click here to access.

Why Demonstrating Marketing ROI Is So Important for CMOs

When times are tough, costs must be cut and spending must be justified. Yet, outcomes must continue, business as usual. This conundrum puts CMOs between a rock and a hard place. How do you deliver results with a tighter budget? More importantly, how can you tie those results to your budget effectively?

The majority of CMOs are turning to a little metric called return on investment (ROI). As macroeconomic uncertainty results in tighter budgets, marketing spend is under more scrutiny than usual. Every dollar spent needs to be correlated with a healthy return, and fast — 77% of CMOs say they’re under pressure to prove increased short-term ROI on marketing campaigns.  

In this blog, we’ll break down why ROI matters right now, what a focus on ROI changes about marketing activity, and how to start delivering ROI despite the current economic climate. 

CMOs Must Track & Prove ROI Faster Than Ever

In the face of a looming recession following several years of pandemic-related upheaval, a laser focus on ROI is a pretty natural response for company leadership. After all, when so much is uncertain, doubling down on the things that are working is a no-brainer. 

This certainly seems to be the case. Nearly 37% of marketers report that tracking ROI is becoming increasingly front-and-center, especially for larger organizations. Indeed, ROI has risen to the top of company leaders’ priority list. 

Marketers report the top metrics for their CEO, CFO, and board members are:

  • ROI: 48.4%
  • Delivering business outcomes: 39.9%
  • New customer acquisition: 35.8%

Couple this with shifting customer behavior due to inflation, and it’s never been trickier for CMOs to deliver on leaderships’ expectations. As recent Gartner research has identified, the burden to deliver ROI falls heavily on the CMO’s shoulders. 

“In order to meet the enterprise mandate of driving growth amid continued disruption, CMOs must act decisively to prioritize their investments and their strategy for the year ahead [2023],” said Ewan McIntyre, Gartner Marketing’s Chief of Research.

The Impact of an ROI Focus on Marketing Objectives & Outcomes

Prioritizing ROI impacts CMOs’ decisions around marketing activity and outcomes in a variety of ways. Beyond the pressure to deliver ROI in the short term, the current environment has led marketing leaders to worry about their strategy as a whole. 31% of marketing leaders are concerned they’ll have to curb creative campaigns, with an additional 30% worrying they’ll have to operate more reactively instead of proactively. 

This new focus on tying marketing activity to clear-cut returns can be new territory for many marketing activities, presenting challenges for marketers and CMOs alike. For example, when analyzing marketing campaign effectiveness, only 28.4% of marketers report measuring ROI to do so. In fact, 45.7% of marketers say their brand is “too focused” on ROI. 

Clearly, there is a large disconnect between the metrics the CEO and CFO want to see and what marketers believe is important. In bridging that gap, CMOs have their jobs cut out for them. 

In today’s climate, an ROI focus means CMOs have to more or less accomplish all of the following:

  • Work smarter with a tighter budget in order to deliver the same outcomes as before.
  • Help the CEO and CFO understand what ROI means for marketing, and help marketers understand what ROI means according to the CEO and CFO.
  • Ensure a focus on ROI doesn’t distract from impactful marketing activities where ROI is difficult to measure, in both the short and long term.

In short, doing all this with fewer resources is a tall order for CMOs and the organizations they lead.

How To Retain Budget, Maximize Marketing Activity, & Prove ROI

One of the most important things CMOs can do to successfully lead their marketing organizations through uncertain times is learning how to strengthen value calculations that prove marketing’s importance. Although it may seem counterintuitive, this often means moving beyond ROI as an end-all metric and making the case to evaluate budgets on various other inputs instead. 

For example, the ROI of your marketing tech stack can be difficult to tie directly to pipeline numbers, yet it’s essential to marketing activities that do influence revenue. Likewise, long-term strategies may not have an immediate ROI, but they do pay off with time. Striking the right balance between what’s essential for both now and later can be difficult on your own.

Learn More About Inverta

Inverta acts as a player, coach, and trusted advisor when it comes to helping CMOs measure and deliver ROI. Our new campaign-in-a-box solution can build short-term wins while we set up your organization for future success. 

  • Interested in how Inverta can help coach you through a campaign planning strategy? Contact us here.
  • Learn more about our new campaign in a box solution – click here to access.

Check out Conquering Barriers to Activation: The Strategic Chief Marketing Technologist