5 Best Buyer Intent Data Tools

TL;DR:

• Marketing budgets have decreased, making it crucial to target qualified prospects.
• Buyer intent data helps understand prospects' interests and next steps.
• There are three ways to source buyer intent data: internal, external, and intent data tools.
• The top 5 buyer intent data tools are Letterdrop, ZoomInfo, 6Sense, Cognism, and Bombora.

Marketing budgets dropped from 10.4% of company revenue in 2022 to 7.5% in 2023. It's more indefensible than ever to go after prospects that simply won't convert.

In order to increase the efficiency of your marketing spend (and your valuable time), you should be using intent data to actually help you identify qualified prospects that are in the market to buy (or accounts in orbit) and go after them with the right campaigns to convert them. But this is becoming increasingly difficult to do with existing customer data alone.

That's where intent data tools come in.

What is Buyer Intent Data?

Buyer intent data, also referred to as intent data or purchase intent data, is a collection of online signals on user behavior that help you determine:

• What topics your prospect is interested in
• What steps they might take next

This data helps you better understand your target audience's buyer journey, equipping you to make informed decisions on how best to engage the prospect and convert them into a buyer.

Some examples of buyer intent data include:

• The types of content they're consuming, such as webinars or blog posts
• The topics they're interested in according to the pages they visit
• Their demographic information such as job title, industry, and location
• Their social media activity
• Their search terms
• Their event attendance
• Their purchase history
• Their job or budget changes

How to Source Buyer Intent Data

There are three ways that you can source buyer intent data:

1. Internal (First-Party) Data: This type of data is collected from your own web properties, such as your website, mobile app, or customer relationship management (CRM) system. It includes information on user behavior, interactions, and engagement with your brand.
2. External (Second- and Third-Party) Data: External data is collected by other vendors or data providers. This data can be sourced from various channels, such as social media platforms, advertising networks, and data aggregators. It includes information on user activities, interests, and behaviors across different websites and platforms.
3. Intent Data Tools: There are specialized tools and platforms available that help collect and analyze buyer intent data. These tools use various techniques, such as tracking website visits, monitoring search queries, analyzing social media interactions, and leveraging machine learning algorithms to identify and predict buyer intent.

All three methods give you a deeper understanding of what your ICP is looking for, which allows you to tailor sales and marketing efforts to increase your conversion rates.

Top 5 Best Buyer Intent Data Tools

There are a lot of buyer intent data providers and tools out there.

After evaluating various lists of possible options, we've put together a list of what we believe to be the best intent data tools on the market, how to use their features to increase your conversion rates, and their pros and cons.

1. Letterdrop

Letterdrop is an AI-powered SEO assistant and end-to-end content marketing platform with an intent data feature built-in.

Most intent data is just around whether your buyer is looking at G2 reviews or on a pricing page.

But here's where Letterdrop stands out: it builds a buyer profile for everyone who has engaged with your web or LinkedIn content and shows you what topics they care about.

You can use the topical data from Letterdrop to:

• Personalize your outbound with content recommendations unique to that person's preferences
• Better your retargeting ads by personalizing them with content and topics your prospects actually care about

Pros

• Shows a blow-by-blow history of account engagement and what topics the prospect is interested in
• Provides contact information
• Integrates deeply into the rest of your content workflow
• Advanced SEO tooling includes search intent analysis and deep topical optimization

Cons

• This is an additional feature rather than a dedicated buyer intent tool

2. ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is one of the biggest intent data networks available in the market, partnering with thousands of content publishers to get access to over a trillion intent signals from B2B buyers every month.

Its customizable packages allow users to search for detailed information on over 50 million businesses, which get flagged as possible target accounts when they search topics or keywords related to your offering. Teams are even able to enrich existing customer data with new intent data and firmographics.

You can create automated workflows based on intent data and seamlessly fit these into your CRM, too.

Finally, it's also known for keeping all its data points fresh and up to date, with constant data monitoring and email checking, so you're always in the loop.

Pros

• Contact information
• Access to a large database
• Access to content info across teams and organizations
• Automated workflows to speed up your sales cycle
• Data is up to date

Cons

• Updates can be slow
• Contact information is sometimes limited

3. 6Sense

6Sense is an AI-powered business intelligence tool that also offers an intent data feature. It consolidates information from its proprietary network as well as from those of others like G2 and Bombora for this data.

You can use 6Sense to identify high-intent keywords relevant to your offering, as well as ones relating to your competitors to give you an edge.

It also gives you insight into low-intent opportunities that haven't yet entered the sales cycle.

Its predictive models use this intent data to predict the optimal time for you to reach out according to where the prospect is in the buyer funnel, which takes the guesswork out of the equation.

Pros

• Contact information
• Find opportunities before they enter the funnel to give you a competitive edge
• Deep behavioral insights
• Predictive AI is helpful in targeting accounts at the right time
• Great segmentation features

Cons

• A slow or buggy user interface
• Occasionally outdated information (especially when integrated with a CRM with historical information)

4. Cognism

Cognism is a leading business intelligence tool that takes intent data from a tool like Bombora and dynamically enriches this data with the contact information of key decision makers in the B2B space. You can use this data to create lead lists and develop buyer personas.

This combination, along with the ability to track over 12,000 intent data topics, allows you to pinpoint in-market accounts and intercept them in their buyer journey. This can help beat out your competitors.

Pros

• A live database of contacts which reflects when people leave a job
• Plug-and-play integrations with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot

Cons

• Contact information is occasionally incorrect

5. Bombora

Bombora is a robust buyer intent tool with a large and exclusive database — 70% of its data is proprietary.

The tool is able to track a prospect's journey across approximately 4,000+ websites to help you find accounts that are actually ready to buy. You're able to filter down your search to trending and relevant keywords and topics for better targeting.

Pros

• A large integrations pool (HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe, Triblio, and more)
• An exclusive database
• Shows you the topics your prospects are searching

Cons

• No access to contact information
• There is a steep learning curve

Knowing How to Distinguish Valuable Intent Data from the Noise

Mason Cosby from ScrappyABM let us know how to tell the difference between intent data that's actually of value versus intent data that just adds to the noise.

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Which Buyer Intent Data Tool is Right for Me?

In a time of budget cuts and layoffs, it's important to invest in a buyer intent tool or feature that:

• Actually helps you target high-intent accounts
• Can give you more "bang for your buck" in terms of other use cases

Of course, the tool you choose comes down to your individual goals and your budget. Hopefully, this list has helped you come closer to a decision.

We're always thinking about how we can make your marketing processes more efficient by giving you the right tools and data at the right time. Feel free to reach out to us anytime for your intent data solution.