How to Use Buyer Intent Analysis Tools to Harvest Data

I’ve talked a lot before on this blog and elsewhere about search intent. When users perform a search on Google or another search engine (like YouTube or Amazon), they have a reason for doing so. Maybe they’re looking to have a question answered. Maybe they want to compare two companies or products. Maybe they have a more active intent.

The key to great content marketing is knowing this intent and matching your content to the intent behind the keywords you’re targeting.

Intent goes beyond just content marketing, though. In fact, in a way, the use of search intent in content marketing is an offshoot of the broader concept of using buyer intent for marketing and sales.

We’re all running businesses here, and while I mostly talk about content marketing, sales is also an important part of succeeding in business. Let’s talk about buyer intent!

What is Buyer Intent?

Given what I’ve already mentioned, you probably have a good idea of what buyer intent is already. But, for the sake of the post, let’s pin it down.

Buyer intent data is the overall name for information about your prospective buyers or users, which indicates that they may have an intent to buy. Buyer intent data can encompass a lot of different behavioral signals, and the more of them a user displays, the more likely they are to make a purchase.

Consider behaviors you might see, such as:

• Users visiting a page you set up that compares your product to your three closest competitors.
• Users clicking through and engaging with marketing and sales content on social media, as paid ads, or on your site.
• Users performing searches on Google with a commercial or transactional intent.
• Users visiting key pages like your features and pricing pages.
• Users signing up for and actively using your free trial.

Any one of these may not indicate a ton of buyer intent. I have plenty of free accounts with services that I use all the time but have no interest in paying for because I get all I need out of a free version. I also frequently visit pricing and feature or comparison pages for products I don’t have any interest in buying, as research for posts for myself or my clients.

But, in general, when a user performs one or more actions that have buyer intent attached to them, they’re more likely to be willing to make a purchase than other users who don’t make those actions.

Different Types of Buyer Intent Data

Buyer intent data can come from different sources, and that influences what kinds of data it is, how reliable and valuable it is, and how you can use it.

First-party data is data that comes from your own site and your own media. Your website’s analytics, your social media engagement audiences, and the behavior of subscribers on your email newsletter; when it’s within your ecosystem and is available in a dashboard you can access natively, it falls into this category.

First-party data is powerful because it’s unadulterated. It can be granular down to the individual, it can be surprisingly accurate, and in some cases even identifying. In fact, this is one challenge businesses are currently facing: privacy legislations like GDPR are placing limiters on the first-party data you can harvest and use.

Second-party data is data harvested by another company that they make accessible to you. When a review site offers access to data about users visiting your profile on their site, that’s second-party data. Technically, social media analytics fall into this category, but the free and unfettered access to those analytics directly makes me assign them more to first-party than second-party.

Second-party data can be very valuable because people tend to trust a third party in their decision-making more than they would trust you directly. It’s why those comparison sites and profiles exist in the first place.

Third-party data is effectively an aggregate of second-party data from various sources. This can be data from industry analytics tools (think Ahrefs or Semrush style but for business data), or it can be from data analysis firms who do independent research and sell access to those who are mentioned in it.

Ironically, despite this being the broadest perspective, third-party data tends to be the least useful because it’s often second-hand, indirect, or inferred. Often, the most actionable data comes from deeper in the process, while third-party aggregate data is more in the early awareness stages.

The lines between the three categories – and even the difference between second and third parties – are fairly individualized, with different teams and platforms defining them differently. Really, all that matters is the reliability of the source, the amount of information, and the way you can use it.

Why is Buyer Intent Important?

It’s hard out there. Economic downturns every handful of years, emerging technologies that invalidate entire industries, and easily established competition for all but the most niche or unique products; running a business is hard work.

We all hear stories about how running a business back in the day used to be as simple as having an idea and making it happen, that the novelty of a product could be enough to set up a billion-dollar corporation after a decade or two. But the world isn’t that small anymore. These days, you come up with an idea, and there’s a decent chance a factory in China is manufacturing it for AliExpress before you’ve even finished the prototyping.

There are other issues, too. A lot of businesses these days have way more people making decisions than they used to. You don’t have the luxury of winning over a CEO and making a million-unit deal; you have to win over a committee of 10-20 people sometimes.

