What Is Intent Data and why it is important?

By Aadarsh K S | June 9, 2023

It is a common misconception that all data is the same. At the core, there are two types of data: transactional and behavioural. While both types are important for providing an accurate picture of your customer behaviour, transactional data provides only limited insight into the customer finding its value limited to an immediate state — what, who and where.

On the other hand, behavioural data with its rich detail can provide a much more comprehensive understanding of your prospects’ interests, needs and preferences to help you understand their decision-making process for buying decisions and also predict future opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. So let’s focus on the behavioural data of the user.

What is B2B Intent Data?

B2B marketing teams empower sales representatives to automate their cold email approach by using intent data and other sources to find prospects that are ready to hand off, allowing them to act quickly on leads and gain an advantage over competitors who may be in the dark.

Intent data identify prospects that have already indicated and demonstrated the need to buy or engage with your company. To capitalize on intent data, you need to understand what a prospect’s behaviour indicates they are likely to purchase or do. This is because information like “I want to buy product/service x” is not enough; you also need to know what stage the prospect/client is in their buying journey.

Here is how intent data can make a difference in your marketing efforts:

What Makes Buyer Intent Data More Valuable Than Other Data?

When you have a complete picture of the buyer’s journey, you can be more strategic about when and where the right messaging is delivered. Buyer Intent Data provides marketers and sales teams with insights into what types of content prospects are engaging with online, regardless of whether they ultimately engage with your brand. Using this data, we can generate actionable insights to inform how, when, and where to reach prospects throughout their buying journey — including identifying leads that convert at various stages of the funnel.

Why Intent Data is the Future of B2B Marketing & Sales?

The importance of understanding buyer intent is not lost on most marketers and salespeople who are looking for ways to get ahead. Advances in artificial intelligence have made it possible to evaluate the probability of a prospect buying based on shopping behaviour. A large number of businesses might either be using or considering using intent signals as a way to better understand prospects’ behaviour and triggers to increase their amount of sales. With numerous aggregated intent data, businesses can better identify “ready to buy” prospects, thus increasing the likelihood of a purchase decision being made by them.

How to Use Intent Data for Your Business?

There are many areas where it can make a huge impact. Here are the key ways you can take advantage of Intent Data. Identifying Early Opportunities The most obvious use of intent data is tapping prospects earlier in the buying process. One of the best ways to get a leg up on the competition is to get in contact with prospects before other salespeople do. When you approach prospects through marketing campaigns, there is a good chance that one segment of the audience is not in the correct buying phase to connect with your content. You are too late to reach out, or you are reaching them at the same time as the rest of your rivals. This is why B2B marketers are beginning to recognize the value of employing Intent Data to improve the success of marketing initiatives. Learn more about how Intent Data works for marketers.

1. Account-level Scoring

Buyer intent data can help you distinguish between accounts that are actively researching a pain point and those that are simply reading about a particular topic without any intention to make a purchase. This information highlights which accounts fit your ideal customer profile or not, making prioritization easy. A lead scoring model on the Account level requires time, brainstorming, and effort. As a result, it frequently takes a long while to set up and monitor the process. This is where Intelous buyer intent data can come in handy; each account receives a live score based on the level of interest in certain topics. The higher the rating, the more information an account has consumed relevant to your products and services — making it easier for you to find accounts with high conversion potential when setting up a lead-scoring model using Intent Data.

2. Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing is all about Account level relationships. Intent data can become the most important contributor to engaging and building relationships with the right prospects. While ABM often requires technographic and firmographic data, you must use every possible avenue to collect more information about your prospects that will help you take a laser-focused approach. Intent Data not only helps you expand your reach, but it also gives you data that you might not be able to collect yourself. This data helps you to find more in-market customers, score leads with greater precision, and re-shape your ABM campaign with customized messaging.

3. Smart Content Strategy

Intent Data helps you create a content strategy that matches what your ideal customers want to see. Whether you’re looking for new ways to expand your marketing efforts, or just need more ideas for how to build content, Intent Data can help.

4. Account-level Advertising

Intelous uses custom-built algorithms to uncover buyer intent that is likely to convert from data collected from your site and gives it a boost. Our technology then pairs the intent with appropriate content and sends it to prospects with an actionable call-to-action. You don’t need to create this content from scratch — just provide us with existing information about your product or service and we’ll build landing pages, web forms and emails for you.

5. Accelerate your Sales pipeline

Driving company results demands more than simply following an end-to-end plan. You must go beyond only identifying and engaging demand in your marketing funnel. It is no longer enough to create innovative lead generation campaigns. It is necessary to research your target market, understand their behaviour, and approach them with unique content. Personalizing your marketing plan has gone beyond demographic and firmographic data on your target audience.

6. Conversational AI powered Emails

Intent data can and should influence all aspects of your prospect marketing, including direct mail. You can utilize tactile marketing automation to apply that intelligence to direct mail and boost the impact and engagement of your brand. Integrated, branded, and personalized direct mail outperforms standard direct mail and is the most successful channel for engaging members of the C-Suite. Intent data opens up a world of possibilities for automating customized brand interactions, especially if you can utilize your integrations to evaluate whether the visitor meets your conditions.

Intelous enhances your revenue team to generate, nurture and convert target prospects into customers with the help of smart intent data and conversational AI. Signup for early access!

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