Even worse, many of those leads may not even be a good fit for your product or service in the first place. Without clear signals of intent, it’s easy to spend time chasing the wrong prospects while missing the ones who are actually close to converting.

The solution is already on your website: buyer intent data. This data reveals which visitors are actively showing buying signals, often in ways most companies overlook. If you’re not using it to guide your marketing and sales efforts, you’re likely missing high-value opportunities hiding in plain sight.

Note: Leadfeeder is the buyer intent data tool you've been waiting for. Sign up for a free trial, install our tracker, and we'll start sending you buyer intent data today. 

What is B2B intent data?

Buyer intent data refers to actions that indicate a specific prospect or site visitor is interested in making a purchase. 

They aren't researching their options or just looking for blog posts — they know what they need and are almost ready to buy. 

Buyer intent data are specific signals users send that tell your sales or marketing team they're ready to close the deal. 

Requesting a demo or signing up for a trial are the most obvious examples of buyer intent. 

Depending on your industry and marketing models, many other actions can be intent signals, for example: 

• Visiting your pricing page after reading two to three blog posts 

• Downloading a pricing comparison guide

• Using the site search to search for "free trial" or "demo." 

How intent data works 

Intent data has two essential parameters: WHO is doing the action, and WHAT that action is. 

Guide to Intent Data for Marketers

Intent data is the future of ABM! Learn how to use intent signals to engage the right companies and grow your revenue with this guide →

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When both of these align with your definition of buyer intent, you have a solid prospect. 

Here's an example of why the who and the what matter: Say two visitors take the same action — they visit your pricing page. 

Are they both ready to buy? Maybe. Say one visitor is in your target audience and has read three blog posts in the last two days. 

They are likely ready to buy. But based on the IP address, you can tell the other visitor works for your main competitor. 

It's clear that the competitor isn't going to make a purchase; they're probably just checking how much you charge. 

Remember, how you define an intent signal (i.e., a signal that someone is ready to buy) can vary by industry, market, and the length of your sales funnel. Defining intent signals for your business is crucial to using buyer intent data. 

How to use buyer intent data in B2B marketing  

Online behavior, such as what content visitors consume or what campaigns they engage with, provides clues about where they are in the buying cycle. 

How can you use that data to improve your marketing? Here are a few ways buyer intent data can turn you into a marketing superhero. 

1. Filter out unqualified leads

Tired of wasting time on leads that aren't ready to buy? Tracking buyer intent data helps filter out companies that don’t fit your target personas or reach a minimum level of engagement. 

For example, someone might hit the right engagement level but live in a country you don't service.  

In Leadfeeder, you can create Custom Feeds that take care of lead scoring for you, automatically filtering out companies that don’t fit your target personas or reach a minimum level of engagement. 

Once a lead comes through your feed, you can further qualify them using automation Leadfeeder’s Custom Feeds. 

For example, someone may visit your product page — but if they also visit your jobs or careers page, chances are, they don’t have buying intent.

You can use automation to filter those leads out: 

2. Inform your content marketing efforts 

If you’re interested in switching software or finding a new vendor, you’re probably going to ask around or – more likely – go straight to Google for a bit of recon. 

Buyer intent data from your website can tell you what blog posts buyers read before they leave, what case studies are most likely to result in a conversion, and even how many pages buyers usually visit before conversion. 

That information can give you insight into the types of content your buyers are interested in, so you can create more of it — ultimately increasing conversions. 

3. Pull more insights from outreach campaigns

The average cold email campaign gets a response rate of less than 1%. But, that’s not the end of the story — at least it doesn’t have to be. 

If you’re leveraging the right buyer intent software, you can still gain valuable insights into how prospects behave upon receiving your email. 

For instance, software like Mailshake can track key campaign metrics, such as email open rates and click-through rates, so you can see which subject lines or content are relevant to specific stages in the buyer’s journey. 

When users reply, you can trigger automated follow-up emails using pre-made templates designed to further identify their buyer’s intent and assign them a lead score. 

4. Leverage machine learning and AI

To stay ahead of the digital natives, B2B companies need to be where the consumers are – anytime, anywhere. 

Chat solutions like Intercom are easy to install, relatively affordable, and start directing traffic and gathering buyer intent right away. 

You can opt to use live chat to provide a personal experience or automate the process with an Intercom chatbot that welcomes users, asks questions, and then routes them to the appropriate sales team when they are ready to buy. 

5. Personalize your marketing efforts

Marketing personalization isn't just a buzzword — it's an incredibly effective strategy that helps businesses deliver exactly what consumers want. 

In fact, 80 percent of customers are more likely to buy when brands offer personalized experiences. 

Buyer intent data can inform your personalization efforts. Say a company came to your site through a Mailchimp email campaign about a new product or service. 

You can ensure your outreach messaging aligns with the email copy and landing pages. 

Here’s another example: If a lead visited your CRM Integrations page, they’re likely interested in whether or not your product works with their favored CRM. 

You can include that information in your sales pitch to make it more relevant to the things that particular lead cares about. 

How to collect and use B2B buyer intent data  

Google Analytics can tell you how many people visit a particular page, whether they came from social media or your blog, how long the average visitor spends on your site, and even how many conversions you can attribute to a specific page. 

That’s all the useful information. But it doesn’t help you identify, target, or convert B2B leads. It doesn’t help you personalize and tailor your marketing efforts throughout the buyer’s journey. And it doesn’t offer any firmographic details.

Instead, B2B marketers and salespeople need a buyer intent software option like Leadfeeder that identifies site visitors (that's the WHO) and tracks onsite behavior (the WHAT part of intent data). There is a range of buyer intent data tools that can help you do just that. 

Leadfeeder lets you see who visits your website and provides data on the organization that visits. 

You can see who is the best contact at that company, including their email and social profiles. 

In addition, Leadfeeder tells you what pages they've browsed. For example, you can see they spent four minutes watching a video or one minute on your pricing page. 

You can even see what page they exited on: 

That's valuable intent data you can use to improve your marketing campaigns or pass on to sales. 

You don’t have to stop there — you can add additional data points about demographics or the behavior of trial users in your product.

Using Zapier or a similar tool, you can collect all this data into one place—usually your CRM—and use it further.

You can also use Leadfeeder to qualify leads by using custom feeds, as I covered in the section above. 

For each Custom Feed, you can choose people to notify when new sales leads arrive — and you can notify them via email, Slack notification, or both. 

You can also connect Leadfeeder with your CRM software to automatically push new leads into your CRM and assign them to the appropriate salesperson. 

Once the right team members are notified about a new target account, they can head directly to Leadfeeder to get more details to inform their outreach. 

For example, if the visit details show that a company visited a particular service page on your website, that gives sales reps insight into which department of the company to reach out to or what solutions they are looking for.  

B2B buyer intent data is key to a more effective marketing strategy 

From qualifying leads to building more effective nurture campaigns, buyer intent data helps B2B businesses target leads more effectively, understand what target accounts want, and create more personalized messaging that drives higher conversion rates.

Using a buyer intent tool like Leadfeeder is key to unlocking B2B intent data hidden on your website and putting it to work in your marketing efforts. 

Guide to Intent Data for Marketers

Intent data is the future of ABM! Learn how to use intent signals to engage the right companies and grow your revenue with this guide →

Download

Note: Ready to pull buyer intent data from your website? Sign up and try Leadfeeder free for 14 days.