What Is 1st-Party Intent Data?
1st party intent data refers to the data that a business collects directly from its website or other digital properties. This data includes information about user behavior, such as page views, click-through rates, time on site, and other engagement metrics. 1st party intent data also includes data that users provide voluntarily, such as email addresses, contact information, and preferences.
The advantage of 1st party intent data is that it is owned and controlled by the business itself, which means it is often more accurate and reliable than third-party data. Since businesses have direct access to this data, they can use it to gain insights into the behavior of their customers and improve their prospecting and outreach strategies.
Some examples of 1st party intent data include:
- Website analytics data, such as Google Analytics, that tracks user behavior on a website
- Customer relationship management (CRM) data, which includes information about customer interactions, preferences, and purchasing history
- Prospecting data, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates
- Social media analytics data, which includes data on user engagement, reach, and sentiment on social media platforms
- Content Analytics: tracking the open-rate, heatmaps, and scroll rate of your informative content and sales content as well a who has been interacting with the content.
The Value of First-Party Intent Data
Intent data is focused on whether a prospect is ready to buy, indicating their stage in the buyer’s journey. High-intent prospects seriously consider their options and are prepared to pay for a solution. This knowledge can help sellers tailor their messages and CTAs to encourage action rather than just raising awareness. Detecting intent data early can give your sales team a head start, allowing them to reach out earlier in the decision cycle and beat competitors to the punch.
Intent signals come from behavioral data, the record of a prospect’s actions related to your product or solution, and contextual data, which provides more insight into their journey and decision-making process. Behavioral data includes website activity, free trial signups, content downloads, webinar attendance, email engagement, ad engagement, responsiveness, and online research. Timing, frequency, and patterns of behavior are also important to understand.
Tracking customer behavior can provide valuable insights into product usage and customer satisfaction. This information can also reveal cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
Leveraging Buyer Engagement With Intent Data Within Sales
Out of all the visitors to your website, only a small percentage, typically between 10-15%, have the potential to become qualified leads. You can leverage first-party intent data in your sales pipeline to maximize your chances of converting these visitors into customers. Gathering this level of data on visitors, such as the content they have viewed, the time they have been on your website, the opening of your emails, etc. You can prioritize those in a high-intent phase in your sales efforts. For example, if a visitor has been looking at a specific product page on your website, they may be considered a high-intent lead. They should be given more attention and resources to help convert them into customers.
As a seller, you strive to gain as many meetings as possible and get a good sense of buying intent from activities from prospects. By monitoring the behavior of prospective buyers who visit your website, you may employ tactics such as sending them specific information or adapting your message toward the prospects.Frequently, companies will try to leverage lead scoring to limit the manual analysis of these interactions. Resulting in more meetings and higher close rates.
You may miss out on potential leads without visibility into their engagement. That’s why leveraging buyer intent data is crucial to identify the prospects most likely to engage in a buying cycle based on their content consumption habits.
Prioritization of Your Prospects on a Personal Level, Not an Account Level
When prioritizing prospects, using first-party intent data can be a game-changer for businesses. While third-party data can provide valuable insights into industry trends and market share, it is often less accurate than first-party data since it comes from external sources. On the other hand, first-party intent data comes directly from your website and digital properties, giving you a more accurate picture of your visitors’ behavior and intent.
By leveraging first-party intent data, businesses can prioritize their prospects personally rather than just at an account level. This means considering each prospect’s behavior, interests, and preferences rather than just looking at their company size or industry.
Let’s say you run a software company providing business project management tools. By analyzing your first-party intent data, you may discover that a particular visitor from a large enterprise company has repeatedly visited your website’s features page, pricing page, and case studies section. This visitor may have also downloaded one of your whitepapers or signed up for your newsletter.
Based on this information, you can infer that this visitor is a potential buyer interested in your project management tools and is researching to evaluate if they are a good fit for their company. With this knowledge, you can prioritize this individual prospect and engage with them through personalized outreach efforts such as targeted email campaigns, tailored demos, or a direct call from your sales team.
Furthermore, you can use the insights gathered from their behavior on your website to personalize the communication and create customized messaging that directly addresses their pain points and concerns. This personalized approach can significantly increase the chances of converting this prospect into a customer, potentially expanding the opportunity for an enterprise-level sale.
In this way, leveraging first-party intent data can help businesses prioritize their B2B prospects based on individual interests and behaviors, leading to more effective sales processes and driving more revenue and growth.
Content Gating, Sharing the Right Content With the Right Prospect
Content gating is a strategy that involves offering premium content such as whitepapers, case studies, or webinars to your website visitors in exchange for their contact as their name, email, and company information. This strategy can help businesses generate new leads for their sales team. However, it can also help businesses identify intent across your prospects, helping you to drive more conversions.
By leveraging intent data, businesses can optimize their content-gating strategy by identifying the specific content prospects have been looking at on their website. This information can help businesses personalize their follow-up actions and ensure they share the right content with the right person in their outreach.
For example, you run a digital marketing agency with a gated whitepaper on the latest SEO trends. Using intent data, you can identify prospects who have been spending a lot of time on your website’s SEO blog section and have previously downloaded other SEO-related content. These prospects will likely be highly interested in the SEO trends whitepaper and may be more willing to provide their contact information in exchange for access.
Furthermore, with the help of intent data, you can personalize your outreach by mentioning the specific content the prospect has been looking at on your website and offering them content that is highly relevant to their interests. This can increase the likelihood of them engaging with your outreach efforts and ultimately becoming qualified prospects for your business.
Intent Data Driving Pipeline Movement and Automation
Intent data can significantly drive pipeline movement and automation for your business. By leveraging first-party intent data such as website behavior, email engagement, and content consumption patterns, sales teams can automate their sales efforts to move prospects through the pipeline more efficiently.
For example, you run a B2B software company and have identified a prospect who has repeatedly visited your pricing page and opened and replied to several of your cold outreach emails. Based on this intent data, you can create an automation trigger that automatically moves this prospect to the next stage of your sales pipeline, such as scheduling a demo or assigning them to a sales rep for follow-up.
In addition, intent data can enroll prospects in cadences specifically tailored to their interests and behaviors. For instance, if a prospect has been viewing content on your website related to a specific feature of your software, you can enroll them in a cadence that includes more information about that feature and its benefits.
By leveraging intent data to drive pipeline movement and automation, businesses can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their sales process. Automating certain tasks based on prospect behavior can save time and resources while providing a more personalized experience for the prospect.
Prospects Coming Back After a Time; Do You Catch Them or Not?
Old prospects returning to your website can be a valuable opportunity for businesses to re-engage with them and convert them into customers. By leveraging first-party intent data, businesses can detect when old prospects are back on their website and immediately take action to get back in touch with them.
For example, let’s say you run a human resources business and a prospect who you’ve been in contact with returns to your website after a few months; if you don’t add a signal or a trigger to notify you when this happens, you would completely miss the opportunity to re-engage with them and put them back in your pipeline.
Conclusion
By analyzing 1st party intent data, sales teams can better understand their prospects and create more targeted and effective sales outreach, ultimately leading to increased engagement and revenue. Leveraging first-party intent data also helps teams prioritize their prospects more easily, leading to more effective sales efforts. Content gating combined with intent data can be a powerful strategy for generating new qualified prospects and driving conversions. By offering relevant, high-quality content and personalizing your outreach efforts based on prospects’ interests and behavior, you can increase the effectiveness of your sales efforts.