It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or how big your company is. Every business adheres to one fundamental principle — that your job is to get people to know, like, and trust you.
But becoming known, liked, and trusted is easier said than done. It’s not about gaming a lead generation system or finding some magic bullet marketing tactic. It’s about forging connections with your target audience and enabling sales to close deals.
Your key to gaining a competitive advantage is building these relationships more efficiently. And with intent data infused into your funnel, you’ll have a foundation of knowledge that will help you become known, liked, and trusted and boost sales.
Become Known: Finding Your Target Audience
Becoming known has always been about visibility. You can’t build relationships with your target audience if they have no idea who you are. But if you want to forge better relationships and drive B2B sales, you can’t focus solely on increasing your visibility to target customers.
Your first step should be identifying your ideal target audience. Visibility means nothing if you’re only known to prospects that would never buy from you. This is why intent data is so important to becoming known.
Intent data gives you the information necessary to go beyond high-level, theoretical buyer personas. Instead, you’ll have insights into the specific organizations, teams, and contacts that are looking to purchase solutions like yours. And with that data, you can start to create a more strategic plan for becoming known in your market.
Narrowing your attention to those prospects that show purchase intent will help you spend marketing resources more efficiently as you increase visibility for your brand, products, and services. And that, in turn, makes it easier to get prospects to like you.
Become Liked: Crafting Relevant Messages
Once you have a strategy for getting in front of the right prospects, you need to know what you actually want to put in front of them. That means creating content and crafting messages that will get them to like you.
This has always been the promise of content marketing. With the right approach, you could create relevant messages to build an audience that truly likes you. But your B2B buyers are now inundated with content. There’s so much noise that you can’t just expect generic content to get valuable B2B prospects to like you.
Instead, you need to create hyper-relevant content that goes beyond personalization. Because you narrowed your focus to prospects showing purchase intent, it’s easier to create relevant content for specific contacts and accounts. The more relevant you can make your content (both in terms of challenges discussed and specific stages of the buyer’s journey), the more your audience will like your brand.
Intent data is the missing link in content marketing that can take you from generic content to hyper-relevant messaging. Instead of guessing at what your target prospects might want/need to see, you’ll have deep insight into the content they engage with most and which stage of the buyer’s journey they’re at.
Creating relevant content and getting target prospects to like you is a strong step forward in getting them to trust you. But to build real trust in the relationship, you need more than just a relevant piece of content.
Become Trusted: Enabling Consistency at Every Stage
The real difference maker in the “known, liked, trusted” principle is building trust with your target customers. Brands that can build trusting relationships with B2B buyers are the ones that will continually win new business and spark loyalty as markets change rapidly.
Trust is all about consistency. It’s great that you created a piece of relevant content that got a prospect to like you at the top of the funnel. But how will the relationship be handled in the middle of the funnel or during a handoff to sales? Your ability to work closely with sales and maximize the effectiveness of sales enablement will dictate how well you can build trust with customers.
Intent data doesn’t directly increase trust. However, working with the right intent data provider will ensure you have the most actionable insights possible at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Whether a target prospect is just starting to research a problem or actively looking for a solution to purchase, you should be able to act quickly to deliver relevant messaging and helpful service. Intent gives you the depth of information necessary to make that possible.
But not all intent data is created equal. If you invest in the wrong dataset, you risk trying to build relationships with false information. And even if you deploy all the right marketing tactics, poor information will hurt your ability to become known, liked, and trusted.
If you want to learn more about finding the right intent data to become known, liked, and trusted, download our free report, Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data.
