What an individual’s interests are and what they’re likely to purchase next is revealed by intent data. B2B intent data is analyzed by considering the sites a buyer visits, the items or services they study, and the degree of purchase intent they demonstrate. Since most B2B buying journeys include a significant amount of research, these content exchanges may be pretty valuable for predicting buyer intent.

A new phrase, “intent data,” is used in B2B Marketing to describe signals and buyer intent regarding potential consumers and companies actively exploring goods and services. Tracking potential customers’ content and digital activity may reveal their interests that indicate a desire to make a purchase. To focus their efforts and discover the best times and methods for interacting with potential customers, sales and marketing teams turn to intent data as a critical strategic asset in their account based marketing tactics.

How is buyer intent data generated?

The digital footprint and the literature a buyer consume online help build the intent databases. Whether these datasets are first-party intent data (produced on the company’s digital channels) or third-party intent data (purchased from B2B publishers) doesn’t matter. They always need four key components:

A vast and diverse collection of material:

Blog articles, videos, and gated assets are gateways to specific solutions and products in the B2B buyer journey. Buyers use this knowledge to answer a particular issue or meet apparent business demand. Buyer intent can now be discovered in the early stages of their content research journey.

Items containing topical metadata have been included:

The content consumption and the buyer intent are measured when the material is machine-readable. An additional layer of context is added to the content by having descriptive metadata descriptions in the form of people,places,products,concepts,companies,events etc. and other tags such as the funnel stage.

Individual tracking technology:

To create an intent dataset, you must first identify a potential customer. An Individual’s IP address is recorded on third-party publisher sites, and this information may then be linked to CRM or marketing automation software that sits online behind the emails to identify the buyer (name, role, email address, etc.).

People-tracking technology:

It is possible to establish an “interest profile” for a person once they have been cookied, which may be used to gather information about the subjects they’re interested in as they consume material.

How to Use Intent Data for Your B2B Business?

Buyer Intent Data is becoming more vital if you want to stay competitive. Numerous ramifications might be expected in this regard.

Customers may be targeted early in the purchase process by using intent data. To get an advantage over the competition, we can not contact potential customers before they are approached by another salesperson. Most of the time, organizations prefer to do business with a salesman that gets them directly. Sometimes it is likely that some of your target audience may not be in the proper buying phase to engage with your content when you reach out to them via marketing efforts. By the time you reach out, it may be too late, or you will be reaching out at the same time as all your competitors. Using Intent Data to better marketing activities is becoming more popular among B2B marketers.

Customers with a genuine interest in learning more about a specific problem or issue may be distinguished from those who are only reading about it for informational purposes. This data reveals whether or not a lead is a good match for your target client and simplifies the process of setting priorities. Creating a lead scoring model is a lengthy process that involves a great deal of time and work. Setting up, monitoring, and improving the intent scoring process often takes longer. Buyer intent data from data providers may help here. Intent data providers help you determine the prospect’s buying signals based on intent keywords that have been widely researched by businesses.

You may get a sense of what your prospective customers are looking for by monitoring the 20+ million Intent signals and 20 thousand plus technologies mapped. The topics are commonly viewed using a live score based on a specific topic, keyword, and more; each contact is given a scoring point. You can see how much the buying intent has increased for the contacts in your CRM over a period of time. E.g., John attended the event XYY last week, Mike is currently evaluating with a competitor this week, and so on. Due to the automation of the lead scoring process, this is made more accessible and real-time. You can choose accounts with the most significant potential for conversion by narrowing your search for related topics or keywords.

As part of the account-based marketing strategy, relationships are at the heart of account-based marketing. Intent Data may play a pivotal role in attracting and retaining the appropriate customers. To get a laser-focused approach, you need to acquire as much information on your prospects as possible, even if they don’t have a lot of information about themselves. With the aid of Intent Data, you may not only broaden your audience, but you can also gather data that you would not otherwise be able to. This data helps you find more in-market customers, score leads with greater precision, and re-shape your ABM campaign with customized messaging. Around 10% of purchasers are either actively purchasing or interested in purchasing at any one moment. 10 out of the 100 customers on your target list indicate urgent business potential. Which ten are the most important? This is where the use of intent data comes in. Knowing what a corporation actively seeks may reasonably predict what it wants to acquire. Exactly what intent data does is offer this information. Thousands of topics are monitored in real-time regarding various goods and services to know which organizations are most interested in specific topics. Customers who spend more time looking into a subject are more likely to purchase in that area.

Real-time Intent data

The most common question for a CMO today is, “How can I identify and engage in-market prospects earlier in the buying cycle before they start to evaluate vendors?” Real-time intent data help you do that. This is powered by predictive intelligence and AI algorithms that enable predictive lead scoring and help marketers identify high potential prospects even if they have not interacted with your website or email. Today, we can capture intent for our CRM contacts without sending them an email, running ads, or even before they visit your website. This predictive lead scoring also helps decide the right time to be pitched or simply streamline the right content to be sent to the next funnel.

So, in conclusion, what does the future look for B2B marketing and sales in terms of intent data?

Understanding the purpose of customers is essential for any marketer or salesperson who wants to increase their success rate and who is constantly seeking ways to improve their B2B marketing strategies. Businesses may learn a lot about their customers by observing and analyzing their buying patterns and triggers. With this information, sales and marketing teams may focus on a single buyer persona and tailor their approach to meet their needs to maximize the possibility of a sale. Businesses can identify “ready to buy” prospects with numerous aggregated intent signals and fine-tune their campaigns accordingly.

Overwhelmed buyers are unable to make a decision. Unless it’s a pressing problem, even those in the target market for your product aren’t going to answer the phone when a marketing vendor calls. The way a potential customer consumes material might reveal a lot about their interests. Sellers also have the problem of potential purchasers doing their own research instead of contacting them directly. It’s a curse that has become a benefit because of intent data. But what if you were privy to the information that other individuals were gathering? It’s a valuable insight to engage a prospect on pertinent issues even if the material doesn’t immediately connect to your offer. Using this method, you can see whether now is the perfect time to pursue a firm or if you should put other options higher on your list.

The information included in intent data may be utilized for future prospecting since it reveals specific trends and predictions that can be leveraged to increase your prospects’ purchasing choices throughout their buyer journey. You should be mindful that even if your opponent is not now using Intent Data, they may do so soon.