This article was updated 20th December 2024
Read time: 6 minutes
Today, nearly all B2B marketers have seen success when using intent data to achieve their goals, and it's not hard to see why. Intent data is the gateway to hyper-personalised, highly targeted marketing campaigns that deliver actual results. It's no surprise, then, that 65% of B2B companies plan to invest more in buyer intent data to overcome their lead generation challenges.
But, in the face of third-party data depreciation, understanding a prospect’s “intent” with your business requires more than just understanding their Google Search activity. Much more.
In this blog, we break down the difference between intent signals and high intent. We also show you the best practices to consider when identifying high-intent leads.
What are intent signals?
Intent signals, also known as buying signals, are the various data points collected about an individual and their behaviour. You can use these to indicate whether a person is a prospective customer of your business.
We say again: Signals indicate intent. Much like someone’s Google Search activity, it tells you whether a person is actively looking for your product or service. And like any radio signal, it can be clean and clear, or it can be distorted and garbled.
6 types of intent signal
There are many types of intent signals, and each of them could indicate different things about your potential customers:
1. Search intent signals
These signals are when an individual uses a particular key phrase or term in search engines like Google, YouTube and social media. These signals indicate that they're interested in a particular topic, product or service. Using analytics, you can assess these signals to identify similar search queries and ensure you're providing the answers they're looking for.
2. Engagement intent signals
Engagement intent is where people perform certain actions and interact with your business. These signals indicate a potential customer is interested in your brand in particular.
A few examples of this type of intent include:
- Engaging with your social media accounts: Follows, likes, shares, comments
- Interacting with your website: Visiting certain pages on your website frequently or for a prolonged period of time
- Participating in events: Attending events hosted by your brand or visiting your booth or talk at an event
3. Research intent signals
People display this type of intent in the information-gathering part of the process. They could be:
- Consuming written content (like articles, guides, reports or whitepapers)
- Reading comparisons and reviews
- Looking through FAQs, pricing and product pages
- Signing up for product demos and webinars
- Visiting competitor websites
- Spending longer periods of time engaging with your website
These intent signals can reveal what stage potential buyers are at in the customer journey, which can influence your messaging and communications approach.
4. Hiring intent signals
This intent signal indicates an organisation or individual is looking to hire or expand their teams. This can provide valuable context for your sales teams, equipping them with insight into a buyer's potential needs and priorities.
5. Technographic intent signals
These signals indicate the tools, software and technology an organisation has adopted or stopped using. This information can help marketing and sales teams identify complementary tools for their existing tech stack and reveal their technology gaps and priorities.
6. Company event intent signals
These signals are the newsworthy updates that could suggest significant changes or updates within a company that could influence purchasing decisions. For example, an organisation could be undergoing a merger or acquisition, have received significant funding or be launching a new product.
What is high intent?
High intent refers to the actions and behaviours that indicate a prospect has a high chance of taking a desired action. Users who display these sort of intent signals need little convincing to become sales.
These buying signals are a helpful way to identify leads with the best chance of converting, saving your marketing and sales teams time that might have been spent on less promising prospects.
Recommended reading: How to actually use B2B intent data to achieve your marketing goals
High intent vs intent signals: what’s the difference?
There's a stark difference between intent signals and high intent.
Intent signals rely upon multiple inputs to determine the true intention behind a prospect’s engagement with your business.
High intent, on the other hand, is like digging for gold buried in a mountain of rocks. You have to survey the land and analyse the various levels of sediments (or, in this case, signals). Once you get to the gold and excavate it, what you’re left with will pay you dividends.
Short of saying, “I'm looking to buy that product”, you can only identify high-intent leads through behaviours. And it’s these signals that imply action.
Our best practices for identifying high-intent leads
According to a 2023 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey from ON24, intent data is the top priority for B2B marketers. Why? Because highly targeted marketing campaigns based on high-quality, human-verified intent data deliver the best ROI.
But how exactly can you identify high-intent leads? Here are a few of our best practices:
1. Go beyond demographics and identify technographic and firmographic data
Firmographic data – like a prospect’s company size, current product offerings and total revenues – is vital for qualifying lead intent. Beyond this, you should also know exactly what tech stack each prospect relies on and what adoption rates they see. This technographic information allows you to qualify leads whose infrastructure aligns with what you have to offer.
Say you’re a procurement platform provider. You'll want to know which vendor management and accounting software your leads rely on. Then you can target those with integration capabilities. And you can prioritise your product development in line with tools your ICPs commonly use, but you can't yet integrate with.
2. Rely on AI and natural language processing tools to score intent signals
In today’s digital realm, there is a plethora of signals you need to capture and sieve through. Leaning on natural language processing (NLPs) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help score these signals is a great way to streamline analysis and automate early lead qualification.
With a tool like Pelago, you can rely on AI and NLP technologies to trawl through a lead’s associated assets and extract the key themes, topics and keywords. And this gives you the power to align your lead generation efforts for maximum engagement.
3. Understand online behaviour
Scroll velocity, asset downloads, dwell times, time on page. There’s a variety of data “signals” you can capture to help you better understand someone’s online behaviour.
Top-of-funnel asset downloads, for example, could signal an intention to learn more about solving a specific problem. A prospect downloading product guides and watching demo videos, however, could signal an active intent to make a purchase.
Monitoring the content consumption of your leads is a great way to understand and qualify their intent. And once you have a pool of targeted leads, you can use this list to inform your content outreach campaigns. And knowing where their interest lies, you can create personalised messaging to improve engagement.
True intent data is the gateway to successful lead generation
Intent signals provide excellent waypoints on your journey to identifying high-intent leads. Ultimately, one lonesome signal (like Google Search activity) provides little insight into the true intent behind someone’s engagement with your business.
By capturing and analysing an extensive database of intent signals, you can begin to paint a clear picture of a lead’s true intent. Armed with this, you can maximise your marketing efforts, increase your lead conversion potential, and deliver a consistent return on investment.
