What types of intent data are there?

First party and third party.

First-party intent data is internal data based on prospects activity with your emails, website, content, social media or anything else your business owns. First party buyer intent indicators could be:

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• Opens and clicks on your newsletter
• Ebook downloads
• Blog post views
• Website page visits, and the frequency and duration of these visits
• Social media likes, comments or reposts

Essentially, any engagement with anything to do with your company that you can measure and track. Marketing automation software such as Hubspot, Salesforce Pardot and Marketo are great ways to use this information at scale (see upcoming article on marketing automation tools).

Third-party intent data is external data that third-party tools such as Bombora, 6sense or Demand Science collect for you to use.

How does it work?

Third party buyer intent data tracks activities that you can’t track or don’t have anything to do with your company:

• These are activities which tell you the person or business is looking for what you offer
• The tools identify when someone is researching certain topics online, reading related articles or looking at competitors
• They are already in the buying journey for what you offer
• They might not know about you or have searched for you, but the buyer intent is there, nonetheless

How do these third-party tools get their intent data?

A lot of tools that have intent data white label Bombora’s data. It is the industry standard. Bombora has a cooperative of 5000+ B2B websites. It claims to be the “only full consent-based data cooperative of B2B publishers in existence”. It uses machine learning to understand the context of text on a webpage from an intent perspective, across 4 million domains and over 16 billion interactions per month:

1. It segments and identifies the business behind the interaction
2. It identifies how many people from the same company are researching the topic
3. It notices how often and to what extent these people are looking into the topic, and how this compares to their normal activity
4. It uses this information to determine when this research indicates an intent to buy

Why should I care about buyer intent, and when should I use the data?

Imagine two scenarios where you are prospecting via email, phone, LinkedIn or whatever it may be:

1. The prospect may or may not be in the market for your product or service
2. The prospect is in the market for your product or service
   

Which option would you choose?

Obviously the second. Let’s look at a simplified typical B2B buying journey.

The middle part of the funnel is where the prospect is currently considering their options. They are actively looking for a solution like yours. They have buyer intent. This is the time to approach the target so they they consider your option.

How does it improve marketing and sales?

1. Lead scoring and campaigns

Anytime a lead opens, clicks or replies to an email. Anytime a lead reads one of your articles. Anytime a lead downloads a resource. Anytime a lead likes or comments on a social media post. Anytime a lead likes or comments on a social media post. Anytime a lead takes any action on anything that you have published. This can be tracked and added to their ‘score’.

The score can be used to understand when a contact or company becomes a marketing qualified lead (MQL). Taking into account third party intent data, as well as first party intent data, makes this process much more accurate.

It is also valuable if your company does account-based marketing (ABM) or account-based sales (ABS) – see upcoming article on Account Based Marketing. Buyer intent data helps to optimise your marketing budget. It reduces your client acquisition cost (CAC), since you are only displaying content to those within the buying journey.

Ultimately, your campaigns are more targeted.

2. Lead qualification

Most business development teams will qualify leads based on their company financial or demographic qualities, or the person’s job title. The company qualities might include:

• Annual revenue
• Number of employees
• Location
• Industry segment

This is a great starting point. These targets are more likely to have a need for what you offer. This does not mean that they have that need. Understanding their buyer intent tells you that they are aware of that need and are looking for a solution. They are more qualified.

You can incorporate buyer intent data when pulling contacts, accounts and lists from tools such as Apollo, Sales Intel or 6sense (see upcoming article comparing Apollo with other prospecting data sources)

3. Closing

Accurate qualifications makes sales reps time a lot more efficient. They are not doing outreach to unqualified prospects. So, they are more likely to convert the prospect from the ‘considering options’ stage to the ‘buy’ stage.

How amazing would it be if you approached someone and their response is “How did you know? I was just looking for something like this!”

That is the power of buyer intent data.