Capture Unidentified Demand on Your Website

The challenge every marketing leader faces is finding a way to scale lead-gen campaigns without sacrificing the quality of those leads. You make constant tradeoffs to balance volume and quality because you can’t increase your budget.

Thankfully, there is a way to achieve volume and quality without going over budget. You can do this by capturing unidentified demand.

What is unidentified demand?
It’s website visitors who are prospects, show buying intent and are a good fit for your business. They just didn’t convert via a contact form yet.

A buyer not raising their hand to talk to you shouldn’t be ruled out as a prospective buyer.

There could be a number of reasons why they didn’t convert. For example, they might be interested in your solution but they need to discuss the potential partnership with all roles in the buying group before reaching out to sales.

Your unidentified website visitors present a fantastic opportunity to capture more qualified leads, in turn increasing revenue.

Your pipeline should be filled with high quality leads. So the first aspect of capturing more of them is understanding what a good quality lead looks like. That’s where your ideal customer profile comes in.

How to Define Your Ideal Customer Profile

It’s likely you’ve heard the term ‘ideal customer profile’ but let’s recap on what this means to ensure we’re on the same page.

A company-level ICP should not be confused with buyer personas who represent the individual buyers within the company. An ICP traditionally comes from the account-based marketing space. It allows you to focus on selling to targeted accounts that fit your organization. When it’s done correctly, it helps you identify the high value leads that will become long-term customers.

It’s important to note that when defining your ICP you should gather various stakeholders within the business to make sure there’s alignment on what the perfect customer looks like.

It may seem obvious what an ideal customer is to you but different people in different roles will have different views.

For example, your CFO might say it’s someone with a high customer lifetime value.

A customer service rep might say it’s someone who employs tech-savvy people who don’t need constant technological support.

Marketing and Sales might think the perfect customer is one that has a budget to buy within the next month.

All these perspectives are valid and should be considered when defining your ICP.

To start with, make a list of your top 10 customers as a team.

Now look for similarities.

You can use this list of questions to get started on your ICP:

By analyzing these similarities and creating a general profile of your best accounts, sales and marketing teams can develop measurable strategies that convert these top buyers and increase revenue potential.

Once you’ve evaluated the similarities your best customers have, you need to develop a company-fit model to see how well an account aligns with your ICP.

You can use this rating system to prioritize your sales resources and tactics, as well as identify future target companies.

Here’s an example of the company-fit model:

This rating system means you’re equipped to qualify inbound leads - prospects that have expressed interest in your products and services - to determine how you follow up with them and how they progress in the sales cycle.

It also provides strategic direction and prioritization for your outbound sales team. Those dream companies will become the priority when it comes to prospecting. It also enables your SDRs to use their time wisely.

Use Intent Data to Capture Demand

Intent data can be used to help you drive revenue growth.

For marketers, intent data enables you to gain a deeper insight into your potential buyers’ needs which in turn allows you to deliver more targeted customer experiences.

Intent Data Definition

The basic definition of B2B intent data is that it is a collection of information about the behaviour of a particular company.

Intent data can be split into two different types.

Internal intent data or first-party intent data

This type of intent data derives from the activity your company captures directly via its website, marketing automation platform or CRM software. First-party intent data allows you to uncover company information and buying signals based on purchase decision information. This typically includes:

External intent data or third-party data

This type of intent data is gathered by publisher networks collected from offsite destinations. Third-party intent data is useful for:

First-party intent data can be used for:

→ Advanced lead prioritization.

First-party intent data allows you to rank leads into several different tiers based on their activity on site and ICP match. By using intent data in this way, you’re able to easily distinguish prospects with the rating system mentioned above as well as understand how much buying intent they have based on which pages they visited on site i.e. product/service page views, pricing page views.

→ Automatic outreach sequences.

First-party intent data can also help you predict where a prospect will be at a later point in time. This information can then be sent to your CRM or marketing automation system to trigger campaigns.

→ Campaign performance measurement.

First-party intent data can provide you with performance indicators on the campaigns you’re running, enabling you to understand which campaigns are driving engagement and which ones are a waste of resources.

→ Personalized sales and marketing interactions.

B2B marketers and salespeople can use first-party intent data to discover accounts that are researching topics on your website i.e. your blog. You can use this to create more effective, personalized marketing and sales conversations to drive engagement.

Third-party intent data can be used for:

→ Targeted advertising.

Third-party intent data provides information that B2B marketers can use to improve the accuracy of targeted ad campaigns.

By including intent data in your technology stack, you’re solving a long-standing marketing issue - how to reach out to the right prospect at the right time, with the right message.

What’s more, intent data enables you to recognise buying indicators before prospects have made themselves known to you. This means you can identify where a prospect is in the buyer journey.

Of course, not all intent data is equal. Certain data will show low buying intent, for example website visitors reading a blog might just be looking for education.

On the other hand, high intent data will show prospects visiting your pricing or product pages. Having a good understanding of this determines how you use intent data for lead scoring.

When you’re prioritizing leads to pass onto your sales team, be sure to define what high buying intent looks like.

In the next chapter, we’ll show you how to use intent data to identify qualified leads on your website.