The most important aspect of intent-based marketing is to deeply understand the customer and their needs, which are sometimes counter-intuitive, especially in the B2B space.
Thankfully, the point isn’t to guess — and there are tools to help marketers mine their customers’ needs.
Below are a few intent-driven marketing tools for B2B companies.
Teamwork
No, we don’t mean literal cooperation between team members, but that never hurts! Project management software programs keep teams informed and projects on track. Solutions like Teamwork allow teams to create and manage tasks, send messages and feedback, and prioritize work, according to Jordan Buning, President of ddm marketing + communications.
“It ensures all communication about a project lives in one place which saves time and keeps everyone informed of the current project status. No more emails asking where a project stands or who is responsible for the next task.
“Projects delivered on time result in happy clients, and happy clients are more likely to engage with your company for additional services. It’s a win for client teams and a win for sales.”
Hubspot
There’s no greater tool for marketing and sales teams than a CRM. And Hubspot offers affordable options for SMBs. The ability to track leads, prospects, and current clients is critical for optimizing processes and increasing sales, Buning says.
With a CRM, sales teams can see how a lead came in, who they’ve engaged with, whether they’ve consumed content, and where they are at in their buyer’s journey.
“This prevents redundancy and ensures leads aren’t bombarded with information they’ve already received.
“Hubspot integrates with many website analytics and social media platforms too. It tracks if leads come from your website contact forms or social media ads and records that for attribution purposes.
“As a bonus, businesses can also use Hubspot to send and track email marketing campaigns and create landing pages. It’s one tool that serves countless purposes for marketing and sales teams.”
Phil Wheaton, Chief Marketing Officer at Copia Wealth Studios, says, “There are a lot of alternatives to HubSpot, but for us, their ‘all in’ approach helps us stay organized and on task. HubSpot helps us look for positive and negative signals across all marketing channels, but it doesn’t intervene actively like some other tools.”
MonkeyLearn
“We feed MonkeyLearn all our customer feedback from people using our products and from demos and interviews we conduct,” Wheaton says.
“The outputs help us better understand the intent of our customers at each stage of the process. We then use that data to influence and tweak our materials.”
6Sense
“I think it’s easy to get lost in a sea of tools looking for a silver bullet, but in practice, intent-driven marketing is just doing good marketing,” Wheaton says.
“What I like about 6Sense is that they aren’t selling silver bullets. They are selling actionable insights and a keen focus on signal amplification so you can do the actual work of a modern marketer more effectively.”
Jobs-to-be-done-Canvas
Wheaton says this tool gets you in your clients’ headspace and breaks down all the areas where a task might fail or require assistance. From there, you can create marketing artifacts that are timely and relevant.