Quality Over Quantity: Identifying High-Value Intent Data

As marketers, we’re all looking for a silver bullet to resolve our pipeline challenges, especially in a really tough macro-environment. For many teams, the search for solutions leads to too many tools promising the impossible. At best, marketing teams gain buckets of data that they then have to sort through to pull out insights. At worst, teams can become overwhelmed or even misinformed by this data.

From where I sit, it’s time for a return to quality over quantity when it comes to solutions and the insights they provide us with, particularly when it comes to intent data and the quality of the signals within that data.

What Is Quality Intent Data?

Before we dig into what determines the quality of intent signals, it’s important we’re clear on what intent data is. Purchase intent data, a particular category of behavioral data, helps organizations recognize real purchase behavior among individuals. It must help show go-to-market teams which individuals’ signals suggest actual interest in making a specific purchase, as well as a larger look at the market demand for a solution or product.

To identify high-quality intent data, look to answer these five questions:

1. Can you see the behaviors and easily understand them?

2. Where is the data sourced from and is that source trusted?

3. Do you know what content generated the behavior?

4. Does the behavior really indicate an impending purchase?

5. At the individual level, who is showing these behaviors?

The Connection Between Quality Signals And Valuable Insights

When it comes to intent data, quality is paramount. For example, most web traffic is created by general interest material and can be observed by any data aggregator. So, the data collected is not really useful to marketers (to learn more about their buyers), unless it is purchase decision support content. Quality signals should help predict an individual’s purchase intentions. With these insights, companies can benefit from insights into customer preferences and buying teams.

As the previous example shows, having the right type of content, specifically content that helps support buyers during their purchase decision journey, is essential to creating strong intent signals. This type of content is unsurprisingly hard to create, so the majority of marketing teams aren’t creating it on their own to gather buyer signals. Instead, organizations look to enterprise tech web properties that have the expertise and scale to produce content that produces high-quality signals.

Leveraging High-Quality Intent Data In Marketing

When marketers can utilize intent data created from high-quality purchase intent signals, they can apply insights to improve performance across all GTM actions. High-quality intent data shows insights at the account and individual level, so marketers can see where individual signals are coming from and details about that individual, such as role, topics of interest and content consumed. All of this can help to uncover buyer insights and trends and create personalized marketing strategies that are tailored to each customer’s needs.

At the end of the day, when marketers are looking to intent data for insights, it’s not the number of signals that matters most, it’s the quality of the signals that will give you an advantage.

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This article was written by Forbes and originally published here.

 

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