Acquiring qualified, relevant contacts is an essential element of an effective growth marketing strategy. It’s also often easier said than done.
The hard part isn’t knowing who to target, what messaging to use, or even how to find them—these are things that can be determined largely through research, planning, and experimentation. The true challenge lies in finding the right contacts at the right time.
According to Gartner research, "the average enterprise B2B buying group consists of five to 11 stakeholders, who represent an average of five distinct business functions."
On top of identifying these key contacts, there is also their stage in the buying process to consider. Only 20% of prospects are in the market for a given solution in a given year; 5% in a given quarter.
Homing in on key prospects that are both in the market for a solution AND involved in the buying process can feel a little like searching for a needle in a haystack.
It’s no wonder why 75% of marketers admit they can’t find the right contacts at companies matching target profiles.
To help organizations overcome this daunting challenge, many demand generation vendors are adopting cutting-edge technology like intent data and AI to enhance their services. How do these new-age vendors leverage such technology to find high-quality contacts and what role should they play in your overall demand generation strategy? Let’s dive in and find out.
Intent and AI: Revolutionizing Demand Generation Services
Traditional demand generation vendors fall short
For many sales and marketing teams, traditional demand generation vendors have a reputation for prioritizing quantity over quality. And while they may deliver on lead goals, the results don’t necessarily translate to ROI.
AI and data-driven demand partners provide a competitive edge
By leveraging transformative technology like AI, intent data, and advancements in data modeling and analytics, many vendors are adopting a more data-driven approach to demand generation. Here are some ways modern demand partners use data and automation to focus on quality over quantity:
- ✅ Information accuracy: AI-assisted algorithms regularly analyze large volumes of data from various first and third-party sources like social media and websites to track changes to contact information and maintain updated databases.
- ✅ Personalization: With access to more information such as behavioral insights with intent data, AI systems can tailor content and messaging to optimize relevancy amongst target prospects and improve overall engagement.
- ✅ Data compliance: Automation enables vendors to adopt opt-in processes that comply with data and privacy regulations like GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CCPA. Maintaining compliance is not only crucial to business integrity, but it also improves the overall customer experience for partner clients and end users alike.
- ✅ Enhanced analytics: AI can ingest more data to provide deeper insights into the performance of demand generation campaigns and optimize accordingly. AI can also be used to predict prospects more likely to convert, allowing for better prioritization and resource allocation.
The Benefits of Collaborating with a Data-Driven Demand Partner
There are many tried-and-true lead prospecting and generation tactics leveraged by B2B sales and marketing teams across industries. Here are some of the most common tactics:
- Social media and web research
- In-person and virtual events
- GTM platforms
- ABM platforms
- Purchased cold lists
- Inbound marketing and free trials Segment leads for personalization
With the right processes in place, every one of these tactics (except for purchased cold lists) can prove impactful to your overall contact acquisition strategy. However, each is not without its disadvantages and inefficiencies, including but not limited to:
- Manual and time-consuming processes
- Irrelevant prospects
- Outdated information
- Resource-intensive efforts
- Hard to track metrics
- Slow returns
That’s where demand partners come into play. Their data-driven services can fill in the gaps left by these shortcomings to help surface the right contacts at the right time. The outcome is a more efficient overall contact acquisition strategy.
Here are five ways teams benefit from collaborating with a demand partner:
- Time savings: Perhaps the greatest benefit of all. Using AI and intent data, demand partners can interpret behavioral insights and analyze large volumes of data to quickly and accurately identify relevant contacts, freeing up Sales teams to focus on engaging prospects instead of manually searching for them. AI-powered automation overseen by demand partners also affords Sales and Marketing teams more time to allocate toward internal strategic initiatives like pipeline acceleration.
- Expanded reach: Demand partners have expansive databases that are regularly maintained with the help of AI and intent data. Teams can coordinate with demand partners to run highly targeted programs that expand the reach of their content and messaging. Demand partners can also create custom ABM and lookalike audiences, which can identify new potential customers and boost brand awareness amongst a previously untapped market of relevant contacts.
- Richer contextual insights: Leveraging intent and AI, demand partners can gain specific insights into the needs and interests of an individual or organization, collected from a variety of sources including website traffic, social media activity, and email behavior. These insights can be used to optimize campaigns for better results or surface useful information Sales and Marketers can incorporate into their follow-up activities and conversations.
- More engaging experiences: Using demographic and behavioral insights, AI can identify an individual’s needs and preferences—interests, journey stage, pain points, etc. From there, content and messaging can be tailored accordingly. Personalization will not only lead to better engagement metrics, but it will also offer contacts a more relevant and value-driven user experience.
- Actionable analysis: Demand partners can use AI to track the performance of their campaigns and make optimizations as they go. For example, if an asset is underperforming for a particular audience, it can be replaced with a better-performing one. After a campaign is complete, results can be analyzed, and recommendations can be made for future programs. For example, which content types perform best.
Demand partners play a crucial role in the modern lead acquisition landscape, helping B2B teams find quality leads and improve the overall efficiency of their lead acquisition strategies. Leveraging data-driven practices and transformative technology like AI and intent data, demand partners can help teams identify relevant contacts faster, target them with personalized messaging, and measure the performance of their campaigns with greater precision.
DemandSkill is one such partner for your B2B demand generation needs. Our services are powered by an innovative platform that seamlessly integrates AI, intent, and first-party data to execute targeted lead acquisition programs tailored to your ICP and funnel goals. Each program is overseen by a dedicated in-house expert and leads undergo multi-step QA and verification processes before delivery. Get in touch with us today if you’d like to learn more about how we help teams attain their lead goals.