Knowing buyer intent is one of the most underrated yet essential strategies of any company’s marketing strategy.

A B2B buyer intent data platform helps you automate and optimize this process by giving you essential insights into the customer journey.

In this article, we will tell you what buyer intent is and how it’s generated, the types of buyer intent data, and the tools you can use to get into your prospects’ shoes and convert them into buyers.

What Is buyer intent & how is it generated?

Buyer intent is the degree of willingness a person has to purchase some product or service within a given period. 

buyer intent

On average, 67% of B2B consumers are already halfway through the buyer’s journey. But, only a small portion of them engage with your sales team.

This means there are high chances you’re missing out on potential customers.

As per reports, 89% of consumers perform extensive research before purchasing. Therefore, it’s a good idea to hook potential customers when they research.

But how can you do this? 

The answer lies in Buyer Intent Data.

Buyer intent data is a cluster of behavioral signals used to identify potential buyers for your business.

It’s a type of sales intelligence that shows prospects active in the buying cycle and looking for a solution. 

Buyer intent data is a valuable resource for your sales and marketing team. 

To generate such meaningful data, intent data software analyzes many variable factors, such as:

  • Level of engagement with content
  • Number of consumers
  • Types of content consumed
  • Frequency of visit
  • Scroll speed of visitors

Other common behaviors that may signal buyer intent include: 

  • Multiple people from a specific company visiting your website
  • Prospects interacting with your newsletters or ads
  • Visitors asking questions on your live chat
  • Potential customers visiting competitors’ websites
  • Candidates attending similar industry events
  • People researching high-intent keywords online

To further refine this data, marketers use Predictive modeling – a technique used to predetermine future results based on historical data.

Fortunately, there are several buyer intent data platforms available on the web. These platforms study your buyer’s journey and provide your sales and marketing team with actionable insights.

But, we’ll discuss these platforms later in the blog.

First, let’s understand the types of buyer intent data and how they benefit your business.

What is buyer intent data?

Buyer intent data gives you essential insights into any visitor’s journey on your website. The data shows where the visitor landed, what they clicked, where they spent the most of their time, etc.

Types of Buyer Intent Data

There are two types of intent data, and each comes from different sources – First-party data & Third-party data.

First-Party Data

You can collect First-party intent data (Aka Internal intent data) within your organization. This data comes from your marketing automation platform, website, downloadable resources, etc.

The best part of collecting internal data is having complete control over what and how you collect it.

You can also actively use this data to nurture your customers’ buying intent to your preferences since you have complete control over it.

Third-Party Data

When it comes to collecting third-party data, companies outsource data from other B2B buyer intent data suppliers. Even though the data is not internally sourced, your team can still use it.

Intent data suppliers acquire third-party data through IPs or cookies on specific websites. 

Since it’s challenging to collect internal data, a popular way to collect it is to buy data from a licensed external provider.

Once you own the data, you can build a strategy to capitalize on this valuable resource.

Benefits of buyer intent data

#1. Increase in Prospecting Efficiency

Over 70% of businesses consider closing high-end deals their top sales priority.

increase in prospecting efficiency

But with 50% of prospects researching your content on third-party websites, it becomes crucial for you to know who is looking at what content.

This makes your sales team’s job easier and allows them to personalize their communication with leads.

#2. Improved Sales Outreach

Providing your sales team with intent data lets them engage with qualified leads earlier in their buyer’s journey.

improved sales outreach

That means no more waiting for the customers to complete an action or fill in a form.

Your potential customers spend 50% of their time researching on third-party platforms. You can track these customers’ behavioral intent and enhance your sales outreach with intent data.

Intent data can also improve the ROI of your B2B content efforts. You can see who is researching what about your solution and can target your audience with the exact content they are searching on the web.

#3. Upscaling Content Marketing Game

Buyer intent data can be beneficial for your in-house content marketing team. It can help you drive your content creation strategy and hook your potential leads at any point in their buyer’s journey.

content marketing

So, instead of wasting your marketing efforts on creating meaningless content for unqualified leads, refine your content strategy for purchase-ready customers.

