Buyer Intent Data

In today’s market understanding buyer intent is one of the best ways to achieve growth and maintain a competitive edge. Intent data, especially in the B2B realm, offers insights into potential customers' behaviors and readiness to purchase.

Leveraging this data can strengthen marketing strategies, sales processes and strategies. This blog will dive into what buyer intent data is, the real-world applications and how businesses can use it to succeed.

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What is buyer intent data?

Intent data is the information that indicates a potential customer’s interest in your product or service. This data is from various online activities such as web page visits, content downloads, webinar attendance, and returning visits. It is commonly used in B2B marketing, lead generation, account-based marketing and sales strategies.

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How Does Intent Data Work

Once the data is collected, it's analyzed to understand the buyer's intent. This involves looking for trends in the data, such as specific keywords, popular blogs, and frequently visited webpages. This information helps in planning more focused marketing campaigns and improving sales strategies.

Real-World Example

Understanding buyer intent can significantly enhance your strategies, revolutionizing how you engage with leads and customers.  

Imagine you work at a software company targeting marketing managers. Using the data you gathered, you discover they’re currently looking for a tool to improve lead generation. Specifically, they’re exploring blogs on lead enrichment, lead scoring and segmentation.  

With this knowledge you can plan a personalized campaign tailored to their interests. For example, you can plan an email strategy that focuses on their needs and wants. This approach increases the likelihood of capturing their attention but also builds a strong relationship that can lead to closing deals.

This is an example of intent data in account- based marketing, this is just one of the ways you can use buyer intent to grow and strengthen your business strategy.

Why is Intent Data Important?

Understanding buyers helps businesses plan their marketing and sales efforts more effectively.  

This data allows you to see what gets the most customer engagement. Using this you can improve your targeting, for example you can target more high intent keywords.  

B2B buyer intent data can be crucial to B2B teams, helping you weed out uninterested buyers and focus on accounts that are ready to buy.

Leveraging this data allows you to avoid wasting resources and concentrate on more effective strategies. This approach can lead to higher conversion rates, improved customer experience, and increased revenue.

Benefits of Intent Data

Understanding intent helps businesses to tailor their marketing and sales efforts more effectively. This approach has many benefits, some of the key benefits are:

1. Enhanced targeting: Marketing campaigns can focus on individuals or businesses that are most likely to convert, reducing wasted efforts and resources.  

2. Shortened Sales Cycle: Sales teams can focus on leads that show high purchase intent, helping them close deals faster.  

3. Improved Personalization: Intent data gives you the ability to personalize messaging and offers, resonating with potential buyers and increasing engagement.

4. Lead prioritization: Using intent data, you can prioritize leads that are actively engaging with your content, helping your sales team be more efficient  

Different Types of Buyer Intent

Buyer intent can be categorized into two main types.

First Party Data: Information that a business directly collects from their digital properties, such as website analytics, email, social interactions.

Example - Visitor information from filling out a form on your website.

Third Party Data: Information from external sources, such as other websites, and content platforms.

Example - Information gathered from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

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What is Customer Intent Data?

Customer intent data is like buyer intent data but focuses on existing customers. This involves tracking and analyzing their behaviors to understand their needs and satisfaction levels. This data helps businesses with their customer retention and loyalty by anticipating their needs and providing timely, relevant solutions.

Steps to Use Buyer Intent Data

Finding and utilizing this data involves several steps.

1. Identify Data Sources: Use tools and platforms that offer intent data analytics.

2. Integrate Data with CRM: Ensure your CRM system can integrate with your data sources to streamline data collection and analysis.

3. Analyze and Segment: Segment the data based on criteria like industry, company size, and behavioral indicators to identify high intent leads.

4. Implement: Use the insights gained to strengthen your marketing strategies and sales outreach.

How to Use Intent data in Marketing and Sales

Intent data can strengthen both your sales and marketing strategies.  

