Intent data: What it is, how it works, and how to use it

You can’t answer these questions by reading your customers’ and prospects’ minds, but you can do something nearly as effective: Look at their intent data. Intent data, also known as buyer intent data or purchase intent data) is basic information about a customer’s online behaviour. 

Intent data reveals certain online behaviours from your target audience that signal what they’re likely to do next—whether that’s buy a product in your category or leave your company for a competitor. 

However, despite its business value, it’s rarely leveraged effectively. For example, when we studied 114 B2B companies’ lead response times, the average time clocked in at 12 hours, while 18% of organizations never responded. 

This begs the question: How can you use this type of data quickly and thoughtfully? We’ll breakdown 5 examples that tackle both of these goals. But first, let’s make sure we’re aligned on what we mean by intent data and why it’s critical for growing your business. 

Intent data definition

Intent data refers to market intelligence data that tells you about the online research a lead is conducting. To put this plainly, your lead’s content consumption and behaviour. This data can be obtained from first-party and/or third-party sources. 

First-party data simply uses cookies and IP addresses to follow leads on your site. You’ll learn about the pages they view, the whitepapers they download, the webinars they attend, etc., while third-party data monitors your leads’ behaviours across other sites. 

But what does this data provide? It often includes everything from the lead/user’s behavioural data, application/social media interaction, website visits, downloads action, interest across the web, and keyword searches. 

Since this data is some sort of breadcrumb behavioural data from a user’s digital footprint, it can be used to better understand a user’s buyer intent, gain engagement insights, and tailor personalized interest. Thus, by understanding what your leads are reading, when they’re reading it, and how long it takes, you can begin to sell and market your product more effectively (the following sections explore this further). 

Types of Intent data

As mentioned, Intent data can be obtained from first-party and/or third-party sources. Let us briefly explore these types: 

First-party intent data

First-party intent data is data collected from your site using cookies and IP addresses to follow your site. One of the perks of first-party intent data is that it is reliable and tailored to your site because it gives you first-hand insight into users who directly interacted with your site. The data, which can come from filled-out forms, customer feedback, or IP addresses, can give you insights into users. 

Third-party intent data

Third-party intent data is data collected from external sources—data providers, conglomerates, or publishers—to monitor your lead’s behaviour across other sites. The data mostly gives you insights into competitor activities and user interests, which you can use for opportunities, needs, and innovation. 

Sources of 3rd-party intent data

To better understand different forms of intent data, let’s explore some popular 3rd-party  platforms that let you gather it: 

• G2: using a software review site like G2, you can uncover the specific pages accounts visit, whether it’s your company’s listing, a specific competitor’s, or a comparison page (between your organization and a specific competitor)
• Bombora: this type of platform can track account activity across a specific network of sites. It can even understand the topic(s) of the pages that are viewed via natural language processing, allowing it to score accounts for specific topics
• 6sense: a tool like 6sense allows you to track accounts that view specific ads as well as understand the content of the pages that these ads are displayed in (via NLP). Similar to Bombora, it can use these insights to assign scores to accounts for specific topics

Is intent data safe to use?

Intent data is safe to use only if measures are taken to ensure its safety throughout the process—from collection to storage and analytics.  

You, your organization, and your data provider must adhere to data protection regulations to ensure safety. Thus, you must get consent, apply security measures (encryption, access control) to personal information, and be transparent about how you collect the data and plan to use it.  

When discussing personal information, it is important to ensure that it doesn’t reflect biases, is anonymized, is audited regularly, and that data handling techniques are implemented.  

How to use intent data

Here are just a couple of impactful ways to use intent data: 

1. Share critical intent data with reps in near real-time

Yes, Intent data gives you insights. One way to maximize the impact is by sharing this insight with shareholders in near real-time so they can act swiftly, prioritize efforts, and personalize their interaction with the lead to address their needs. 

Doing this can boost your conversion rate and improve customer engagement and revenue. 