Pro Tip: Target transaction search intent keywords and create high DA backlinks to get more traffic.

You can create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) with Buyer intent data. In this profile, you can collect all the intent data received from a specific customer. This makes a strong buyer persona for your sales team to pitch in and communicate efficiently.

Likewise, you can create personalized content depending on the phase of your buyer’s journey to keep them hooked and moving towards the end goal, i.e., Sales.

#4. Guide Sales & Marketing Messaging

Did you know that 72% of customers only engage with personalized sales and marketing messages? They will open your message only if it’s personalized to their specific interests and desires.

sales and marketing messaging

So, yes, Personalization is the key to generating high-end leads.

Back in the day, institutions had minimal information about their prospects. Hence, they used a conventional strategy for their sales pitch – Product information & Offers. 

With quality intent data, you get access to your customer’s slightest behavioral intent on the web. You can quickly identify their buying path and pain points. Thus, personalize your marketing content and sales pitches to build a better relationship with them.

#5. Reduce Churn Rate

A churn rate is when customers stop doing business with a company.

There could be something that’s turning your customers off. It might be because your product doesn’t meet their particular needs.

But what a delight it would be if you already have a list of those customers who are researching your competitors and are more likely to switch to them.

You can work on creating a strategy to retain them!

This is where buyer intent data helps you track intent signals from customers who show intent to switch services. It also identifies communication gaps and helps you retain significant customers.

Now that we have understood what buyer intent data is and how it benefits marketing.

Let’s get familiar with some of the market’s top buyer intent data tools. 

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo assists businesses with B2B buyer intent data and software to connect with and convert valuable leads.

zoominfo

Features

  • Extensive Outreach: Track intent signals from 300,000+ published domains and trillions of new keywords sourced from 90% of accessible devices every month
  • Real-Time Intent: Discover what your potential buyers are researching and connect with them earlier in their buyer journey 
  • Seamless Integration: Export your buyer intent data into CRM or marketing software to set up automated workflow effortlessly

ZoomInfo provides a 360 view of customers, prospects, and leading opportunities. It also offers a ZoomInfo extension for Chrome users to view prospects in your browser at any given period.

LeadFeeder

LeadFeeder helps businesses improve their lead-gen strategy by telling them who visits their website and why – All you need to do is install a single line of code into your website.

leadfeeder

Features

  • B2B Lead Generation: Get to know who visits your website and where do they spend time, track their behavior across your website by installing a single line of code
  • Advanced Customization: Easily customize your dashboard to work on your target audience using a selection of custom feeds and built-in filters 
  • Quick Integration: Integrate your business intelligence tools with LeadFeeder and generate better insights from buyer intent data

LeadFeeder collects data from publicly available sources and complies with GDPR laws. It isn’t surprising why 60,000 companies trust LeadFeeder’s buyer intent data. 

Bombora

Bombora is a powerful buyer intent data tool. So much so that most lead-gen agencies rely on Bombora’s raw data to fuel their tools.

bombora

Features

  • Quality Lead Generation: Use quality intent data to save time and bring in priority leads effortlessly.
  • Campaign Optimization: Boost digital engagements by running ads and emails to potential buyers generated from intent data collection
  • Churn Reduction: Understand if your existing customers have new needs or buying interests by monitoring their online research and keeping them engaged and happy

Unlike other intent tools, Bombora provides excellent global coverage. It sweeps all the digital breadcrumbs left by travelers on the internet. Hence, serving you with the best intent data.

DemandScience Intelligence

DemandScience Intelligence is a B2B data platform that provides intent data supply. 

demandscience intelligence

It also has instant access to 70 million global data records ready to download and use for your sales and marketing campaigns.