Even for B2C, you have users who are much more savvy about their purchases, much warier about being scammed, and much less trusting in general. People want to do their own research – whatever that research entails – and are a lot more hesitant to spend money. It’s even worse in those downturns, where the money to spend is scarce.

Don’t forget, of course, that there’s an ever-present pressure not just to maintain sales but to increase them. If you aren’t growing 50% year over year, are you even successful?

Buyer intent data helps you with pretty much all of these. It helps you identify the audiences most likely to be receptive to your sales pushes, identify when to target people with money to spend and a plan to spend it, and do so with less waste, less time loss, and more efficiency.

What Are the Best Buyer Intent Analysis Tools?

Buyer intent data can come from all manner of sources.

One option is to buy data packages and reports from third-party data aggregators. Companies like Bombora, TechTarget, and Clay are examples that take behavioral data from a variety of sources, analyze it, and provide reports.

If you prefer to do your own analysis and just want raw data, you can also harvest it yourself using tools you install or access as web apps. Many of these function a lot like Google Analytics; something you install on your site, which harvests relevant data and gives it to you on a dashboard.

Some options include:

• Cognism, a sales intelligence platform meant for company and contact data. This is actually in partnership with Bombora, which I just mentioned. They’re primarily focused on B2B and help you identify when a business is searching for you or for a product like yours.
• Koala, a fairly lightweight platform meant for managing customer data. One of its main functions is not just to identify potential customers out of a sea of noise but to segment them and forward them to different sales reps with different specialties.
• Apollo, a full suite of engagement tools and sales intelligence features that help with prospecting, lead qualification, outreach, and the full sales process.

There are other sorts of buyer intent tools, too. For example, there are tools that help you convert your product into another source of data. These are aimed at SaaS and other -aaS services since you can’t very well track user behavior on a physical product without a whole IoT infrastructure.

You can also just work with second-party data sources like review sites. Places like G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, and others all perform this function. Any time you search for your product and find a listing on a site that compares it to a variety of your competitors, with user reviews, you can usually find a way to buy access to the data from that site.

How to Make Use of Buyer Intent Data

It’s one thing to harvest all of this data, but how do you put it to use? This is actually the biggest stumbling block; surveys show that over 70% of businesses harvest some kind of buyer intent data, but over half of those businesses aren’t using it.

How can you make use of the data? Here are some of the most common use cases.

Personalize Leads and Accounts

Perhaps the most common reason to use buyer intent data is to identify the specific groups and people who are ready to slip into the sales funnel and prioritize them. The more signals point to an account being ready to make a purchase, the more your sales team can prioritize efforts to reach out to them, to schmooze up to them, and to land that sale.

This is also the easiest of the options since it’s the baseline functionality built into pretty much every lead management and sales tracking platform on the market. Identifying and targeting the warmest leads is the baseline use case for buyer intent data.

Refining and Targeting Ad Campaigns

Buyer intent data is also great for optimizing ad campaigns. While you can’t really target an ad campaign on a specific individual or company, you can take data from prospective buyers and use it to refine your target audience as narrowly as possible.

Combined with the knowledge you gain of customers who make purchases, you can run remarketing and retargeting campaigns, you can run campaigns to lookalike audiences, and even refine down the keyword lists you use. On top of that, you can identify the specific pain points and USPs that make for the most effective ad copy for those audiences.

There are a variety of other purposes as well:

• Developing competitive messaging, specifically targeting the people who might snipe sales from you and reasons not to buy from them.
• Making use of multi-threaded outreach and marketing to low-key bombard leads with messaging from different angles.
• Identifying viable avenues for upsells and cross-sells from the audience you already know is interested – and knowing when being too pushy can turn them off.

All of this comes from harvesting data and knowing how to put it to use. Fortunately, many of the buyer intent tools are relatively easy to use, have guided experiences, or have account managers to help you out when you set it all up. From there, it’s just a matter of finding more effective ways to use the data you get and ways to find more useful data down the line.

Finally, don’t forget the cross-over between buyer intent data and search intent data for your content marketing. In many ways, the data is similar, and you can often use the information from buyer intent harvesting to align with your content marketing. When it works, it really works, and you’ll wonder how you managed without it.

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