Olivia Lipkin — October 17, 2019 In this era of hyper-personalization and ABM, having the right data can make or break your marketing efforts. That’s why we spend so much time talking about the value of third-party intent data — it’s your key to better account prioritizing, more effective content personalization, more efficient outreach, and more.
But there’s a problem. You do your research on intent data, find the right partner, and finally decide to make an investment. Then what? Having a collection of intent data in a silo within your marketing department isn’t enough.
The real key to success with intent insights is effective data integration. Once you overcome key challenges, you’ll be well on your way to unlocking the potential of intent data.
3 Challenges of Data Integration for Marketers
Finding ways to integrate data properly can make a significant difference in your business results. Aberdeen’s research into the topic found that companies using data integration solutions see 9% higher operating profits and 8% increases in the customer bases year-over-year.
But sometimes data integration isn’t as simple as adding another tool to your analytics capabilities. There are a few challenges that keep you from consistently gaining actionable insights from intent data, including:
- Combining Multiple Data Streams: Third-party intent insights should mesh with your existing first-party data to reveal critical behavioral insights. But your first-party data is coming from so many directions. Integrating it all, in addition to the third-party streams, proves challenging. External integration tools can quickly become overwhelmed by too many data streams, leading to data quality issues and inaccurate insights.
- Maintaining Data Quality: Without quality data, you’ll never uncover the behavioral insights necessary to drive successful ABM. High quality data is complete, timely, and accurate. When dealing with high volumes of unstructured data that update at different times, it’s difficult to maintain quality at scale.
- Mapping Data Effectively: As marketers, we want to focus on the business use cases of third-party intent data. However, beneath it all is a need for technical expertise and an ability to map data effectively between distinct models. Each new source you add becomes an integration challenge for the IT team. With so many projects competing for IT attention, it can be difficult to leverage data from providers that don’t streamline the integration process.
There’s no denying the technical complexity of data integration. In the marketing department, your goal should be to find third party intent data providers that make it as easy as possible to integrate their insights with all kinds of platforms — CRM, advertising, existing data lakes, etc.
It all comes down to the process of choosing your intent data provider wisely.
Finding the Right Partner for Data Integration
When you’re able to create a single source of information within your marketing department, your team can optimize processes by prioritizing activities that drive the best results. On the backend, you’ll need to integrate your ERP and CRM solutions as well as the other systems that fuel your marketing engine. But you’re less in control when it comes time to integrate intent data from a third-party provider.
Any time you’re searching for the right intent data provider, you need to keep data integration in mind. Your goal should be to give your team an on-demand dashboard, or, for more technical teams, an open API that enables intent data to be loaded directly into marketing automation, CRM, advertising platforms, data lakes, and more. Having a unified data model of intent categories and keywords, firmographic and technographic data, as well as contacts within a self-serve interface will all be critical to your marketing success
Ready to get the most out of third-party intent data to learn what your buyers are really doing? Check out our Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data report to find out how.
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