Buyer Intent Guide & Use Cases
This guide covers everything related to Buyer Intent Data, including types and use cases. Before reading this guide, make sure you've explored the SourceForge Buyer Intent Data๏ปฟ section, and navigated to the "Buyer Intent" tab within your SourceForge product admin section.
Buyer Intent Data refers to the information collected and analyzed to determine a potential customer's readiness and likelihood to purchase a product or service. Buyer Intent Data is incredibly valuable for B2B sectors, including software companies. This data, rich in detail and analysis, reveals a potential customer's readiness to purchase. Its importance is crucial as it pinpoints exactly which organizations are interested in your products or services and their stage in the buying process. For B2B businesses, this isn't just useful information; it's essential for crafting effective market strategies and driving sales. This data transforms uncertainty into strategic insight, enabling companies to focus on the most promising leads with greater accuracy.
In the context of SourceForge: SourceForge provides you with data about which companies are researching your product on SourceForge. With SourceForge Intent Data, you can access data on which companies are viewing your product page, your categories, and your competitors.
1st party Intent Data is collected directly by your organization from your own digital assets. This includes data from your website, app, CRM system, or any other customer engagement platform. It's the digital footprint left by your prospects and customers when they interact with your brand online.
Characteristics:
- Highly Relevant: It's directly related to your products or services.
- Exclusive: Only your organization has access to this data.
- High Trustworthiness: Since itโs gathered from your own sources, the accuracy is usually high.
Uses:
- Personalized Marketing: Tailor your outreach based on specific interactions a customer has with your brand.
- Improved Customer Experience: Enhance the user experience on your digital platforms based on how visitors interact with your content.
- Sales Prioritization: Identify hot leads based on engagement levels with your resources.
2nd party Intent Data is essentially 1st party data that you acquire from another company, such as SourceForge, through a partnership or direct relationship. This is the data theyโve collected directly and are willing to share with you, often in a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Characteristics:
- Highly Targeted: Offers specific insights tailored through business partnerships, enhancing marketing precision.
- Mutually Beneficial: Often shared in a context that benefits both parties.
- Reliable: Sourced from established partners like SourceForge, ensuring data accuracy and trustworthiness.
- Exclusive Access: Unique to the partners involved, providing a competitive edge with non-public insights.
- Quality Depends on Source: The trustworthiness hinges on the data collection methods of your partners. SourceForge employs best in class technology and with 20 million visitors per month, offers one of the largest datasets of targeted Intent Data in the world.
Uses:
- Market Expansion: Access new segments or markets through partner data.
- Enhanced Targeting: Leverage partner insights to refine your marketing strategies.
- Collaborative Opportunities: Create joint marketing or sales initiatives based on shared data insights.
3rd party Intent Data is collected by large data providers such as Bombora and 6sense. These organizations aggregate data from multiple sources like websites, publications, and forums, and then sell this aggregated data.
Characteristics:
- Broad and Diverse: Covers a wide array of sources and industries.
- Varied Quality: The reliability can vary depending on the aggregatorโs methods.
- Accessible to Many: Often available to any buyer, not exclusive.
Uses:
- Market Trend Analysis: Understand broader market trends and behaviors.
- Lead Generation: Identify potential leads outside your existing network.
2nd Party Intent Data vs. 3rd Party Intent Data: Why 2nd Party Buyer Intent Data is Much More Powerful
When it comes to leveraging Buyer Intent Data, the distinction between 2nd Party and 3rd Party data is critical for businesses aiming to optimize their marketing and sales strategies. Here's why 2nd Party Buyer Intent Data often stands out as the superior choice:
- Higher Accuracy and Relevance
- 2nd Party Data: This data is collected directly from a trusted partner (e.g., SourceForge in this case) and provides actionable insights based on specific user interactions with that platform. For example, SourceForge's Buyer Intent Data reveals which companies are actively researching your product, related categories, or competitors on their site, ensuring highly relevant and reliable signals.
- 3rd Party Data: Providers like Bombora, Demandbase, and ZoomInfo collect data from a wide network of websites and digital touchpoints. While these platforms offer broad industry insights, the aggregated data often lacks the specificity and direct context provided by 2nd Party data. For instance, Bombora might indicate that a company is researching "cloud computing," but it wonโt tell you if theyโre specifically looking at your product or a competitorโs product within that category.
- Transparent Data Collection
- 2nd Party Data: Vendors know exactly where the data comes from (e.g., SourceForge users browsing a product category or competitor listings). This transparency ensures compliance with privacy regulations and builds trust with customers.