Related: How to implement lead routing effectively 

2. Track previous buyers and reach out when they land a new job

When someone transitions into a new role, they’re eager to establish themselves and make a strong impression on their team. This can motivate them to use tools that fueled their success in the past. 

Intent data can help re-engage previous leads, especially when they make new career changes and indicate renewed interest in your product. The good thing is that intent data also helps you re-engage at the right time. This way, you can capitalize on the moment to rekindle relationships and upsell or cross-sell opportunities. 

An example will be updating contact info in your CRM via data sources like ZoomInfo and triggering alerts to the account manager using Workbot. The account manager can then send personalized messages through a platform like Outreach or even send a gift with a tool like Sendoso. 

Let me show you how:

3. Respond to new leads on time

We recently tackled this approach ourselves. We wanted to accelerate our response time as 77% of leads either heard back when it was too late or didn’t hear back. So, we used intent data. 

How? Leveraging intent data comes with the gift of automation. This data, when used, can help one respond swiftly, personalise interaction, and boost conversion rates.  

On our end, we responded to qualified lead faster using Lead Bot to route every lead that filled out a form to our sales rep in Slack. Within every message, we also add information on the lead by using ClearBit, ZoomInfo, Linkedin Sales Navigator, and Salesforce. 

Here’s additional insight into this process and the benefits it’s delivered to our sales organization:

4. Tell customer success managers when a client is viewing competitors

Let’s say that one of your customers is browsing through a peer-review site for business software, like G2. They spend time looking at your page, your competitors’ pages, and they even look at the list of the best vendors within your software category. 

Clearly, this customer is reevaluating their relationship with your business. But how do you help your team become aware of this before it’s too late? By sharing the customer’s activity with your team through “Intent Bot”. Here’s how it works: 

1. You define the criteria for a customer at risk of churn and then use that as your trigger in Workato (an enterprise automation platform). For example, it can be a customer who views a certain competitor’s page in G2.
2. Once a customer meets your trigger condition, Intent Bot collects their information from 1st-party apps, like their account in your instance of Salesforce.
3. Intent Bot then messages the appropriate customer success manager (CSM) in your organization’s internal communications platform. The message includes the customer’s activity in G2 and their information in your 1st-party apps.

Now your CSMs can identify which of their accounts are at risk of churn. And by using the information provided by Intent Bot, they can provide a personalized response quickly—which should significantly reduce the chances that your customer leaves. 

5. Combine intent and product usage data to pinpoint expansion opportunities

While intent data, in and of itself, is clearly valuable, it’s utility stretches further when combined with other types of information, such as product usage data. 

For example, say an account is adding users who (based on their titles) might be interested in one of your products that don’t fall within their current license. In addition, according to your intent data, contacts at the account are consuming content that’s related to that product. 

You can use these insights to trigger an automation where the assigned CSM receives a notification in Slack; within the message, they can not only learn about the new users and the account’s score for a specific content topic(s), but also add the contacts to the appropriate Outreach sequence with the click of a button. In addition, they can access resources for selling that product, giving them all the more confidence in cross-selling to that account. 

What are the benefits of intent data?

Here are some of the top benefits it provides: 

1. Identify buyers faster

With this type of data, you can better understand when a lead is sales-ready. This allows you to reach out to them sooner—which makes a world of a difference on your close rate. Interestingly, a survey by Bombora with Ascend2 revealed that 56% of respondents primarily utilize buyer intent data to identify new target accounts. 

However, as we proved earlier, having it on-hand doesn’t guarantee a timely reaction. Later in this page, we’ll show you how you can use it to ensure that your team responds quickly. 

Related: 4 ways to ramp up your speed to lead 

2. Personalize your outreach

Intent data also allows you to understand what, exactly, the lead is looking for. 

Were they viewing a specific product page in your site? That’s a clear sign that they’re interested in that product. Were they reviewing your competitor’s page in a software review site? They may be seriously considering them over you. 

The more you understand your intent data for each lead or client, the better you can respond. And a better response not only gives you a higher chance of getting your message viewed, but it also increases the chances that you deliver on your desired outcome—such as retaining the client or selling them another product. 