Features

  • Real-Time Data: Identify prospects who are actively researching a solution like yours and share a personalized pitch with them to get ahead of competitors
  • Qualified Leads: Specially designed algorithm to collect quality intent data to help identify people who are purchase-ready
  • Seamless Integration: Optimize your workflow with CRM and API integrations that bring powerful data to your fingertips

With DemandScience, you can track intent signals from over 6000 topics and 21M locations. What more can we ask for? 

Intensify

Founded in 2018 – Intentsify’s intent-driven software provides you with actionable and impactful buyer intent data. 

intensify

The software company is on a mission to bridge the gap between strategy and executive with quality intent data.

Features

  • Extensive Coverage: Aggregate multiple intent sources to ensure broader coverage of prospects’ research activities
  • High-End Accuracy: Automatically highlights meaningful signals verified by multiple leads to identify purchase-ready customers
  • Actionable Insights: Enable quick launch and optimization of intent-driven campaigns with actionable insights 

Intentsify’s intent activation software is bliss for B2B sales and marketing teams that rely significantly on intent-driven campaigns.

Lead411

Lead411 is a B2B marketing/sales intelligence software. With 96% accuracy, it’s a premier source for businesses to get verified lead data. 

lead411

Features

  • Growth Intent Triggers: Use intent data through a combination of sales intelligence and growth triggers to identify growth opportunities 
  • Advanced Search: Segment your potential customers based on various factors and create unique customer profiles with advanced search and filtering
  • Contact Enrichment: Set up automated emails, create custom email/SMS templates, add contacts to campaigns and call customers directly from the in-built dialer.

Lead411 has generated millions of leads for thousands of customers. It currently has a 450M contacts database within 20M companies across the globe.

HappierLeads

HappierLeads is a lead-gen tool that helps you turn your website visitors into buyers. It’s designed to provide real-time insights.

happierleads

Features

  • Identification: Identify anonymous website visitors whether they work from home or use their devices to research your solution
  • Advanced Segmentation: Create behavioral and demographic filters to segment the leads and automatically score them based on their web activity
  • Easy Outreach: Reveal and export email addresses, phone numbers, and LinkedIn profiles of your visitors to connect with them in real-time

Over 2000+ growing companies trust HappierLeads for generating hot leads with fresh and accurate data at their fingertips.

eCHO

180byTWO eCHO helps B2B and account-based marketers build account lists based on intent and engagement data.

echo

Features

  • Score and Prioritize Accounts: Prioritize accounts with an intent velocity that need more engagement with top-of-the-funnel (ToFU) advertising and personalized email messaging
  • Engagement Detector: Gain key insights into which accounts are more likely to convert or churn based on their engagement level for related topics
  • Broader Coverage: Get optimized and accurate buyer intent data from over 21M locations across the globe

180byTWO eCHO covers over 6000+ topics from 21M locations. It’s powered by more than 50 content consumption signals to get you fresh and accurate intent data in real-time.

Cognism

Cognism is another intent data platform that collects consent-based intent signals from high-traffic websites. 

cognism

It provides you with accurate intent data by comparing prospects’ interests in real-time with their interest in the past.

Features

  • Account-Based Marketing: Give your prospects a filtered account list built from quality intent data
  • Intent-Data Tracking: Keep track of where your intent data comes from and what it means; ensure it’s trusted, relevant, and collected from high-quality sites
  • Quick Integrations: Align your existing workflow with Cognism’s intent data tool to help your sales and marketing teams make better data-driven decisions

Cognism believes in a fully GDPR-compliant data sourcing process. It helps you build targeted audiences for paid social campaigns and prevents you from wasting dollars on accounts that will never buy from you.

Conclusion

99% of large enterprises use intent data in some way. Investing in buyer intent data tools is valuable to your sales and marketing team. These tools can track your prospect’s movement across the internet and evaluate the data to tell you how and when to target them.

The tools mentioned in the article provide you with quality intent data and are also a promising source of revenue growth for your company.

You may now look at some of the best outreach software.