What Is Intent Data and Is It Right for Your Business?

The rise of intent data is not entirely surprising given how data is the de facto backbone of today’s marketing strategies. Take one look at the current tech giants and it’s easy to see why they employ data to run ads to target the consumer. Simply put, it works. 

Defined variously as a collection of observed data, a set of behavioral information and signals, insights into interests, marketing intelligence, and even a kind of bat signal. Intent data paints a sort of digital pixelated portrait of the interested buyer behind the data, or at least parts of that buyer. 

In this article, we’ll delve into the following topics:

• A definition of intent data

• The Buyer Journey

• Types of Intent

• Strong vs. Weak Intent

• How to Use Intent

• The Key to Leveraging Intent

• Is Intent Data the Right Choice?

• Biggest Intent Data Providers

• How Effective is Intent Data?

What is intent data?

Intent data is online behavioral information collected from first-party and third-party sources used to predict consumer buying habits. Marketers and sales teams use intent data to see when a buyer is researching topics related to their product. This way they can engage with the buyer early on during the process.

Intent data is used in marketing, particularly in B2B marketing as a means of gauging the account/consumer’s willingness to buy or perform a certain action resulting in a sale or positive behaviors. This means liking, subscribing, downloading, following, reacting, commenting, sharing, clicking, etc. 

As an aggregate, these actions all inform you about where a prospect is on the buyer’s journey. This allows you to make more informed marketing decisions. You gain a better understanding of your user and can serve their needs more directly. 

A Word about the Buyer Journey 

You’ve probably heard of the ABCs of sales? For B2C sales, digital and online marketing are similar, but instead of closing a sale with a handshake, closing is a digital cart checkout, no hands involved. In B2B, marketing and sales work in tandem to create an overarching marketing plan. 

From sales funnels to flywheels, personas, and yes data, marketers always strive for ways to attract prospects and help close the deal. The buyer journey is a definitive part of the marketing landscape and one that is referenced constantly. So what is it exactly? The buyer’s journey chronicles the steps a customer takes to get to the buy. It consists of:

• Awareness

• Consideration

• Decision

It’s a basic set of principles that plays an important role in sales and marketing in all of its forms from digital to outbound, search engine, etc. 

Marketers spend much time crafting buyer personas and carefully nurturing targeting those groups with well-spent budgets, clever copy, informative articles, or funny ads – whatever would perceivably win those personas over. The buyer journey also plays an important role in the use of intent data. 

The first step of this journey– awareness– means identifying the problem. What problem is the prospect trying to solve? Do they need a better way to plan and execute content? Do they need a better CRM more suited to their industry? Is their hardware out of date? And so on and so forth. 

This leads to the research and education (consideration) phase–taking into account things like needs, industry standards, quality, benefits, price points, etc. Research leads to decisive factors like weeding out brands that are not a good fit.

Most of this research and decision-making occurs online before engaging with vendors. The average B2B buyer in general does all their shopping without even involving a salesperson. 

Ideally, marketers should be looking at how much time is spent searching and how much time is spent looking on the web in order to tailor ads and content  to fit the needs of the consumer at that moment. What most marketers don’t know is that time spent in the sales cycle actually takes at least the same amount or double the time a buyer spends on researching. Starting early matters. This is what helps drive and accelerate the sales cycle. 

This is an ever-evolving landscape and with new advances in technology come new methods of marketing such as the use of intent data to support the buyer journey.

As “Fast Company’s” Jason Cottrell notes:

“The sales funnel has changed, shifting from direct connections with consumers at the top of the funnel—which enabled business to connect early and often in a purchase journey—to what companies refer to as a “dark funnel,” which leaves sales and marketing teams unaware of interest until a purchaser is on the brink of buying…Intent data acts as a kind of bat signal, cutting through the darkness.”

An early indication of buying intent gains a better chance of connecting and closing. It helps delineate a pathway to sales.

Don’t Bounce: The Types of Intent

There are three main types of intent data: 

• 1st Party Intent: This is data you’ve harvested on your own website by tracking visitor behaviors like email opens, comments, landing page engagement, and other interactions. It comes from new visitors and contacts you’ve already interacted with.
  
  This type of data is useful in creating workflows, marketing leads, and revealing how to approach these clients and interested prospects further along the marketing funnel. What strategies can you take using the data gained here? 
  

• 2nd Party Intent: This is data gathered and commonly purchased from another company This typically includes publishing sites and review sites. These sites sell leads complete with insights into what the user is reading, or searching, what type of solutions they seek etc.
  
  Second-party intent is sold through vendors who have acquired the right to sell or share that data. It is also bound by the amount of content available for engagement. If it's an obscure niche, you might be pressed to find a lot of the data you need.
  

• 3rd Party Intent: This is basically data collected on other websites. It widens the scope of things dramatically. Its data, drawn from across many online spheres including social media and websites, and profiles.
  
  It’s such a wide net cast that you in fact almost never actually know who the person with intent is. This is anonymous data – data best suited for B2B intent data. Third-party data provides a more comprehensive view of prospects' activities across the web. 
  
