5.6 Billion Searches per Day
That's SEO Tribunal's estimate of 2019 activity on Google. How many additional are on Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc.?
So of course you're serious about your SEO. Research, content creation, blog posts, optimization tweaks, inbound link building — you're consistently working on all the important steps from basic through sophisticated. And you track the results.
Let me discourage you for a moment though. You're doing all the hard work to rank for terms organically (get to 1 – 3 on Google) and boost your click-through rate (CTR) to a superb level for organic terms (say 30%.) Yet only a small portion of the market is active, and of those only a portion will use the terms you're optimized around. So let's say that perhaps 5 – 10% of the active market finds your site organically.
But that's okay because you don't need every buyer, just those that are a good fit. You've got great content that engages them once they arrive on your site, and you carefully follow best practices for lead conversion. So you're probably converting 5% of your B2B visitors into known leads through forms, conversational marketing and other approaches.
Here comes the discouraging part.
That means you are active with 0.25 to 0.5% of the active buyers.
It might be okay to pitch your board on growth in traffic and leads, but would you want to share that number with them?
I didn't think so.
That's where intent data can supplement your hard and effective work on organic SEO.
Intent Data: The Other 2 Billion Websites (Including Competitors')
WebsiteHostingRating.com estimates that there are 1.94 billion websites in early 2019.
Some of those feature information that's specifically relevant to your audience. These include websites — competitors', forums, events, etc. — into which you have no insight, but where activity and engagement would be as important a signal as a lead conversion on your own.
That's the potential power of 3rd party intent data if it's aggregated from broad activity (vs. from limited publishing co-ops, through Bidstream or from Add-This activity.) Not sure about what data sources mean or how to compare them? Check out our extensive guide to buying and using intent data available here.
Leveraging Insights with 3rd Party Intent Data
What would you do if you knew that a target account was engaged with content specifically focused on the problem that your product/service solves?
That's a silly question, right? You'd start to nurture them with relevant information and provide details to your sales development folks to reach out.
That's precisely the opportunity with the right kind of 3rd party intent data. That opportunity, however, depends on having intent data that provides the detail and granularity necessary to personalize at scale.
Topics vs. A Detailed Algorithm
3rd party intent data is often structured around topics. It's easy to pick a couple, or many, and the flow of data starts. But what's behind a "topic"? What's the taxonomy - what key terms does the topic's developer think are relevant or irrelevant? What social signals are pertinent - does a Twitter follow by the nephew of a target account's VP or Regulation help you? What events or thought leader/influencers are feeding results?
Of course you don't know - you just have tons of data...and in today's world that must be a good thing, right?
Actually, no.
In order to personalize at scale you need context. Is the signal a strong one, or an additional data point to feed your broad analysis? Where is the prospect in their buying journey? What problem are they trying to solve? That context isn't possible to extract when a lead is simply a topic hit - but that's exactly what a custom algorithm delivers.
Knowing which person is at which stage in their buying journey, allows you to interact with them - personally and at scale.
Engage some of the other 99.5%
You know how to nurture someone that converts on your site - but the math doesn't lie. There are many others out there that would really appreciate your insights and assistance as they try to improve their business. No matter how effective or massive your organic reach is, you'll never attract them all to your content.
Contact Level™ Intent Data provides the breadth (amazing reach) and granularity (incredible context) to help you identify many of those who'd wish they'd engaged with you earlier.
Here's your chance to help them!