- 3rd Party Data: Providers like Demandbase or ZoomInfo gather data from a variety of third-party publishers and websites, but the sources are often less transparent. This can make it harder to verify the quality or origin of the data, potentially raising concerns about compliance with data privacy laws.
- Intent-Specific Insights
- 2nd Party Data: It provides direct insights into user behavior and intent within a platform where buyers are actively researching solutions. This allows vendors to tailor marketing and sales efforts to meet real-time buyer needs.
- 3rd Party Data: While platforms like Bombora or ZoomInfo can identify general intent signals (e.g., content consumption trends), they often donโt capture specific actions or intent within niche platforms. For example, SourceForge's data can pinpoint when a company is comparing your software against competitors, offering much deeper and actionable insights than broad third-party trends.
- Exclusivity and Competitive Advantage
- 2nd Party Data: Since it's shared directly by the platform (like SourceForge), access to this data is often exclusive to premium vendors. This creates a competitive edge by providing insights competitors may not have.
- 3rd Party Data: Providers like Bombora and Demandbase offer their data to multiple companies, which means competitors may be working with the exact same data. This reduces the ability to gain a unique competitive advantage.
- Better Integration Opportunities
- 2nd Party Data: It integrates seamlessly with your existing CRM, sales, or marketing tools because it comes from a known and specific source. This makes it easier to act on the insights.
- 3rd Party Data: Integration with platforms like Demandbase or Bombora can be more challenging due to inconsistent formats, data quality, and the need for significant customization to extract value from their broader datasets.
Conclusion
While 3rd Party Buyer Intent Data providers like Bombora, Demandbase, and ZoomInfo offer broad reach and general trends, 2nd Party Buyer Intent Data from platforms like SourceForge provides precise, actionable, and transparent insights that directly align with a vendor's objectives. For companies focused on targeted, efficient, and privacy-compliant strategies, 2nd Party Buyer Intent Data is the smarter choice.
B2B Intent Data provides insight into a web user's purchase intent; allowing you to identify if and when a prospect is actively considering, or looking to purchase your (or similar) products or solutions.
There are a lot of ways to use buyer Intent Data, which can be beneficial at various stages of a business's marketing strategy. Some of these processes are intricate and may take a couple of months to yield results, while others can start yielding results right away.
In today's B2B market, where advertising is pervasive, buyers are increasingly skeptical of marketers. They often prefer to explore their options independently, without assistance from vendors or sales teams. Typically, a buyer is 57% to 70% through their decision-making process before they even contact a sales representative. This trend makes it challenging for sales teams to influence decisions early in the process. As a result, B2B sales and marketing teams are turning to Intent Data to identify prospects who are in the early stages of research and forming buying committees.
The use of Intent Data varies widely, ranging from simple applications that can be implemented in under a week to more complex ones that may take several months to fully integrate. Given the dynamic nature of buyers and revenue opportunities, we advise a gradual scale-up strategy for rapid implementation and to establish an initial proof of concept.
Here are the most straightforward and fastest-resulting common use cases:
We understand the challenges faced by SDR and BDR teams. This particular application of Intent Data is designed for those dealing with high-volume sales scenarios. For instance, each member of a sales development team might have to navigate through an overwhelming list of 600 to 1,500 accounts weekly. Intent Data can help these teams focus on the most promising accounts (perhaps the top 25 or 75) showing active interest in your product or service category. This approach quickly aligns efforts, delivers measurable outcomes, and fosters internal advocacy.
Tips for quick implementation:
- Understand what your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is, and create segments in your SourceForge Intent Data portal.
- Exclude accounts already in your pipeline to truly evaluate the impact of Intent Data. This will ensure that any successes are genuinely new deals.
- Export your SourceForge Intent Data to a spreadsheet for easier sorting and filtering.
- Use the SourceForge Buyer Intent API๏ปฟ to connect your SourceForge Intent Data to systems and applications you already use such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and any other system that allows API connections.
- Use the SourceForge Zapier Integration๏ปฟ to connect your SourceForge Intent Data to over 7,000 apps and software with no coding knowledge required. This will let you push SourceForge Intent data to almost any platform you can think of including HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, Airtable, Google Sheets, Clearbit, ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg, and over 7,000 more platforms. View all Zapier/SourceForge Intent Data use cases.๏ปฟ
- Use the SourceForge Slack Integration๏ปฟ to get daily, weekly, or monthly CSVs of your SourceForge Intent Data delivered to you via Slack.