  It’s worth noting, with increasing privacy concerns, growing regulations, as well as Google's push away from third-party cookies is paving the way for third-party user intent data to be adopted on a broader basis.

Strong Intent vs. Weak Intent

Intent comes in many forms, some are clearly more visible and more actionable on the buying spectrum than others. There’s a lot of content out there and most of that content is not going to lead to a purchase.

Strong intent can be defined as patterns of behaviors, clicks, scrolls, downloads, gazes, types, keyboard strokes that occur with a CTA or site, the more interaction with the site, the stronger the intent signals. 

Traditionally, signals of strong intent are measured through engagement activities. How much is a prospect engaging with a website or URL?  Has the prospect clicked any links? What are the hot zones of activity? An abandoned cart, for example, is also an indicator of strong intent (not to buy). This is a good time to send the prospect a reminder not to leave the cart!

Conversely, weak intent shows a prospect isn’t interested because the prospect hasn’t engaged with the website or displayed any substantive. buying behaviors. The prospect doesn’t stay long on a page, or do much activity at all with any of the content, or socials provided. Weak intent does not indicate an actual impending purchase. 

Deep learning and AI with natural language processing algorithms can tag and identify intent through context and topic among other inputs. Together they are able to retrieve enough data points to gauge the depth of the intent and level of interest from weak to strong. They work to take the ambiguities out of the data. Through machine learning, the AI knows and accurately recognizes what are markers or signals of buying intent. From there, can you tailor your approach and enhance the user experience, guiding the way for future interactions. 

How to Use Intent Data

You can leverage intent data to easily reach prospective customers. Focus on these key factors to successfully convert and show a clear ROI instead of wasting time and budget on tactics that don't work. Integrate cross-channel marketing as part of that strategy. Here are some of the most common uses for intent data:

• Identify Leads: Find companies that are engaged in the buying process. Early buying interest indicates companies looking for a product, service, or solution such as yours. 

• Target: 70% of the time sales occur with the sales team who’s first to the table. Build lists of prospects who actively show intent. Filtering by active interests allows marketing and sales departments to get in front of buyers, be the first contact, and amplify the effect of marketing campaigns.

• Personalize: Personalization is a tried-and-true marketing method. Clear data metrics give insight into the buyer, so teams can tailor with best-fit strategies in mind. This includes the level of personalization that goes beyond just a name. Personalization that is customer-centric relevant to intent – what the customer wants to accomplish at that moment. 

• Prioritize/Nurture: Give priority to leads who show strong intent. Intent data can show who is in the midst of a buying cycle – who is more likely to make a purchase in the near future. Marketing and sales teams are able to implement these signals and then roll out the red carpet for buyers. 

Acting on signals is also easiest when defining levels of intent and then assigning each level a fitting task then will get the prospective buyer to the next level of intent until the buying cycle is completed. 

What is the Key to Leveraging Intent?

Gaining a Competitive Edge

Intent helps delimit the kinds of techniques, campaigns, and actions you can deploy to close a deal. Typically B2B prospects are more than halfway through the buying journey. They’ve already done their research, looked at competitors, and compared prices. Using intent data allows companies to hyper-target potential customers during the buying journey and understand what steps need to be taken for the journey to continue and complete the sale. This is particularly helpful when someone is already determined to make a purchase. And buyer intent data is extremely effective in showing when a prospect is on the cusp of buying. This in turn can grow market share and while expanding on existing ones.

Understanding Why It Didn’t Convert

Alternatively, user intent data serve as a guide for deeper understanding when a deal is not completed. Analyzing intent data, in this case, can reveal why something isn’t converting and what more can be done to change that. This is particularly useful in content marketing. Say, for example, you post an article and it receives thousands of hits, but the conversion rate is low. Is the article too broad? Do the CTA’s need to be stronger? Are the pain points/solutions unclear? 

Leverage intent takes using a customized approach that engages with a prospect and ultimately delivers conversion. Using intent data to respond accordingly stimulates leads. Converting those on the cusp of buying, particularly if you know key details like the competition, features and cost they are looking for is much easier than converting someone at the beginning of the cycle. 

Is Intent Data the Right Choice?

Choosing intent data can be beneficial for the reasons named above. It’s an especially powerful tool if you can harness the data. However, there are certain costs and barriers that go with it. For the B2C market, costs may be prohibitively high as purchase cycles are shorter and often there is not enough capital for using intent data in a meaningful way. Indeed, intent data providers usually cost tens of thousands of dollars a year for a subscription. There are different levels of service provided from account level, to enterprise and even free data intent tools. Depending on your data stack, cost also varies. 

For a company with high-volume, complex, significant sales revenue – a B2B business– this is a better idea and great strategy. The purchase cycle is much longer with B2B than B2C allowing the time to deep dive into the data and engage with the customer. There is usually a larger data set with ample support – IT and financial— to back up research and development. This also works particularly well for companies with a strong marketing and sales team that can work together toward shared outcomes. In fact, active use of Intent data shows marketers focus more on growth and fine-tuning rather than finding leads, which means less money wasted. Sales can be made more intelligently. 

Who Are the Biggest Data Providers?

Below is a list of some of the biggest intent data providers currently on the market including what they are known for and what they are best for.