Marketing today is all about data. Marketers track conversion rates for every ad campaign, open rates for every newsletter blast, the number of visitors for every webpage, the average value for every ecommerce order, and so on.
Quantitative and qualitative data gives marketers a sense of direction for future campaigns, pinpoints various issues early on, and makes it easier to identify leads.
Without precise data, all marketers can do is cast a wide (and inefficient) net over the whole target audience, hoping that a generic message would be enough to convert some of it into customers.
Imagine how that would change if marketers knew who is actually interested in their solution beforehand? They could create much more effective personalized messages and pass the best leads to the sales team. The reality is, they can — with buyer intent tools.
Why Use Buyer Intent Tools?
Buyer intent tools help you identify buyer intent by surfacing buyer intent data, which could include hundreds of data signals:
- Ad clicks
- Website visits from the same IP address
- The number of pages visited
- Email newsletter subscriptions
- Whether a demo was requested
Most buyer intent tools are able to analyze such signals for lead scoring — identifying the most promising leads out of all website visitors. A few buyer intent tools leverage third-party data to augment first-party data and improve the results. Exceptional buyer intent tools train their own machine-learning models on billions of signals to get the most accurate representation of high-quality leads on your website.
Buyer Intent Tools for Your Marketing Team
There are dozens of popular buyer intent tools on the market today. Most of them specialize in particular use cases (e.g. sales pipelines or marketing campaigns) or technology (e.g. Salesforce integration or live chat). Some are part of larger sales and marketing platforms, some integrate into the tools you already use, and others work as standalone solutions.
Let’s review five great and unique buyer intent tools that will help you identify the best leads for your business.
1. Lead Forensics
Lead Forensics is a B2B tool to ID-reveal a significant percentage of anonymous website visitors. You can see which companies your visitors are coming from, their contact information, which webpages they’ve visited, how much time they’ve spent on your website, and more.
You can use Lead Forensics’s data in various ways:
- Sort your visitors by companies or industries
- Add opportunities to your CRM
- Receive a notification when a specific B2B customer is on your support page so you can call them first
The way Lead Forensics works is by reading the IP addresses of your website visitors and comparing them to its proprietary B2B IP address database. While this method allows Lead Forensics to analyze a vast number of visitors at the same time, it doesn’t always guarantee the most accurate results.
2. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is another popular tool for identifying high-value companies that could turn into customers.
There are four steps to Leadfeeder’s process:
- Tracking how companies behave on your website at the account level, including remote workers, thanks to a database of static and dynamic IP addresses
- Qualifying real companies by disregarding ISP traffic and creating behavioral and demographic filters
- Finding the right decision maker to contact from a global database
- Automatically syncing new data with your CRM
Just like Lead Forensics, Leadfeeder works off its own IP address database, but creates more of a continuous flow and selects the most promising leads for you.
3. Cognism
Cognism takes another approach to helping your sales and marketing teams connect with customers. This platform provides you with the right contact information (emails and phone numbers) of the people who are most likely to buy from you.
To analyze buyer intent, Cognism uses hiring, funding, and other information about the company and integrates it with buyer intent data from other platforms (e.g. Bombora).
What’s unique about Cognism is that they carefully validate prospects’ contact information, while complying with all regulations (e.g. Do Not Call registry). This means that your marketing and sales will always have in-market leads to reach out to and be able to do so quickly.
4. KickFire
KickFire works on uncovering the buyer intent of your website visitors. It looks for potential customers actively researching your company, prioritizes the most engaged visitors, and even helps your marketing team approach them with the tailored messaging or retarget them with ad campaigns.
It’s also easy to integrate KickFire with the rest of your sales and marketing stack, from Marketo to Drift to HubSpot.
5. Lift AI
Lift AI is a buyer intent solution that combines powerful behavioral data analysis with automated simplicity that instantly boosts the capabilities of your sales and marketing teams.
The power of Lift AI comes from identifying real-time buyer intent by combining third-party and first-party data, and analyzing it with a unique machine-learning model, trained on billions of data signals and over 14 million live sales engagements.
At the same time, Lift AI automatically integrates with the chat tool you already use (e.g. Drift) and requires no complex configurations that you see with other apps.
The way Lift AI works is by identifying the buyer intent of all website visitors (even anonymous ones) in real time and connecting the top ones directly to your BDRs through chat. Lower-scoring visitors can be delegated to a nurturing bot or a self-help guide instead.
As a result, your team always gets to talk to leads that are most likely to buy. Companies that use Lift AI see up to 10 times increases in their chat conversions within 90 days. For example, Formstack increased its pipeline by 88%. PointClickCare — by 400%.
Try Lift AI free for 30 days. No credit card is required and you don’t need IT involvement to get started. Just copy-paste a small JavaScript snippet to your website, and Lift AI will automatically configure itself.
Now you have five examples of buyer intent tools you can work with today. Depending on your needs (e.g. integrations, pricing), you might choose different options. The best strategy here is to start with free trials, where available, and see the results for yourself.
