Leveraging Buyer Intent Data to Stay Ahead in the B2B Industry

Buyer intent data may sound like another marketing buzzword, but it’s a powerful tool that could be the trump card your B2B business needs. Buyer intent data refers to signals and cues that potential customers give off, indicating their readiness or interest in purchasing a product or service.  

This data isn’t just about who wants to make a purchase, but more importantly, why, when, and how they intend to make their purchase. It’s about understanding the buyer’s journey, their needs, preferences, and behavior, and leveraging that understanding to optimize your marketing strategies.  

Imagine being able to tailor your marketing strategy to a perfect audience at exactly the right time. 

For B2B companies, buyer intent data is even more critical. The buying process in B2B involves multiple decision-makers, longer sales cycles, and a more significant investment. Therefore, understanding and predicting buyer behavior is and can be a game-changer.  

What Is Buyer Intent Data? 

Intent data is information collected about a person’s behavior online. It’s formed on behavioral signals that indicate what topic, product or service a person may be interested in. Giving you an understanding of their perceived intent. 

The power of buyer intent data is that it allows sales and marketing teams to prioritize certain groups of people based on their intent. Or, at least, how active that intent is. 

For most companies, this data provides deeper insights into the buying process to better tailor marketing strategies to their target audience. 

You can gauge the level of a buyer’s intent through the content they consume. For example: 

• Reading specific articles on your website. 
• Product comparison and review pages. 
• Frequency of their visits and how often they return. 

• Downloads (whitepapers, case studies, eBooks). 
• Engagement levels (email opens, time on site, clicks) 

The more data points collected, the stronger the intent signals. 

In its simplest form, intent data tells you when a lead is actively researching online before making a purchase decision. 

What are the Benefits of Leveraging Buyer Intent Data in B2B Marketing? 

• Identify high-quality leads. Buyer intent data helps B2B businesses prioritize leads based on their level of intent. A lead who has exhibited strong buying signals, such as frequent visits to product pages, engagement with pricing information, and downloading relevant resources, is likely to be a higher quality lead compared to a lead who only briefly visited the website. By focusing on leads with higher intent, you can allocate your resources more efficiently and increase the chances of conversion.  
   
• Personalize your marketing efforts. Buyer intent data provides insights into the specific needs, pain points, and preferences of potential buyers. By understanding these details, you can create personalized marketing campaigns, starting with your email blasts, and content that resonate with your target audience.  
   
• Optimize your sales assessment process. Buyer intent data allows B2B businesses to determine where potential buyers are in the buying journey. For instance, if a buyer is researching “best CRM software for small businesses,” it indicates they are in the early stages of their buying process. On the other hand, a buyer searching for “CRM pricing” or “CRM demo” is likely further along in their decision-making process. By understanding the buying stage of a lead, you can tailor your messaging and nurture them accordingly. Additionally, providing your sales team with insights into a buyer’s decision-making process will help them better understand how to approach, nurture, and convert leads.  

What Are the Benefits of Using Buyer Intent Data for Sales? 

The first (and most important) benefit of using intent data is that you are eliminating the risk of engaging with uninterested buyers. 

You’re essentially streamlining your prospecting pipeline to qualified buyers only. Not only will that dramatically increase your conversion rate potential, but it will also give your sales and marketing team a huge advantage over your competitors. 

Imagine how confident your staff will be knowing that their lead generation just became that much easier and more effective. 

• ‍Supercharged Account-Based Marketing. A fundamental aspect of account-based marketing (ABM) is targeting accounts who are a good fit for your company’s products or solution. By leveraging the power of intent data, you immediately give your sales and marketing team an unfair advantage. You’re able to strategically prioritize and personalize your lead generation campaigns with granular insight. Meaning, you can segment your outreach lists based on the intent of their behaviors. 
• ‍Enhanced Ad Campaigns. Intent data gives you context. It allows you to understand which topics and interests capture people’s attention most. You can use this knowledge to create ad campaigns and distribute content that aims to answer your prospect’s questions. Just by aligning your content with somebody’s pain points at the right time can result in an increased flow of qualified leads. 
• ‍Capture Interest During the Buyer Journey. An effective B2B marketing campaign is one that’s delivered on time. By this we mean capturing people’s interest before they reach out to a salesperson themselves. With buyer intent data, you can help trigger that lightbulb moment in your prospect’s mind. Helping them believe they’ve made the decision themselves by giving them enough information to engage with your company. 
• Produce Relevant Content at Scale. Across any marketing channel, relevancy is always key. In fact, the recipe for the most successful campaigns are nearly always relevancy and timing. Build landing pages on your site that answer specific questions. Connect and segment pages based on topics. Create landing pages by industry and application. Once you begin utilizing intent data, you can capitalize on inbound marketing and lead generation through downloads and specific on-site events that you can easily track. 

How Is Buyer Intent Data Collected? How Does it Work? 

Buyer intent data works by tracking and analyzing a variety of signals that a potential buyer gives off during their buying journey. These signals can come from various sources, such as website visits, content downloads, product reviews, social media interactions, and more.  

