Intent data helps you identify the precise moment at which your prospects begin to move toward a goal. When a prospect takes a step in the direction of making a purchase, your sales team’s first responsibilities are to understand what their needs are and find ways to fulfil those needs.

With Intent data, you can access a window into the world of your prospects’ purchase journeys. These signals place you in an ideal position to be able to pitch your product at just the right time and make it stand out from the masses.

What Are the Different Types of Intent Data?

Intent data uses activity indicators like browser cookies to track customer activity, and the two main types are first-party and third-party intent data.

First-Party Intent Data

First-party intent data covers most things you would think of when tracking valuable buyer activity insights. That said, first-party data may be anonymous when you cannot tie it to a specific buyer or know when you can identify the business or individual with IP identification of previously submitted forms. First-party intent data has proven to be very useful. However, the downside to depending solely on it is that you’re only gathering customer data in a single aspect of their journey. As a result, you could be missing ideal prospects that never make it to your website in the first place.”

Third-Party Intent Data

Third-party intent data is basically any intentions data collected on another website. While it also includes IP addresses and filled-in forms, it is usually gathered by intent data providers to buyers. Because third-party purpose data observe customer research everywhere (well, maybe not everywhere, but you get the idea), it gives you a holistic view of your prospect’s activities. This data is very useful since customers often make more than one visit to more than one website before making a sophisticated buying decision.

What Are the Benefits of Using Intent Data?

Intent data is a real game-changer for any business’s sales and marketing efforts. Here are a few of its benefits.

Finding active prospects

Intent data is the difference between finding active and inactive customers.

Since it shows you which prospects have the most interest in your solutions, you can prioritize them based on intent.

This makes it so much easier for you to identify and go after individuals nearing the end of their search for a solution and allows you to increase your conversion rate.

Finding leads with interests

You can expand on the previous point to identify and target leads that have shown even the smallest amount of interest in your products, especially if they may not have been in your scope initially.

Gaining audience insights

Intent data also allows you to learn more about your audience.

It tells you who they are and how your solution can help them.

Simply put, intent data is a key factor for gaining audience insights and finding new prospects without losing your hold on existing ones.

How Do You Collect Intent Data?

Once you understand the types of intent data, it becomes easier to see how you can collect it.

Collecting first-party intent data

First-party intent data is collected when prospective buyers visit your platforms and when they fill out and submit a form on your website. For this to work, your prospects must be researching challenges that your solution can address, and they must be doing that research on your website.

So, what if they’re doing research, just not on your website?

That’s where third-party vendors come in to help you with third-party intent data.

Collecting third-party intent data

As your prospects visit other sites, you have no visibility of their activity. However, the easiest way to access third-party intent data is to buy it from a third-party vendor. These platforms can aggregate online research activity from data-sharing cooperatives, including B2B websites and media publishers. By monitoring these baselines of activity, they can pick out spikes in topic search volume.

To create a valid intent data list we should consider:

• Type of content and amount of content consumed
• Bounce rate or time spent on Webpage
• Heatmap of the User including scroll, where he spent more time etc

Intent data collection allows researchers to send relevant information unobtrusively at the right time in a customer’s research journey. It also helps down-funnel salespeople focus their time when those opportunities are coming to fruition and want to hear from them.

Conclusion

Intent data is an essential part of the modern marketing landscape. It’s a goldmine that allows you to find the people who are not only searching for a solution like yours but have even indicated that they are interested in it. Of course, this information will not only help you improve your sales and increase their effectiveness but also save you money and accelerate your sales funnel.