How to correctly use your intent data

What we already know 

When correctly utilized, intent data can provide robust predictions of which accounts are likely to buy. Intent data collects information about an individual’s online activity and tells you how and what they are interested in buying. Thus, you can begin to understand whether or not potential prospects genuinely care about what you offer, if they are close to a buying decision, casually window shopping, learning from your resources, or just somehow landed on your website.

New to intent data? Check out our blog  “Intent Data: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” for a more in-depth breakdown of what intent data is.

Using all the right data

Considered to be the most valuable, intent data can be 1^st party data, which comes from your customers, accounts, and properties. But data can also come from 3^rd party vendors, which track web activity from other sources. These platforms collect online research activity from a data-sharing co-op that includes numerous B2B websites, media publishers, and more. By aggregating weekly activities, they create baselines for a company’s average content consumption over time and seek out spikes above normal levels of topic searches. 

Context is king when it comes to obtaining real value from intent data, and it can help you identify potential new prospects. For instance, to translate intent signals into an actual indication of buyer interest, you need the context behind the appeal. Thus, you need accurate, relevant underlying data. Since B2B intent data is account-focused, account-level information is essential to gauge initial buying intent. However, you will also need equally accurate, relevant data on an individual level to identify the right people within those accounts for effective engagement.

Intent data can only provide consistent value with the right technology to process it. For example, intelligence solutions like predictive and persona modeling can help weed out misleading intent signals. Suppose there’s an outpouring of intent from a specific source with a low score by your predictive models that don’t fit any buyer personas. In that case, they are probably not interested in buying anything. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that they are not worth looking into or that you should automatically reject every signal, but it does give you a strong level of context to start. Such intent data can help B2B marketers and salespeople to improve productivity and results by reaching the right people at the right time.

How to use intent data

Sales and marketing teams often depend on intent data to ensure effective go-to-market strategies, accurate segmentation, and personalized outreach to the right people. Companies that do not utilize predictive intelligence data tend to limit their response to their website data.

There are five prominent use cases for sales and marketing teams using intent data in 2021. 

First, identify early buyer interest. Purchase intent signals to help determine which companies are actively researching your solution. Do this before they fill anything out on your website or start to engage with your marketing or sales teams. 

Next, build targeted account lists. Sales and marketing teams can filter outreach lists for accounts that show an active interest. 

Third, utilize website personalization. Marketing and sales teams can personalize initial outreach with resources to better match their actively pursuing leads. 

Next up is prioritizing accounts and lead scoring. Use predictive purchase data to evaluate your lead scoring model to prioritize companies that demonstrate interest and purchase intent well before initiating the buying process with a competitor.

Finally, analyze and retain customers. Obtain real-time visibility about which customers are researching topics and solutions. With these insights about existing customers, it makes it possible to proactively up-sell way before your customers decide not to renew or have already bought from one of your competitors. 

In recent years, B2B intent data has become the fastest-growing data category. It has changed how teams prioritize their time and how they gather new insights about their accounts. Being said, your competitors have probably started to think about using it, if they aren’t already! So get on trend and speak with one of our specialists at DemandWords Media to get started today!