What is Intent Data? Types, Benefits, and How to Use It for Maximum Impact

The ability to tell prospects that are merely browsing from those eager to buy is a vital skill for salespeople. Without it, they might waste time pitching to someone who’s never going to buy and miss a prospect that could easily be converted.

Previously, this ability relied on in-person hints, with body language being the main contributor. When you’re selling online, you need to use intent data, especially when you’re running a B2B operation with a lengthy sales funnel.

In this article, we’ll provide a detailed intent data definition, list the types you can collect, lay out the core benefits that intent data can provide, and explain how you can start taking advantage of it today by using intent data tools to get an edge over your competitors.

Let’s dive in!

What is intent data?

Intent data includes all the behavioral information you can collect about prospective customers. This data reveals their aims and, more specifically, how receptive they might be to whatever you’re offering.

The primary source of intent data is trackable online actions that display user interest in a topic related to your business. For example, someone downloading your brochure is a clear indicator that they have some awareness of your business. 

Someone marking a relevant topic as an interest on a social media platform is another indicator of intent, albeit a much less significant one.

Intent data empowers you to make better decisions about which leads to pursue and which to put on the back burner. Rather than wasting your time, you can focus on companies that are already researching what you offer and are more likely to be interested in hearing from you.

For the best results, it makes sense to gather intent data from all possible sources. The more data you can gather, the more confidently you can extrapolate the intent data meanings. So, let’s look at some of the possible data intent types that you could collect next.

What are the different intent data types?

Now that we’ve covered the meaning of intent data, we can dig into the various intent data types. 

Not all intent data is the same, and knowing the differences between the following types can help you decide which types (or type) you should prioritize:

First-party intent data

First-party intent data is gathered directly from a platform you control. Usually, this is your website, but it could also be a mobile app, online portal, or even a customer survey.

This is the absolute best intent data you can get for two reasons: firstly, you can only collect it when a prospect has engaged with your brand, indicating some level of interest, and secondly, you can fully trust it because it doesn’t go through any intermediaries.

Can someone visit your product page, read several of your blog posts, and download one of your white papers, yet have zero interest in buying from you? Technically, yes—but it’s very improbable. These are the leads that are most likely to pay off.

And, it’s in this category that Leadfeeder excels. By tracking which companies are visiting your site and what they’re looking at, Leadfeeder allows you to identify opportunities early and engage with them before your competitors.

Second-party intent data

Second-party intent data is simply any other company’s first-hand intent data, and there are two ways to gain access to this type of data. 

The first is to reach an agreement with a non-competitor company that engages with relevant prospects. The second is to purchase intent data from a provider that partners with numerous companies to offer a high-value database.

This type of intent data isn’t quite as useful as first-party intent data for a few reasons:

• You can’t know that the providers didn’t tweak it or limit it

• You can’t adjust the underlying events

• You can’t instantly apply insights to your own marketing and sales materials

Even so, it’s valuable data because it’s from real people engaging with relevant companies and you can pick through specific metrics instead of relying on aggregates.

Third-party intent data

Unlike the other types of intent data (which come directly from your company or similar companies), third-party intent data is gathered from large networks of websites and platforms by data aggregators. 

This data is mostly anonymized and compiled, meaning it offers broad macro-level trends instead of granular insights.

Data aggregators use various means to collect their data. They pull information from public sources, such as social media platforms, online forums, and blog comments, and look for patterns based on what’s said, who it’s said by, and when it’s said. 

They use paid advertising platforms to place trackers on many websites so they can track some of the information that would otherwise be unavailable to them (clicks, bounce rates, etc.).

They also use reverse IP tracking to glean trends across certain regions or businesses, but its value is inconsistent and questionable because IP addresses can be spoofed or hidden entirely. 

On the whole, it’s a bad idea to place too much confidence in third-party intent data because it’s cobbled together from so many sources of varying quality.

However, when it’s accurate, third-party data can give you a solid general overview of how large groups of people interact with a wide range of websites, including those of your competitors. 

For example, you might discover that most visitors to websites similar to yours spend more time engaging with blog content rather than product pages.

While this data is less precise in showing direct buying intent—since it shows collective tendencies rather than specific actions—it still has strategic value. 

Third-party intent data helps you understand broader trends and preferences within your industry, indicating which topics or content types are resonating most so that you can adjust your marketing accordingly.

How to use intent data

Once you’ve acquired worthwhile buyer intent data of the type (or types) most useful to your business, you need to make that acquisition worthwhile by using it to drive your sales and marketing strategies. 