Your SourceForge Intent Data report shows you companies researching your solution on SourceForge, and you can filter this report by Company Size, Company Revenue, Company Industry, Company Headquarters, Buyer Functional Area, Buyer Location, and date last visited. So not only do you get information about the companies researching your solution on SourceForge, but you get a level of information about the individual Buyer as well.
Once your outbound sales team knows which companies are researching your solution, category, or competitors, your sales can start calling on these companies. And because you also get the Buyer Location, in addition to the company location, your sales team can find the right person much more easily.
Prioritizing outbound sales is an effective, straightforward way to start using Intent Data, facilitating its broader implementation. Once you see improvements, such as better meeting scheduling rates and more engaged prospects, it's time to transition from spreadsheets to an automated, ongoing system integrated with your CRM.
SourceForge Intent Data can be a gamechanger when combined with powerful ABM platforms such as 6sense and Demandbase.
6sense and Demandbase are powerful B2B marketing tools that help businesses understand and engage their target audience. 6sense leverages AI-powered insights to prioritize high-value accounts, while Demandbase analyzes website behavior and content engagement to identify potential leads. Both platforms offer ABM features and integrate with popular marketing tools, allowing businesses to personalize campaigns, prioritize leads, and improve marketing ROI.
To leverage third-party Intent Data with 6sense, simply use the native SourceForge 6sense Integration๏ปฟ, which will automatically sync all of your SourceForge Intent Data to your 6sense account daily. To leverage third-party Intent Data with Demandbase, simply upload your SourceForge Intent Data in a CSV file containing company domain names. The platform then analyzes the data and generates valuable insights about potential customers' interests and buying intent.
Supercharge your ABM efforts with SourceForge Intent Data.
After achieving initial successes with these straightforward applications, the path to expanding your programs and exploring more complex applications (like data science or customer success) becomes smoother. Progress by automating processes and creating a constant, account-based, Intent Data-driven ecosystem.
Account-based advertising often requires collaboration with agencies or platforms for manageable campaigns. However, if resources and budget are constraints, there's still potential for advertising. This application of Intent Data is ideal for those wanting to launch ad campaigns that generate warm leads for sales teams mainly handling inbound queries.
The main benefit of leveraging Intent Data with LinkedIn Advertising is to increase your ROAS (return on ad spend). You can advertise on LinkedIn without Intent Data, but without Intent Data, your ads are much more likely to be shown to people and companies who have no interest in your product or service. By uploading Intent Data to LinkedIn, youโre effectively making your ad spend much more effective since youโll be spending money only on people at companies that have shown interest in your product or category.
Getting started with LinkedIn account-based advertising:
- Create a LinkedIn 'Matched Audience' by uploading your target account list of companies that were researching your solution on SourceForge, and refine your audience with additional attributes like job title. For more granular target account lists, you can filter by companies that only viewed your product listing on SourceForge, or only viewed your competitorsโ listings, or only viewed a single category. If youโre looking to advertise to a much larger list, you can broaden your Matched Audience to include your entire SourceForge Intent Data set.
- Compare results by examining open and response rates against a control group or previous engagement rates. You can also measure lead conversion to sales or marketing qualified leads.
As the outcomes improve, scale up and automate this process using a marketing automation platform, like Marketo. Connect your contact list from high-intent businesses interested in specific topics to a LinkedIn targeting campaign, updating it weekly. This approach allows you to 'set it and forget it,' freeing up time to explore other Intent Data applications.
Sometimes, reaching beyond your existing contact database is essential, especially for important events, webinars, or new content releases. This Intent Data application aims to generate wider interest and leads for specific initiatives, thereby acquiring new contacts.
Steps to become an Intent-based lead generation powerhouse:
- Generate a list of high-intent accounts starting from your ICP or target list, selecting relevant Intent topics.
- Reduce the cost of contact acquisition by taking your targeted account list to a contact provider (like Clearbit, ZoomInfo, or DiscoverOrg) to get contacts for a more focused list. You can export your SourceForge Buyer Intent data to CSV and upload it to a sales intelligence or B2B data platform like Clearbit, Zoominfo, or DiscoverOrg to pull the right contacts from the companies that are researching your product, category, or competitors on SourceForge. You can also connect your SourceForge Buyer Intent Data your contact provider (i.e. Clearbit) via our native Zapier Integration๏ปฟ.
- Gauge the effectiveness of your leads by tracking click and open metrics of your promotions, and registered contacts if associated with a call to action.
This use case is also beneficial for field marketing. Identify the geography of most interested prospects or businesses in specific regions researching your topics.