What is Buyer Intent Data? How to Use it to Increase Sales?

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

81% of consumers conduct online research before making a purchase. While that whopping figure might heavily revolve around retail consumers, there is an undeniable buying pattern that exists in consumer behavior. However, it is also important to note that the average decision-making units (DMU) in the B2B landscape only consists of 6.8 decision-makers. Now, this is severely focused as it means that B2B purchasing decisions are typically made by a group of individuals, each with their own roles, responsibilities, and criteria for evaluation. 

Your potential prospects might be actively searching and looking for a solution to a problem they have, but how do you gain precise and targeted influence over the high-value leads in the form of these 6.8 DMUs? 

Enter: intent data. 

‍Buyer intent data gives you unparalleled insight into your prospect’s behavior through the use of intent signals. This data allows you to ‘jump the queue’ and gives you the opportunity to pitch to potential customers at exactly the right moment. 

• Identify High-Potential Leads 
• Personalize Your Outreach 
• Enhance Timing and Responsiveness 
• Optimize Marketing Campaigns 
• Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment 

What is Intent Data?

Buyer intent data refers to the insights and signals that indicate a prospect’s level of interest and readiness to make a purchase. 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 Using Buyer Intent Data?

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 that are a good fit for your company’s products or solutions. 

In 2023,  67% of companies claim that their ABM programs have yielded better sales results and marketing alignment. 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. 

Remember, account-based marketing is only as successful as your personalization. 

Enhanced Ad Campaigns

How many times have you been served an ad on Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn that manages to reach you at exactly the right time? 

Chances are you were targeted by a group of smart markets (just like the people reading this article). 

Why? 

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. By simply 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. 

Most B2B buyers are already 57% of the way through the buying cycle by the time they reach out to a company for more information. 

57%…a B2B campaign is too late by this point. 

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. 

Intent data allows you to: 

• ‍‍Have the opportunity to speak to customers before they reach out. 
• Tailor your messaging based on content consumption. 
• Build relationships with leads immediately. 

Produce Relevant Content at Scale

Across any marketing channel, relevancy is always key. In fact, the recipe for most successful campaigns is nearly always relevancy and timing. 

We’ve already highlighted how intent data can put you in front of the right audience at the right time. 

But here’s how it can help your marketing teams produce relevant content at scale. 

• 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?

Intent data is created using billions of streaming behavior signals from thousands of B2B websites and media publishers. This intent data is then collected and aggregated each week by third-party vendors. 

These signals range across thousands of topics to show both trends and surges of interest in particular topics. 

For example, if there is a peak in interest for B2B buyers looking for a marketing automation platform – the data will reflect that (thus indicating an increase in purchase intent). 

Because a lot of this raw data ranges in the millions, it would be hard to manually process and understand signals at this scale. For that, algorithms have been designed to spot surges in topic searches and interest. 

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. 
• The volume of content consumed. 
• Scroll depth and scroll speed (general user behavior signals). 
• Types of content consumed. 

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. 

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, and 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 Recently Have Your Potential Customers Engaged?

The famous saying by Fredrik Ecklund ‘time kills all deals’ couldn’t be more relevant than right now. 

If you’re using outdated data, you’ve already lost the sale. Your sales reps should be amongst the first few people to outreach to prospects. 

You should be able to respond to highly engaged customers who have only recently engaged with your content. Whether visiting a specific landing page or signing up for a free trial – time is of the essence. 

How Often Have Your Contacts Returned?

Frequency coupled with type of intent is a phenomenal way to increase leads and sales. 

If your prospect has visited the same informational piece of content ten times in two days, the chances are there is a specific problem to solve. It’s highly unlikely your prospect will return to your content if it’s not of interest. 

This will give your sales team a timeline of events and highlight where in the buyer cycle your customer is before they take action.‍ 

How Engaged Are Your Buyers?

You can judge engagement based on website or campaign interactions. Your sales team should always score data based on how engaged your leads are. 

Whether that’s a chatbot interaction, time on site or, the number of actions completed on your website. 

These behaviors are all indicators of the buyer’s journey and it’s at this time your sales team should make contact. 

The Different Types of Intent Data

There are two different types of data and supporting data sources that create them. 

Depending on the size of your marketing campaigns and the level of insights you need to generate revenue, will dictate which type of data will be the best solution. 

Let’s go through each type. 

First-Party Intent Data

You likely already collect first-party intent data without knowing it. 

This type of data can be found in typical web tracking applications. Using internal intent data allows you to report on actual users on your website and their behaviors. 

Common web tracking applications: 

1. Google Analytics 
2. HotJar 
3. Clicky 
4. Bing Webmaster Tools 
5. CrazyEgg 

You can control it and segment this data however you see fit. 

The benefit of using this data is that you can build sales processes and marketing strategies with almost complete agility. Most platforms provide real-time data allowing you to track and monitor activity with granularity. 

Third-Party Intent Data

As the name says, this data is provided by third-party vendors. 

This data is collected across thousands of websites and touch points. This can give your marketing teams a more holistic view of customer behavior and intent. 

Collecting B2B intent data from this many data sources is extremely complicated. Third-party data providers rely on IPs, cookies, and publishing partners to collect data insights. 

In our opinion, it’s better to leave it to a professional B2B data provider due to laws and regulations around data collection and how you can use it. 

Implementing Buyer Intent Data into Your B2B Sales Strategy

ABM is currently widely embraced across various industries, and the B2B technology industry is no stranger. You would find tailored content and ads from subsectors such as finance, healthcare, and professional services. 

Integrating buyer intent data into your B2B sales strategy requires a well-planned and systematic approach.  

Here are the key steps to consider: 

• Assess Your Current Data Sources: Evaluate the data sources you currently have access to and identify any gaps or areas for improvement in your buyer intent data collection. 
• Invest in the Right Tools and Technologies: Explore and implement the appropriate tools and platforms that can help you effectively collect, analyze, and act on buyer intent data, such as marketing automation software, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and data analytics platforms. 
• Establish Cross-Functional Collaboration: Foster close collaboration between your sales, marketing, and data analysis teams to ensure a seamless flow of buyer intent insights and alignment on strategic initiatives. 
• Develop a Comprehensive Data Strategy: Create a well-defined data strategy that outlines your objectives, data sources, data governance protocols, and processes for turning insights into actionable sales and marketing tactics. 
• Implement Buyer Intent-Driven Workflows: Integrate buyer intent data into your sales and marketing workflows, enabling your teams to respond to high-intent leads in a timely and personalized manner. 

Where Can I Find B2B Buyer Intent Data?

You can immediately leverage your own assets to begin collecting customer data. 

Taking advantage of pre-made applications to collect this information from your website can be a great way to increase your marketing and sales process. 

However, if you want specific purchase intent about your dream B2B buyer; third-party data could be the best decision you make.  

DemandScience not just leverages advanced technologies and data analytics to collect, analyze, and interpret intent data. We own the largest first-party data set that allows us to help clients identify and prioritize high-intent leads, understand prospect needs and preferences, personalize marketing messages, and optimize overall marketing strategies. 

Summary

Buyer intent data has fundamentally changed how prospecting is done. Being able to actively target an audience of decision-makers to influence their buying decision is something we’ve not seen before. Moreover, intent data can bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams by providing a common understanding of customer behavior along with the opportunity to significantly improve lead scoring and qualification processes. 

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Let us talk about how we can help you increase your B2B sales.