One use case will be using Intent data to enhance sales and marketing areas, from ad copy to landing pages and sales outreach subject lines. About 52% and 49% of B2B marketers have used it to deliver targeted ad content and personalization. 

3. Prioritize your efforts effectively

Using buyer intent data, you can make an informed decision on who you respond to first. 

For example, if a lead is browsing through several of your competitors’ pages in a software review site, while another lead reads a few news articles in your industry, you should respond to the former first—as they’re more likely to make a purchasing decision sooner. About 50% of tech leaders are already ahead of the game and are using it to align their goals with sales and marketing alignment. 

Related: 3 reasons why RevOps is critical for your organization 

4. Engage accounts earlier on

By the time a prospect submits your demo request form, they’ve likely already done extensive research on different vendors in the market and have come to their own conclusions on the platforms that are best for them. And while your sales team might be able to influence their opinions during the demo call (and during any subsequent meetings), their opinions are harder to influence at this stage. 

You can influence prospects more successfully by using intent data to help reps reach out earlier. For example, as a prospect begins researching topics related to your platform, the assigned sales rep can get alerted and reach out to contacts at that account with a message—along with relevant content from your site—that might interest them. Once you have this prospect, you can join the other 40% of B2B sales leaders to enrich your CRM and better predict customer’s intent signals. 

5. Perform account based marketing successfully 

By using intent data to both understand the specific topics accounts are interested in and where they are in their buying journey, your team is better positioned to engage each account intelligently; this can be including them in the most relevant nurture sequence, showing them personalized ads, etc.

In a survey, over half (56%) of respondents indicated using these data to recognize potential new accounts, establish relationships and eventually turn them into paying clients. 

Challenges of using intent data

Intent data is great! It gives you insight into your leads. However, the reality of intent data doesn’t always translate to our expectations. 

Here are a couple of challenges one could encounter when using intent data. 

1. Noise/Quality

By noise, we mean irrelevant and inaccurate data points in your data.  

Intent data, especially third-party data, can be outdated and inaccurate, not giving the real picture of what is happening. Also, since it isn’t tailored for you, it might work for another industry but is just flat-out wrong for your industry or/and use case. 

Solution: Since timing is crucial, use real-time or near real-time intent data sources. Vet and implement filtering techniques like keyword, frequency, contextual filtering, and quality scoring to ensure the data’s reliability. 

2. Lack of visibility

Just because the data is user data doesn’t mean it has any real buying decision value. Yes, the data was gotten from the user. But most of the time, the data is vague and just top-of-funnel-level data. Thus, it is unreliable for a campaign and can be misinterpreted. 

Solution: Consider your business use case when buying intent data. Prioritize explicit intent data as they are more complete with intent and contextual information, unlike implicit data, which, though valuable, lacks details and context. 

3. Ethics and data privacy

Data privacy and ethical regulation are not things that you should not be compliant with. These regulations have strict rules for collecting, storing, and using user data. Thus, it is important that you seek consent from your lead and users while also ensuring that your external data providers get consent. This will ensure that you do not violate any privacy regulations and are not in conflict with other terms of service. 

Solution: Be familiar with data governance policies. Your platform should also have a clear privacy policy, a cookie banner, and user-friendly settings. Lastly, when patronizing third-party platforms, ensure that they get consent. 

4. Data Integration

Whether you get the data internally or externally, you will need to find a way to integrate it into your tech stack. Thus, it is important to deal with any data silos, interoperability, data format, or any data integration challenge, limitation, or issue you might have. 

Solution: Have a strong data integration plan in plan. It is also important to have a robust data integration platform like Workato. 

Final thoughts

Intent data not only presents you with an opportunity to influence business results, but it also lets you provide better experiences for your prospects, customers, and employees. To use this type of data effectively, you’ll need to integrate your applications, build out workflow automations, and leverage bots. Once your organization does this, it’ll have a competitive advantage for years to come.