The use of buyer intent data has been growing consistently year over year. But, for all the benefits that it provides, only 25% of B2B companies are actually leveraging it on a regular basis.
Without buyer intent data, your sales team is spending dozens of hours (maybe even hundreds) going after poor quality and unverified leads every week. Imagine all that time being leveraged in the right direction. That’s exactly what sales teams and marketing teams can do with qualified leads identified by buyer intent data.
Buyer intent data is essentially a group of interrelated data points that can give us clear insights into what a given user is thinking or about to do. For example, if someone has been reading about integrating a live chat platform into their website, it can be assumed that they are or will be looking for one in the near future. If you sell chat platforms, a lead like that becomes infinitely more valuable than a randomly selected website user.
How Is Buyer Intent Activity Collected?
The idea behind buyer intent data is to gather as much useful profile information about any user as possible. This means combining various types of data and a variety of data sources.
Some of the conventional buyer intent indicators can be:
- Time spent on your blog
- Subscribing to email newsletters or blog updates
- Number of links clicked within a single session
- Number of sessions over a few days or weeks
- Requesting a demo or a call-back
These and other types of data points can be aggregated together to form buyer intent profiles of your website visitors, for example.
Of course, getting such information unfiltered wouldn’t be of much use to most sales and marketing teams. They need to use special buyer intent tools that can analyze raw data and translate it into actionable insights and suggestions.
The best buyer intent tools are able to syndicate various types of content, identify the most promising leads, compile databases of potential customers with the strongest engagement, and even do buyer intent scoring, which is much more effective than simple lead scoring.
Where to Get First and Third-Party Intent Data on Potential Buyers
With all the data points required to create a coherent and actionable image of your audience, you might wonder where all the buyer intent data comes from?
As outlined in our recent article on sourcing and using buyer intent data, there are three types of data sources: first-party data, second-party data, and third-party data.
First-party data is all the information you can gather internally, using all your properties. For example, when someone visits your website, clicks on your CTAs in email newsletters, or replies to your survey. This type of data is often the most limited in scope but also the most accurate.
Second-party data essentially represents commissioned research or buying someone’s first-party data directly. Although second-party data is rarely discussed, it can be a good source of buyer intent information if the company you’re getting it from has a similar target market.
Third-party data is everywhere and includes information sourced from website cookies, IP addresses, public and private databases, crawlers, ads, and more. Companies can usually purchase third-party data or subscribe to third-party data updates. Quite often the access to third-party data is built into an app that automatically analyzes it to output a certain result.
For specific examples of what kind of tools you could use to source buyer intent data, take a look at our top picks from 2021.
With all this data collected, how does it actually assist your target audience in their buyer journey?
How Intent Data Leads to More Purchases from Prospective Customers
Understanding your ICP’s buyer journey is key in leveraging buyer intent data in the most effective way. Visitors on your website are all on different “terms” or timeline when it comes to making a purchase. This means that the messaging used to attract them should be different as well. Giving a prospect who’s done all the research and is ready to buy some basic demo introduction to your product might cause misalignment and even kill that sale.
Buyer intent data can help you:
- Identify opportunities at the right stage in their buyer journey. Wouldn’t it be great to know when any given prospect is considering your product?
- Improve lead scoring. For most sales teams, finding high-quality leads is the number one priority. Buyer intent data gives you insights to help make the right call.
- Fine-tune your ABM. With information provided by buyer intent tools, you can see not only the readiness of each lead but also their value and which company they come from, which will greatly assist your account-based marketing efforts.
- Refine your marketing content. Using buyer intent data, you can identify gaps in your content strategy as it applies to the buyer journey. Create new content and make your marketing funnel even more effective.
- Adjust your ad targeting. Knowing who, when, and why someone visits your website, you can recalibrate your ads to better match the actual profile of the website visitors.
There are, of course, other benefits to using buyer intent data, from analytics to sales reporting to brand positioning. Once the data starts coming in, you’ll discover new use cases for buyer intent over time.
How to Use Content from Buyer Intent Data in Your Messaging
As you can see, there’s a lot of data that exists out there. Some of you might be able to source on your own (first-party data), and some of you might be able to buy (third-party data). But how do you go about integrating everything together? The answer is Lift AI.
Lift AI is the only solution to effectively integrate first and third-party data to accurately determine buyer intent for every single visitor on your website.
Using a unique machine-learning model, Lift AI leverages billions of data points and 14 million sales engagements and applies all that learning to processing live interactions on your website to assign real-time buyer-intent scores.
Unlike other buyer intent tools, Lift AI works on every single visitor (up to 98% of them can be anonymous). As a result, it can identify visitors with the highest buyer intent (about 9% of the overall traffic).
Lift AI integrates directly into any enterprise chat platform of your choice and connects the highest-scoring visitors directly to your BDRs while sending medium and low-scoring ones to a nurturing bot or a self-help guide.
The results are incredible. A recent study showed Drift customers converted 9x more conversations to pipeline using Lift AI. PointClickCare saw a 400% increase, for example, while Formstack grew its chat pipeline by 88%.
See how much pipeline you could expect with Lift AI with a free trial which includes a Revenue Opportunity Assessment for your website. You only need to paste a JavaScript snippet on your website to get started.
Use Lift AI and get all the benefits of integrating first and third-party data without spending any additional time creating and applying complex data models by hand.