So what exactly should that action look like? Here are some of the key steps you should take:

Make your account-based marketing more efficient

Account-based marketing (ABM) sees B2B marketing teams forgo targeting demographics and psychographics to target specific businesses, and it has the potential to return tremendous value. 

While good ABM can be done solely using an in-depth understanding of key prospects, adding intent data to the mix can prove transformational.

Imagine that you’re targeting a successful company that seems a perfect fit for your business, but you don’t have access to any intent data. Because you don’t know where you stand unless one of your contacts expresses a desire to move forward, you can end up reaching out on a semi-regular basis to keep gauging interest.

With a steady stream of sales intent data, however, you can turn your attention elsewhere and wait to see if your marketing efforts take effect. If you suddenly spot actions from that business indicating intent to buy, you can let your sales team get to work at the perfect time to have maximum impact.

With the website visitor data that Leadfeeder provides, companies can gauge the interest of target accounts, build segmented high-intent account lists, and react quickly with automated alerts to enhance ABM marketing.

Refine your content strategy

Content marketing is a serious challenge that only becomes more difficult as your business grows, and B2B content must be of higher quality than its B2C equivalent. So, figuring out the right content to produce is vitally important—but how exactly can you do that?

Industry research will pay off here, as will hiring capable and experienced copywriters, but intent data can also offer significant guidance. 

The more you learn about the topics and keywords your prospects are searching for, the more accurately you can create content that fulfills exactly what they need, earning their interest and attention.

Keep in mind that anticipating customer desires is the best thing a marketer can do, but it’s unfortunately all but impossible to do reliably. 

What you can do consistently, however, is identify the content on your website that target companies currently engage with. With Leadfeeder, you can identify companies that visit your website and see exactly what high-value prospects view. This helps you to gauge customer desires and optimize your content to fulfill them, positioning your business ahead of competitors.

Inform your product/service development

To keep up with changing market conditions and competitor actions, every business should periodically refresh its products and/or services, and intent data can inform development by indicating the things your existing and prospective customers care most about.

If you find that there’s been a steep rise in buying intent centered on a service feature you’ve previously viewed as niche, for instance, you may benefit from doing more to improve and promote that feature. 

This can also reduce the risk of your customers switching to rival services that are already working on that feature.

Run more effective retargeting campaigns

Retargeting is a potent tactic in the B2B world because it can take numerous instances of brand exposure to attract a prospect’s attention. 

With the intent data you collect from early brand interactions (pages viewed, items added to carts, etc.), you can keep track of budding prospects and pick the right times to retarget them with focused marketing.

Suppose you see that someone has repeatedly visited a page on your website that compares your product or service to that of a competitor. 

Knowing that they did so but didn’t opt to convert means that you can create and deploy a tailored ad that concentrates on making a case for choosing your brand over the other. This will result in you having an ad that’s much more impactful than a generic one.

What are the benefits of intent data?

Now that we’ve discussed tips for using intent data, we should discuss why it’s something you should dedicate part of your limited time and resources to. 

The central idea of intent data is that it helps you focus your efforts, but that manifests itself in a variety of ways, so let’s get into them. 

Here are the core benefits of gathering and using intent data:

Accelerates prospect identification

Unless your business offers something truly unique, the length of the B2B sales process makes it hard to compete if you don’t present your brand to a prospect at the earliest opportunity. 

Once a rival has started marketing to someone, they may not want to look elsewhere until they’ve reached a clear decision about that potential deal.

When used well, intent data works to highlight people worth pitching to before they’ve overtly shown interest. Whether you identify them through a page view or a social media post, you can be the first to engage a prospect, giving you a better shot at winning their approval.

Improves lead prioritization

The B2B sales funnel is long and winding with many stages along the way. Taking a close look at B2B intent data can help you infer which prospects are near the beginning of the funnel and which have already made good progress, allowing you to target the latter.

Think about how keywords change as people attempt to work their way through difficult decisions, for instance. 

Someone who searches for your brand alone might just be curious, but someone who searches for your brand plus “discount” may be considering buying from you if you can hit a price point that works for them, making them worthy of extra attention.

You can enhance your lead prioritization further by using a lead scoring model. This allows you to combine your intent data and other sources of relevant lead information to rank leads more broadly and focus on your absolute best leads.

Supports personalized outreach

Few people respond well to cold calls, cold emails, and generic sales pitches nowadays. We’re all bombarded with ads on a daily basis and most of them just wash over us with no impact. 

If you want prospects to take note of your outreach, you need to get it right, and that means personalizing your pitches.

Your gathered intent data can point you in the right direction by flagging things your prospects would like to hear about. If you know their pain points, for instance, you can emphasize the ways in which your solution solves them. It isn’t about doing anything too out of the ordinary—it’s about using what you know to optimal effect.

