Marketing

What Is B2B Intent Data and How it Helps B2B SaaS Marketing and Lead Generation?

Every B2B SaaS Marketing Strategy should have “B2B Intent Data” included in regular marketing campaigns – B2B Intent-Based Marketing is one of the best methods to boost your marketing ROI and grow your lead generation. In this article, we will elaborate on how B2B Intent Data helps drive your marketing and lead generation.

The Definition of B2B Intent Data

Bombora defines “intent data” as data about B2B accounts and prospective buyers that is collected about businesses and the observed behavior on the web – specifically web content consumption – which provides insights into their interests and from this indicate potential intent to take an action.
Intent data provides information on the buyers’ interests and choices. It measures users’ engagement with online content and collects data about their activity on the website.
Intent Data offers a lot of value to marketers. When analyzed, Intent Data will help identify the target audience for your B2B SaaS better. Moreover, your marketing team will waste less time and money on attracting the wrong audience.

Intent data collects information from the following activities:

  • B2B SaaS reviews
  • The time on website pages
  • The upsurge in content consumption
  • Subscriptions to newsletters
  • Webinar visits
  • Opening of infographics
  • Downloads of whitepapers

This information is collected by measuring many factors including:

  • The number of visitors on your page
  • The amount of content engaged with
  • The type of content with the most traffic
  • The time spent on your product
  • The scroll speed

The Components of Intent Data

There are four main components of Intent Data collection.

  • Content. Your prospects need to find solutions to their pains in the content you provide. Intent data is collected from your blog posts, video content and online sources that lead to your product. The amount of time the user spends on your content indicates their interest in your B2B SaaS.
  • Metadata. To be analyzed by the intent data program, your content needs to be machine-readable in the first place. Descriptive metadata also gives your content the context necessary to gather the user’s intent. Various tags involving concepts, products, companies, and funnel stage add the necessary context to your content.
  • IP Address. When the user visits your website, their IP address and other data are saved via browser cookies. This allows you to see the company they represent as well as their role and email address indicated in their CRM.
  • Individual Tracking. The users who were saved in cookies are then tracked by their content journey to build an ‘interest profile.’ This allows you to assess their intent of buying your B2B SaaS product.

The Types of  Data

There are two basic types of intent data, namely first-party and third-party.

First-party intent data comes from a website or application, social media, CRM system, or subscription campaigns of your business. You can collect it from your customers via an online form. This information gives you an insight into what your customers like about your B2B SaaS, but you won’t know if they are using other similar products.

Third-party intent data is collected across various digital sources in a specific category. This information is of great value as you can assess the popularity of your B2B SaaS on the market. This data can be obtained from different websites in a particular category or aggregated datasets gathered by a third party, such as Bombora.

To get a comprehensive overlook of your B2B SaaS position on the market, you need to analyze both first-party and third-party intent data.

P.S. By the way, you may be interested to learn which B2B SaaS Marketing Agency can help you with marketing – and you came to the right place. Check us out at “Revenue, Inc.” 😉