Sales teams

Understanding your buyers gives you the ability to build a more efficient and focused sales strategy.

Let's look at some of the ways you can use it to succeed.

Faster Connection

With intent data, you can see where each lead is at in their buying journey. You can engage and target them faster.  

Helping you keep them interested in your product.

Lead Scoring

Ranking your leads is a great way to know who needs the most resources.

How do I accurately score leads?

Start by setting up criteria, some examples are:

• Are the viewing high intent pages?

• Do they match your ICP?

• Are they engaging in your content?

These are just a couple examples of criteria you can use to score your leads.

Personalized Outreach

Knowing what your prospects are looking at gives you a way to connect.

Each cold call you make you can ask “What are they engaging with on my site?”

Once you find your answer, you have a topic to build off in your call.

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Marketing Teams

Account-based Marketing

Understanding the specific details of each account visiting your site allows you to build a smarter and more engaging marketing strategy.

Building off what they are curious about you can draw them in with more content based around their wants.

Better Customer Journey

Insights into each step a customer takes to purchase your product provide a deeper understanding.  

Knowing this you can create more effective content, engaging social posts, and gain a better understanding of your market

Better Targeting

This ties into the last point, knowing what your audience is looking for is a great way to get more leads, improve engagement, and a higher ROI.

Where to Start

Starting a new plan built around data you are unfamiliar with.

Let’s go over some possible first steps.

Start with a plan

Strategies that have a plan in place before beginning are far more likely to succeed.

The easier way to plan is to start with a Smart goal.  

What are you hoping to achieve?

• Gain more highly qualified leads?

• Increase ROI?

• Higher prospect engagement?

Once you have your goal in mind it’s time to make it a SMART goal.

A SMART goal is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and has a set (realistic) timeframe.

Trainings

Make sure your teams are in the loop. To gain valuable results from using intent data in marketing or sales, each team member needs to be well-versed.  

Training your teams will help them feel more confident about their personal goals and strategies.  

Build Valuable Content

What insights does your data provide? Which type of content resonates most with prospects – blogs, eBooks, Demos?

Your content should correlate with your target audience's needs. Provide resources that will improve their journey and potentially guide them straight to you sales team.

This is an important step in leveraging this information.

Improve Targeting Strategy

Understanding your buyer’s interest provides valuable insights. Look at the steps they take; Do they frequent specific pages on your site? What initially caught their attention? What content did they engage with before scheduling a demo?

By analyzing these trends, you can build a stronger targeting strategy to ensure you’re building a personalized connection with each of your prospects.  

Considerations

Using intent data has many benefits, but it's essential to address potential challenges.

Data Privacy: Make sure all data complies with regulations like GDPR and CCPA when collecting and using your data.

Data Quality: Maintain high quality data by regularly updating and cleaning databases to avoid inaccuracies and outdated information.

Integration: Integrate tools that analyze buyer intent into current systems for efficient use.

How Our Platform uses Buyer Signals

At Signals, we simplify the way you use buyer intent data. Our platform uses Generative AI to automate lead scoring, assigning an individual score to each account that visits your site. The Signals score analyzes demographics and online behaviors, providing a comprehensive view of each account.

Some of our Gen AI Buying Prediction features include:

• Intent Scoring: Analyzes customer behavior and predicts buying stages.

• Sales Tracking: Tracks sales progression and combines it with customer data to predict buyer intent.

• Insights: Provides actionable insights for each account.

Our audience segmentation tool pairs seamlessly with our Gen AI Buying Prediction. This tool enables marketers to deliver personalized website experiences by analyzing past and current activities and company demographics. Automating both lead scoring and segmentation allows you to focus on developing personalized and effective strategies for your prospects.  

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Intent data is a powerful asset for any business looking to enhance its marketing and sales strategies. By understanding and leveraging this data, you can achieve more targeted and effective campaigns, shortened sales cycles, and improved customer engagement.

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