If you’re familiar with website tracking and analytics, it works in a very similar way: 

• Cookies are used to identify users. 
• Traffic sources. 
• Time on site/time on page. 
• Volume of content consumed. 
• Scroll depth and scroll speed (general user behavior signals). 
• Types of content consumed. 

The first step in gathering buyer intent data is to track these signals. Advanced analytics tools and software can help you collect data from various sources and track buyer interactions with your brand. This could include tracking website visits, monitoring social media interactions, analyzing content downloads, and more.  

Once you’ve collected this data, the next step is to analyze it. This involves identifying patterns and trends in the data, which can give you insights into buyer behavior. For example, a sudden increase in website visits or content downloads could indicate a heightened interest in your product or service.  

Types of Intent Data  

• First-party intent data is information that you collect directly from your interactions with potential buyers. This could include data from your website analytics, CRM system, email marketing campaigns, and more. First-party data is highly valuable because it’s specific to your business and your audience.  
• Third-party intent data, on the other hand, is data collected by other businesses or platforms that you can access. This could include data from industry publications, social media platforms, B2B intent data providers, and more. Third-party data can provide a broader view of the market and can help you identify potential buyers who may not be in your existing audience.  

Each type of data has its strengths and weaknesses. First-party data is more specific to your business but may be limited in scope while third-party data provides a broader view but may not be as precise or accurate. Therefore, a combination of both types of data can provide the most comprehensive view of buyer intent.  

How Can You Judge the Quality of B2B Intent Data? 

With so many touchpoints in the buyer cycle, it’s easy to get lost in volumes; rather than quality. 

Certainly, your marketing and sales team would prefer 100 targeted B2B decision-makers in your industry than 1,000 generic contacts with no indication of intent. 

To determine the quality of your intent data, you need to understand human behavior and the broader meaning of intent. There are three common reasons why a prospect is looking for a solution online: 

• Informational intent (they’re researching a topic). 
• Commercial investigation (comparing providers, products, solutions). 
• Purchase intent (the final step in the buying cycle). 

With this in mind, you can judge the quality of your intent data based on the likelihood of an outcome. 

How to Integrate B2B Buyer Intent Data into Your Marketing Strategies?  

Implementing B2B intent data into marketing strategies can significantly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of your campaigns. Buyer intent data provides insights and actionable ideas to help businesses make more informed decisions.  

Here are some key steps to successfully implement B2B buyer intent data into your marketing strategies:  

• Segment your audience: Once you have collected the data, segmenting your audience based on their buyer intent is crucial. This involves grouping potential customers into different categories based on their behavior, interests, and needs. For example, you can create segments for customers who have shown interest in a specific product or service, or those who have interacted with your content on a particular topic.  
   
• Personalize your messaging: With buyer intent data, you can tailor your marketing messages to resonate with each segment of your audience. By understanding their needs and preferences, you can create personalized content that addresses their pain points and offers relevant solutions. For example, if a potential customer has shown interest in a specific product, you can send them targeted emails or advertisements highlighting the benefits and features of that product.  
   
• Optimize content distribution channels: Buyer intent data can also help you optimize your content distribution channels. By analyzing which channels your target audience is most active on, you can prioritize your efforts and allocate resources accordingly. For instance, if your data shows that a significant portion of your audience engages with your content on LinkedIn, you can focus on creating more community-nurturing content and engage with your audience there.  
   
• Continuously refine and iterate: Implementing buyer intent data is an ongoing process. It’s important to continuously monitor and analyze the data, assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategies, and make adjustments as needed. This could involve experimenting with different messaging, testing new distribution channels, or refining your audience segments based on new insights.  

Leverage Intent Data with DemandScience  

DemandScience is a leading provider of B2B buyer intent data. With our advanced analytics tools and comprehensive data sources, you can leverage buyer intent data to stay ahead in the B2B industry.  

More importantly, compliance is of utmost importance to DemandScience, as we strive to not only meet legal requirements but also prioritize operational integrity. We go above and beyond by meticulously following the mandates of the Act. This includes ensuring accurate and transparent header information, using subject lines that precisely reflect the content, clearly indicating promotional messages, disclosing our corporate location in all communications, providing a clear opt-out mechanism for recipients, and promptly addressing and fulfilling opt-out requests. Additionally, through our comprehensive Supplier Management Program, we ensure that our partners and vendors also adhere to relevant regulations, such as the CAN-SPAM Act.  

Our commitment to these guidelines extends beyond legal compliance. It also entails refining our lead generation efforts to align with the suppression lists entrusted to us by our clients. As a result, we consistently deliver high-quality and actionable leads that meet our cilents’ precise standards and help them achieve their campaign objectives.  

Conclusion  

Buyer intent data is a powerful tool that can help you stay ahead in the B2B industry. By understanding and leveraging buyer intent, you can identify high-quality leads, personalize your marketing efforts, and optimize your sales process. In the B2B landscape, information and knowledge is power. A power that provides you with direct control to when and how you are going to create a buzz.  

For a more in-depth discussion about buyer intent data and how you can effectively utilize it with your lead generation efforts, download our eBook “Ultimate Guide to Buyer Intent Data” here.