What is Intent Data and How Your Business Can Use it to Grow?

Last updated on September 20th, 2023 at 01:27 pm

How to know if your prospects are ready to buy or who is looking for a solution you can provide? While there could be other ways to find that out, intent data is one of the sure-fire hacks you can use to good effect. Let’s see what intent data is and how you can leverage it to increase business growth.

What is Intent Data?

Intent data is an in-depth collection of the online behavior, purchase intent, web content consumption, and other digital activities of people and companies. It strengthens your go-to-market strategy by letting you know who is actively considering your solution or is in an active buying cycle. It also reveals which of your targeted prospects and customers are researching a competitor.

Intent data is also a great way to cut through the marketing noise and quickly reach audiences that are likely to buy from you, even before they express their purchase intent. It is collected from both first-party and third-party data sources. The combination of first and third-party intent data provides detailed insights into target audiences, like their propensity to buy.

Top Ways to Use Intent Data to Boost Your Business Growth

1. Target prospects at the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT)

The ZMOT is the stage or moment in the buying cycle where a potential customer researches a brand or product before deciding to make a purchase. It’s the point between a stimulus, where the potential customer sees an ad and gets alerted about a brand or product, and the First Moment of Truth, where the potential customer selects a product over another or decides to make a purchase.

With intent data, you can reach prospects at their exact ZMOT and effectively target them using content and messages that are contextually right and highly relevant. Intent data works great to identify and prioritize active prospects and accounts and engage them at the right time to turn them into buyers.

With real-time insights, intent data enables you to get your brand or product in front of the right audience and take action when it matters. This can be done at the exact time when prospects are looking for solutions or comparing different options. Statistics show that intent data can help with up to 300% marketing budget ROI and 4X pipeline expansion.

2. Reach ABM-focused accounts early in their decision-making

Leverage intent data to intercept qualified prospects even before they land on your website or contact your company. Besides staying top of mind with prospects most interested in you, intent data allows you to reduce the wastage of resources, time, and effort on those who aren’t ready or less likely to buy.

This is particularly helpful in account-based marketing (ABM), where you only focus on best-fit, high-value accounts. Note that third-party intent data will be used by over 70% of B2B marketers by the end of 2022 to engage buyer groups in selected accounts or to target prospects.

If you use events in ABM, intent data can enable you to create content around topics with high intent or search scores. Furthermore, you can use it to start relevant and engaging conversations with attendees and optimize your ABM event outreach.

Intent data also helps take a data-driven ABM approach leading to low churn rates, shorter sales cycles, and more effective account-based nurturing. In addition, you can use intent data to create personalized ABM content that’s tailored to the interests, needs, pain points, and expectations of target accounts and key stakeholders within them.

3. Get the most bang for your advertising buck with precision targeting

Use intent data to drive higher ad targeting and messaging accuracy and optimize your social, search, and programmatic advertising campaigns for increased ROI. Intent data adds as an extra layer of accuracy and optimization to your B2B advertising campaigns. It powers your ads to reach the right audience and specific segments with resonating and timely messaging at different stages of their buyer’s journey.

A case study reveals that a SaaS marketing platform improved its lead conversion by 414% and website engagement by 7X after using Company Surge® Intent data in their LinkedIn advertising campaigns. They also saw a 498% increase in CTR, a 79% reduction in CPC, and a 54.5% decrease in CPM.

Intent-based advertising is an intelligent strategy to directly target accounts that are already showing interest in you, researching products similar to yours, or considering a competitor. This gives you a leg up on the competition and enables you to reach prospects before your competitor reaches them.

4. Improve the web experience for unknown audiences

Your business website may be visited by people and companies that you have information for, mainly through first-party data. While you can optimize your website for these visitors, you can’t do much for your target audiences visiting third-party websites. You don’t know what type of content your target accounts visiting other websites are consuming. You’re also unaware of their online behavior, purchase intent, interests, or keywords they’re searching for.

Here’s where intent data makes the difference in enhancing the web experience of unknown visitors or those you can’t keep track of. Web personalization, customized landing pages, relevant CTAs, and tailored content are some of the benefits of using intent data to deliver impactful web experiences.

Intent data also allows you to have a wider view of known visitors by gaining deep insights into their behavior on websites you don’t own and across the web.

Wrapping Up

Businesses that don’t use intent data are losing valuable opportunities to crush their sales, marketing, and revenue goals. Did you know? Intent data is leveraged by 80% of B2B brands and has positively impacted the business by over 70%.

By helping you better align your content and messages with the specific challenges and interests of target audiences showing buying intent signals, intent data powers you to gain more B2B success. Furthermore, you can use intent data to allocate resources and prioritize engagement for ideal leads and prospects who are actively searching you online or in our market.

Now that you know how to use intent data, start implementing the four powerful strategies discussed here and witness the impressive business growth you’ve been longing for.