What Is Audience Data and How Does It Enhance Marketing?

A marketing strategy driven by audience data is essential for any B2B organization, and more businesses are starting to take notice. According to McKinsey, 75% of B2B businesses believe that digital methods for selling and reaching out to new customers are as effective, if not more effective, than traditional sales or marketing models. 

This growth isn’t a rare occurrence spurred on by the pandemic. Many experts, in fact, believe that digital channels of B2B marketing are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Gartner found that 80% of B2B client interactions will occur through digital means by 2025. 

With this increase in digital client interactions, there is plenty of knowledge to glean for many companies, whether it’s how effective your budget is used for certain marketing methods or understanding the relevance of data in the B2B customer journey. 

By utilizing audience data to build your marketing strategy, you can also help nurture leads more efficiently with the help of audience data enrichment and data management. 

This article will explore ways businesses can use audience data to improve their B2B marketing with a list of our top five audience data providers. 

What Is Audience Data?

Audience data is the information you collect about potential and current customers. You can learn a lot about the people who respond to your ads, buy your products, or visit your websites and other online platforms with the right tools and expertise. 

To fully incorporate audience data into your business’s model, you’ll need to keep yourself up-to-date on the proper data collection protocols and the various audience data types. 

What Are Some Audience Data Types?

Audience data comes in all shapes and sizes. You can collect so much information about your customers that will undoubtedly continue to evolve. The following audience data types can be influential in your B2B marketing: 

Intent data 

Intent data is behavioral information about how your audience consumes web content. In other words, it shows you how your audience navigates your website and its content, giving you insight into their intent. 

For example, if a potential customer visits your product page frequently, their intent could be to make a purchase soon. Or if a visitor reads your blog faithfully, their intent could be to learn more about your brand and expertise. 

You can use intent data to identify what each person is most likely trying to do. Then, armed with that information, you can adjust your campaign tactics, content, and follow-up strategies to get them to take that action. 

Interest data

Interest data is simply information on your audience’s interests. You discover their long- and short-term interests by keeping up with how they navigate the online world, their purchases, and what they do with your brand. 

You can use interest data to help develop a content strategy that will resonate with your audience and prompt them to close a deal with you when the time is right. 

Demographic data

Demographic information is one of the most common audience data types. It’s the collection of socioeconomic information, as well as data regarding age, gender, ethnicity, culture, income, education level, employment status, marital status, and place of residence.  

Demographic data can be used to personalize your B2B marketing campaigns. Tailoring your campaigns to certain individuals will help build trust and further persuade them to close a deal. 

Psychographic data

Psychographic data can also be used to enhance B2B marketing. It details your audience's values, attitudes, and personality traits. It also gives insights into how someone views the world and their motivations for taking specific actions. 

This data can be beneficial in crafting buyer personas. You can weigh your marketing materials against these personas to see if they’ll resonate with your ideal customers. 

Firmographic data

Firmographic data is critical in B2B marketing as it’s the information used to categorize companies. For example, you collect data on the geographic location of the business, how many clients it has, what kind of company it is, its industry, its technological setup, and so forth. 

Your marketing efforts are directed at businesses, not consumers. So, it’s essential to learn about the company and the individuals running it to craft marketing content that will generate results. 

The Importance of Audience Data for B2B Marketing

Audience data is important for B2B marketing mainly because it helps you develop a deeper understanding of your current and potential customers.

When you comprehend the ins and outs of your B2B audience data, you can produce results in multiple ways: 

• Expand your customer base 
• Create detailed buyer personas for precise targeting
• Make productive adjustments to your sales funnels
• Get a deeper understanding of the B2B buyer’s journey 
• Optimize your campaigns and spend your marketing budget wisely 
• Use audience data segmentation to create custom segments for your campaigns
• Create valuable inbound content that brings customers along in their buyer’s journey 
• Continuously uncover insights into your audience’s ever-changing patterns and behaviors 
• Personalize the customer experience with marketing messages tailored to individuals 

Audience data is also critical for data enrichment. This is the process of enhancing the information you’ve already collected about your audience through your data analytics tools, cookies, and other data collection tactics. 

By pairing your first-party audience data with third-party data, you can get a well-rounded picture of your audience and take your marketing to the next level. 

Top 5 Audience Data Providers

When it comes to audience data providers, there are many of them on the market. Here’s a list of the top five performers and a brief overview of what they can do data-wise for your business:

1. CIENCE GO Data

Pricing: By request
Free Trial: Not available
CRM Integration: Available
Browser Extension: Not available

CIENCE GO Data is a sales intelligence platform. It accesses over 200 million lead records from all industries to provide intelligent business contacts and audience data analysis. CIENCE helps you configure audiences easily, creating the best ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to target.

All of CIENCE’s records are validated by a talented team of sales professionals during active campaigns daily so you can count on the information being accurate and trustworthy. 

You can customize your GO Data subscription based on your data objectives, which helps you create a more effective data-driven marketing strategy to connect with your ideal clients. In addition, the contact data you get helps you grow your sales initiatives and increase the ROI of your digital marketing efforts. 

2. OnAudience 

Pricing: By request
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Browser Extension: Available

OnAudience is another reputable audience data marketplace. They get their audience data from trusted sources that span 200 markets. This platform has over 1,000 predefined audience data segments to choose from to create custom target audience data. 

They look closely at demographic data, interests, and purchase intent so you can create campaigns that your audience will engage with and eventually lead to a closed deal. You also have access to free look-alike audiences and cookieless data.

3. Adapt 

Pricing: By request
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Browser Extension: Available

Adapt is one of the most versatile audience data providers out there. It combs through data from over 100 million business contacts in various sectors, like telecommunications, software and internet, and financial services.

Adapt relies on hundreds of thousands of community members to regularly develop and update its data. You have access to various filters for your audience data and lead scoring, both of which can be used to compile actionable insights that better your marketing.

Adapt is also compatible with most CRMs, enabling you to integrate data easily across your company. 

4. Seamless.ai 

Pricing: By request
Free Trial: Available
CRM Integration: Available
Browser Extension: Available

Seamless.ai provides audience data through a real-time search engine that houses B2B contact information. You can access phone numbers and email addresses from over 157 million companies. This platform uses a ten-step artificial intelligence (AI) engine to authenticate all of its contact information. 

You can use relevant filters to niche down your results and then use this information to connect and communicate with high-quality leads that match your ICPs. You can also enable the free chrome extension, automate your list-building, and connect your CRM and LinkedIn Navigator to the platform. 

5. LeadSift

Pricing: Starts at $750/month
Free Trial: Not Available
CRM Integration: Available
Browser Extension: Available

LeadSift (part of Foundry Intent) is one of the best audience data providers for intent data. They create a daily summary for their users that contains high-quality leads based on their data objectives. 

LeadSift notifies you when a lead’s intent changes and gives you insight into the buyer’s journey. CRM integration is also available. In addition, this tool is a top choice because of how well they leverage data mining, machine learning, and artificial intelligence tools to generate valuable audience insights. 

Leverage Audience Data for B2B Marketing

Marketing to other businesses isn’t an easy task. But with precise audience data management, you can develop a holistic understanding of your ideal customers and take advantage of audience enrichment to achieve your marketing objectives most effectively. Ready to reach the next level?