When asked what drives them, the overwhelming answer from marketers – “more leads that convert to deals…” 

This is true across industries, from high-tech, software, financial services, manufacturing, IT services and many more. 

We spend days, weeks and even months planning our dynamite marketing campaigns but if they don’t produce leads that ultimately convert then we are not fulfilling our prime mission. 

In an age where data is the driver to every key decision made in business, marketers prove their worth by delivering for their company’s bottom line. 

So how do we do this today? Well we might do something like this: 

1. Write our marketing plan
2. Create our kick-ass content
3. Create beautiful landing pages
4. Create highly optimised emails and auto-responders
5. Spend hours researching keywords for our PPC campaigns
6. Possibly buy some data to fit with our persona research
7. Launch our campaign

Then what? We sit back and wait for leads to roll in, we watch our dashboards and get excited by every lead coming from PPC, blog posts, website forms, social channels etc. – you get the picture. Often this will be a slow and painstaking journey, with the ramp up in inbound leads taking a very long time. 

The reason? There is simply way too much content out there for us to be heard above the noise and more importantly of those prospects who do engage only a very small percentage are in buying mode. 

If we don’t generate traffic that is interested in buying our optimised campaigns are no better than a website with no content. The question we need to ask ourselves – are we getting in front of the right prospects at the time when they are ready to listen to what we have to say? Probably not! 

With Buyer Intent Data there is a more effective way to ensure that we get the high-quality leads that we need and to get our message in front of prospects when they are in the midst of the decision-making process or even in the middle of discussions with our competitors. 

These will be leads that our sales team will be well equipped to convert and allow us to more judiciously use our marketing budget, not needing to overspend on content or PPC, instead being more targeted about how we use it.

What is Buyer Intent Data? 

Buyer Intent Data (sometimes known as Behavioural Intent Data, Purchase Intent Data or Customer Insights) is not a new phenomenon. 

Put simply, it is information collected on a company or person’s engagement activities. 

Until recently, Buyer Intent Data has been mainly restricted to first party sources, i.e. online interactions like visiting your website and offline 
interactions like attending your stand at a trade-show. These are sources that you control and have access to. 

Truly valuable Buyer Intent Data comes from signals that are happening away from your website or landing pages. It is this data that is now becoming a highly sought-after commodity. 

When a potential customer is talking to your competitors, attending events that are in your field or talking about topics relevant to your products or services they leave signals behind that can be mined and turned into extremely valuable insights for marketers and salespeople.

There are several Buyer Intent Data providers who currently collect, analyse and sell data based on traffic to their website or content portal. 

For example, G2 (the premier technology review site) collects data on all visitors to their respective industry categories and will sell company level data to the vendors they have listed. 

This is great data, but it is not all encompassing. 

Firstly, it is restricted to traffic on the G2 site and secondly it is company level data only and not targeted to the person taking the action. If you are a G2 customer, we can help integrate your Buyer Intent Data into the Lead Onion platform and turn your company level intent data into useful contact level data. 

Many other sites which host a lot of excellent content will also provide data based on the traffic to those sites. Again, great data and very useful but restricted in the same way as G2. 

While a great first step towards finding out who is interested in your products and services, it requires further research, analysis and outreach to find out who the right contact is from the identified companies.

Want to learn more about Lead Onion and how to utilise Buyer Intent Data with automation? Download this guide to find out more!