Facilitates sales and marketing collaboration

Sales operates downstream of marketing, and the persistent effort needed to land a B2B sale makes it essential to get the two departments working in sync. 

Helpfully, B2B purchase intent data can aid this by supporting a practical arrangement whereby your marketing team passes intent information to your sales team to ensure sensible targeting.

Without this sort of information and support, a sales team may start ramping up a scattergun outreach approach that can interfere with top-of-the-funnel marketing and pursue semi-mature leads that aren’t quite ready to convert. 

But, if the sales team is consistently given great qualified leads that offer a lot of value, it can slow down, get out of the way of the marketing team, and do what it does best.

To aid this alignment, we put together the Leadfeeder guide to intent data for marketers. It explains in more detail how intent data can unite sales and marketing teams for more efficient results.

Provides a competitive advantage

Very few businesses have completely unique products or services, and, if they do, they probably won’t for long. Your marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and you can’t just let prospects wait around until you’re ready to act. 

If you don’t reach out to them first, one of your rivals will, and being the first will frame their solution as the benchmark.

Intent data gives you a competitive edge by helping you contact leads before your competitors have noticed they’re in your market. The better you get at inferring intent from the data you’ve collected, the more quickly you can pick out a business that needs what you’re offering and put together a compelling pitch.

Choosing the best buyer intent data providers

If you’re looking for an intent data provider, you’re in luck, as there are numerous options on the market—but they’re not all equally useful. 

Instead of going with the first one you see, you should take the time to choose the one that’s best for your business, as it could make a huge difference in your long-term sales and marketing success.

The best way to make this decision is to think about certain key factors. Does a provider have an interface that suits your team? Can it integrate well with your other systems? Does it have all the features you’re looking for? And, can you trust the accuracy of its insights?

We have a blog post considering a few other buyer intent data tools, including Bombara and DemandJump, and there are yet more B2B intent data providers out there, such as Cognism. 

It’s a good idea to look through product details and reviews to see which option would be the best for your needs.

But, if you want our recommendation, we happen to have one particular tool in mind. Allow us to explain why Leadfeeder makes your decision an easy one.

Optimize sales and marketing with the best intent data tool

Naturally, we believe Leadfeeder should be your first choice. Unlike competitors, it concentrates on valuable first-party data, identifying the businesses that visit your website and giving you detailed insight into what they do there. This includes what pages they view, how often they visit, how long they spend on your site, and more.

Leadfeeder also gives you the power to filter the companies that visit your website in a variety of ways. For example, you can look for prospects based nearby so you can pursue in-person pitches. 

With its range of integrations (including Zapier), you can easily get it running alongside your other software and get information flowing smoothly.

If you want to complement that data with some broader third-party intent data, you can do so. Either way, you won’t regret opting for Leadfeeder. So why not get started now? 

With a free 14-day trial that doesn’t require a credit card, you can give it a try with no commitment and check it’s right for you before you finalize your choice. 

Request a free demo of Leadfeeder today and get ready to discover the transformative power of intent data.

Intent data FAQs

How is buyer intent data collected?

Buyer intent data is collected by accessing the systems that record and store the traces of online actions. 

Links clicked, pages viewed, webinars attended, keywords searched for, guides downloaded—these events can all be stored in data tracking systems and subsequently collected from them.

A content management system for a website, for instance, can store buyer intent data, as can a generic analytics system like Google Analytics. 

For optimal detail and accuracy, however, it’s preferable to use a powerful integrated system (such as Leadfeeder) that was designed to gather the most valuable first-party intent data and put it to good use.

There are also data aggregator services that collect second-party buyer intent data by reaching agreements with companies willing to share their information and/or gather third-party buyer intent data by using methods such as reverse IP tracking or placing trackers through advertising platforms.

How accurate is intent data?

The accuracy of intent data depends on its source. First-party intent data, which is what Leedfeeder collects, is the most accurate because it’s drawn directly from online interactions instead of being aggregated and anonymized from a large selection of sources.

Third-party intent data is useful for reflecting general trends, lining up unlikely leads from outside your niche, and helping you form an overview of the market around you. But, when you’re trying to identify top leads, it’s first-party intent data that you want.

Why is intent data important for B2B sales and marketing?

Intent data is important for B2B sales and marketing because it allows you to uncover potential buyers before they make direct contact with your sales team or even encounter your brand. 

That means you can start presenting your product or service much sooner than you otherwise could, putting you ahead of your competitors.

Sales teams can also benefit greatly from B2B buyer intent data when planning their outreach materials, as their knowledge of what prospects are looking for can help them build rapport with them and compose personalized sales pitches.