Marketing success and thriving sales depend heavily on data. While there is data that allows you to improve your campaigns, data that shows your business rates, and other helpful data, we will talk about data that cues you into prospects’ subtle buying signals. It is intent data that will not only give you a competitive edge but will also help you build a strong and consistent source for sales teams.
Surprisingly, 99% of large companies use intent data in some way. For that 1% of large companies and small businesses who have yet to explore this intelligence system, you should understand that there is a level of maturity that comes with intent data. In this article, we will break down what intent data is, where to find it, its types, and more important aspects regarding intent data to help you drive more sales.
What is intent data?
A good understanding of your customer’s behaviors and next moves is like knowing the secret to where to position yourself to make the perfect pitch. To get to this product-market fit point, you can use intent data insights. If we use a sports reference: firmographic data shows you all the players on the field, whereas intent data shows what their next move will be.
Fundamentally, intent data is a type of sales intelligence system that alerts you when leads or accounts are active or unresponsive. With insights about activity spikes, you’ll know about the intentions of your prospects to purchase a product or service.
When a buyer faces a problem, they look for a solution, search the web and narrow down options. Your product or service could be one of those options that got narrowed down, truly that’s not fair because you hadn’t even had the chance to connect with them. Now imagine what new possibilities you have with intent data, you’ll be able to connect with prospects shortly after they start their search.
Businesses, sales crews, and marketing teams armed with these intelligence systems can prioritize accounts that are on the edge of a purchase over accounts that don’t show interest. As research claims, an average B2B prospect is 67% of the way into a purchase deal even before they engage with a salesperson. Intent data will allow you to take over the rest of the 33% and catch, focus, and sell to the prospect at the right moment.
Where companies can collect intent data
Many of your competitors might be unaware of intent data and are blindly targeting clients without plausible reasons to do so. However, if you use intent data correctly, you’ll acquire prospects more quickly and efficiently. So how do you find this intent data and use it? Keep on reading to find out the various sources.
- Ads/Bidstreams. Ad platforms collect the data a user searches before clicking on an ad. With access to this data, you can generate target ads and create generate content tailored to these prospects.
- Search engine. Basically, the same principle as with ads, search engines can provide keywords and phrases that are searched y targeted users.
- Marketing content. Content designed by marketers is grouped into different lists, and each list is tailored to a prospect type, so basically, marketing content lists withhold some type of intent data insights.
- Internet scraping. It’s the process of identifying bots that find users with the highest intent to purchase. There are various tools dedicated to this, some even create functional lists.
- Third-party sources. Just like with most data, there are third parties who you can purchase data from, since these are specialized sources, they will cover top to bottom.
Common intent data use cases
Here we will break down the use cases of intent data and how to make it work for you and your campaigns. To remain competitive, you’ll need to know the areas where intent data can make a huge impact.
Identify early opportunities
The most obvious use case of intent data is hunting down prospects faster in the buying process. Before a prospect crosses you off their list or the competition contacts them faster, you need to be ahead of these scenarios. If you are reaching a prospect at the same time as your rivals, there is a small chance for you to be the chosen company, prevent this with intent data.
Lead generation
Statistics show that 50% of sales leaders use intent data to improve prospect prioritization. This is because intent data will distinguish between prospects who are researching a pain point and who are simply scrolling through without the intention of making a purchase.
Not saying you should ignore the person who’s just scrolling because truly a good campaign can get them interested too, but you should first focus on the prospect who is interested in investing in a solution your company provides.
Inform and enhance account-based marketing
Account-based marketing that is informed by intent becomes highly personalized and gains an extra layer of precision. Intent data will contribute to the perfect tactics on how to engage and build a relationship While account-based marketing mostly requires technographic and firmographic data, all other possible avenues will only positively contribute.
Targeted advertising
Use behavior signals from intent data to capitalize on leads and improve your advertising campaigns. This will save you costs and time because you’ll be spending your time only on advertisements that bring leads and saving your money on those people who don’t intend to buy your products or services.
Send effective messages
Once you connect the dots between your potential prospects and their behavioral signals and common actions, you can start sharing targeted messages and content to meet their objectives and open your brand to them. Integrated, branded, and personalized messages within marketing campaigns outperform generic spam messages. You will see an increase in sales as you provide the needed product at the right time.
Main types of intent data
There are several types of intent data that can be used for business. Here are three main types of intent data you should know about, each of the types provides different insights into prospect behavior.
- Search intent data
Search data is captured when someone enters a phrase or keyword into a search engine. You can identify what words are searched for most, the most relevant answers, and how the tendency changes over tie.
- Engagement data
This type of data speaks for itself, essentially, you get insight into how a user images with a message, post, or content – whether they read it, share it, comment on it, or save it. For example, if there are many saves and likes on a certain post, that’s an indication that it’s interesting or helpful.
- Firmographic and technographic data
This data is mostly used with companies and businesses, with firmographics, you get information about their size, industry location, revenue, and more. With technographic insights, you get to know a company’s technology infrastructure, the software it uses, the hardware it has, and the networks it’s connected to. If your service or product is aimed at big companies, you can use these details to contact the right industries.
Final thoughts
Intent data, just like any other type of data, can be used to optimize certain processes within the company and get better results. However, just like with other data, it works best when paired with other data points. If used correctly, intent data can be a powerful source of insights about which accounts and prospects have the highest chances of buying your services or products.
