In all the conversation of Intent Data, what’s most often left out is the idea that your sales and marketing data is already laden with intent signals.
Intent data is a signal. That’s it. It’s a great signal because it’s trying to fill the “blindside” of your data, the vast majority of the time your audiences aren’t directly engaged with you.
Having said that, 3rd party data isn’t a panacea. It suffers from three great issues:
- Latency – in the best of all situations, it takes weeks for an Intent platform to identify and score sufficient knowledge to determine in market behavior.
- Accuracy – it’s not always intuitive that the keywords or topics used by an audience reflect what you think they do. For example, if you’re an IT security company, it’s plausible that people researching physical security or home security might get wrapped up into the signals.
- Completeness – your 1st party insight, the knowledge that a target account is responding to your sales and marketing activities, is not included in Intent Data, yet is vastly more important to know.
If you’re primary marketing action is to subscribe to an Intent Data feed and trigger sales and marketing actions, you’ll always be a day late and a dollar short. By the time accurate intent data is found in 3rd party platforms, that means, by definition, that the account is already weeks into their research and evaluation phase of the purchase. This isn’t to say that 3rd party Intent Data is bad or wrong, it’s just not a complete marketing strategy.
