What is B2B intent data & how to use it
7 October 2024
0 min read
B2B intent data helps marketers and sales teams understand their target audience. It allows them to improve their strategies effectively.
While traditional demographic data provides a general understanding of consumers, intent data dives deeper into specific purchasing intentions. It shows what actions consumers actually take online. This helps businesses understand their potential needs and wants better.
This guide will show you how to use buyer intent data to enhance your marketing strategies, streamline sales efforts, and boost revenue.
What is intent data?
In B2B marketing, intent data is information about how your audience acts and behaves. This comes from interactions with your digital content.
It focuses on capturing intent signals that indicate a prospect is ready to buy. Signals might include their search queries, content consumption, and interaction with specific topics or products.
A study by Rollworks and Bombora shows that 96% of B2B marketers have successfully used intent data to meet their goals. Similarly, a Foundry report shows that over 90% of marketers find intent-based strategies helpful for:
Building audiences
Gathering contact-level information
Setting custom triggers
Integrating campaigns
Choosing data sources
By reviewing this data, B2B marketers can find prospects who are researching solutions like theirs. This helps them create more focused and effective marketing and sales strategies.
The different types of intent data
Buyer intent data can be divided into three categories: first-party, second-party, and third-party data.
First-party intent data
A company collects this data from its own digital platforms It shows how visitors and subscribers engage with a company's content, offering insights that are both immediate and actionable.
Examples include:
Website visits
Content downloads
Form submissions
By owning this data, companies gain several advantages. Real-time insights into what customers like and their buying signals help businesses improve their marketing strategies. This makes the marketing more relevant and personal for each customer.
For example, if a visitor frequently downloads content about a specific product, it shows they are interested. This allows marketers to send this user relevant promotions or information.
Second-party intent data
This data comes from another company's first-party data. This means the data is collected by teaming up with a business that sells its first-party data. It's a newer type of data and only available from a few sources.
This data is typically collected through user registrations, product interactions, and on-site behavior tracking.
Examples include:
Mentions on product review sites like G2 and TrustRadius
Sharing content on social media sites
Customer surveys
Second-party data isn't as reliable as first-party data. This is due to its indirect nature. However, it still offers valuable insights.
When used alongside first-party data, companies gain a more complete understanding of their audience. This combined approach enhances customer profiles, improving segmentation and personalization efforts.
Third-party intent data
Third-party data comes from outside sources, not just a business's website or digital platforms. This data provides a wider view of customer behavior.
Four data sources exist:
1. Search intent data
This reveals the topics and keywords that potential customers search for online. This information helps businesses understand the interests and needs of their audience.
This data is important because it shows what prospects are interested in. This helps businesses adjust their content marketing efforts.
The data is gathered from behavioral signals like web page visits, content downloads, and search queries. This helps companies find prospects actively researching their products or services, enhancing targeted marketing strategies and boosting conversion rates.
2. Firmographic intent data
Firmographic intent data focuses on identifying the characteristics and behaviors of companies, rather than individual consumers.
This type of data analyzes information such as industry, company size, revenue, and other company-specific attributes. It helps B2B marketers understand which businesses are most likely to be interested in their products or services.
Marketers can better target specific segments, create personalized messages, and increase engagement and conversion rates. This method is perfect for ABM campaigns, ensuring clear and relevant results.
3. Engagement data
Engagement data shows how audiences interact with a company's content, such as clicks, downloads, or shares. This type of data is collected from sources like social media, ad engagement, website traffic, and email engagement. It provides insight into how effectively content is reaching and resonating with the audience.
Engagement data helps businesses track and analyze the performance of their content marketing efforts. They can use this information to make smart choices about which content works best to engage potential customers.
4. Technographic data
Technographic data shows what technology a company uses. This includes the tools, platforms, and software they rely on. This is vital for B2B marketers, as it shows a company's tech capabilities, preferences, and potential needs.
By understanding the technologies a potential customer uses, marketers can better match their products to the customer's needs.
The benefits of B2B intent data
Understanding the benefits of B2B intent data can profoundly enhance a company's sales and marketing efforts. Some key benefits include:
1. Improved lead prioritization
Buyer intent data allows businesses to identify prospects actively searching for specific solutions. By recognizing these prospects, companies can prioritize leads that show a higher likelihood of engaging or purchasing.
This approach ensures that sales teams focus their efforts on high-intent leads. This increases the chances of successful conversions and optimized sales activities.
2. Enhanced personalization
By looking at audience browsing habits and purchase history, businesses can craft messages that match individual preferences. This personalization builds a stronger connection with potential customers, boosting engagement and increasing conversion rates.
Personalization strategies, using B2B intent data, help companies meet specific customer needs effectively.
3. More effective content marketing strategies
Intent data provides insights into trending topics and products that potential customers are interested in. With this information, businesses can develop content that directly appeals to the interests of their target audience.
4. Accelerated sales cycle
Using intent data, sales teams can find the best time to engage with prospects.
By reaching out with the right message when prospects are actively interested, the sales cycle can be significantly shortened.
5. Improved targeting for ABM campaigns
Firmographic intent data helps identify target accounts that are researching competitors. This insight enables businesses to fine-tune their Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns with greater precision. Targeting accounts already considering similar products enhances the success rate of B2B ABM strategies.
6. Increased ROI and conversions
Focusing marketing on leads who show interest in specific products helps businesses get a better return on investment.
By allocating resources to these high-intent leads, companies can maximize their marketing efficiency and improve overall ROI. This strategic focus ensures that marketing budgets are spent where they are most likely to yield results.
How to use intent data for B2B sales and marketing
Intent data is only valuable if businesses know how to use it effectively. Here are some key steps to take when incorporating intent data into B2B sales and marketing strategies:
1. Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)
The first step to is to understand your target audience. Find the characteristics, behaviors, and preferences of your ideal customer. You can do this by looking at data from past sales, website visitors, and current customers.
2. Find high-value leads
With B2B intent data, sales teams can prioritize leads based on their level of interest in a company's offerings. This not only saves time and resources but also increases the chances of closing more deals with high-intent leads.
3. Build targeted lists
With the data in place, businesses can identify target accounts that are actively researching similar solutions, providing valuable insights into potential customer interests and needs.
This information helps create targeted and personalized account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns. It ensures that the messaging and offers match the specific challenges and goals of each account.
4. Align content with audience interests
Use insights to create content that is relevant and engaging. This content should closely match the specific needs and desires of your prospects.
By understanding what they want, you can adjust your messages to meet their needs and preferences. This will improve their engagement and lead to more meaningful interactions.
5. Incorporate intent data into lead scoring
Lead scoring is a method used by sales teams to prioritize leads based on their potential value to the business.
This method involves scoring leads based on different criteria such as engagement, demographics, and past interactions.
6. Integrate with marketing automation tools
Integrating intent data with marketing automation tools enhances the effectiveness of campaigns by delivering highly targeted messages to potential customers. This ultimately increases engagement and conversion rates.
7. Retain and up-sell customers
B2B intent data isn’t only useful for acquiring new customers but also retaining and up-selling to existing ones.
By tracking customer behavior and interests, businesses can identify opportunities for cross-selling or introducing new products that align with their customers' needs.
8. Continuously analyze and adjust
Intent data should be continuously analyzed and incorporated into strategies to keep up with changing customer behaviors and trends.
With regular reviews, businesses can stay ahead of the competition and ensure their messaging stays relevant.
Integrating Exclaimer with B2B intent data
With Exclaimer, you can use intent data to personalize email signatures. This helps maintain consistent branding and show relevant content based on what the recipient wants. This then turns email signatures into a marketing tool for boosting conversions.
With Exclaimer's HubSpot and Salesforce integrations, you can access detailed recipient lists that sync with your CRM data. This allows you to segment based on factors like industry and purchase history. Using these insights, businesses can create personalized emails that align with each recipient's preferences and needs.
Whether launching new campaigns or nurturing leads, Exclaimer aligns your emails with your marketing strategy, maximizing engagement and conversion rates.
Sign up for an online demonstration or get yourself an interactive product demonstration today.