What Is Intent Data and How to Use It in Marketing and Sales

In a world where buyers do most of their research before ever talking to sales, guessing who's ready to buy just doesn’t work anymore.

Intent data eliminates that guesswork. 

You can use it across marketing, sales, and lead generation to spot which potential customers are showing interest in your product and turn anonymous signals into real revenue.

What Is Intent Data?

At its core, “intent” refers to how ready someone is to take action. Businesses track this by analyzing patterns across first-party channels (your site, your emails) and second and third-party sources (review sites, publisher networks). 

The more intense and relevant the activity, the stronger the purchase intent.

Buyer intent data serves two main purposes:

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   Shows which companies are actively researching solutions like yours in real time

   
   
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   Identifies account cohorts likely to convert based on high-value actions tied to your solution

   
   

Thus, intent data lets you focus on the accounts already warming up. It gives you the ability to strike while the iron is hot and launch a campaign targeted at those prospects.

Let’s say, for example, a CMO at a mid-market SaaS brand reads five articles about ABM platforms, watches a product demo on social media, and visits G2 pages for three vendors. Chances are they’re planning a purchase decision soon.

Different Types of Intent Data

Not all intent data is created equal. There are three main types: first-party, second-party, and third-party. Knowing how to use them together is what separates competent targeting from a top-tier pipeline.

Let’s go through each of them.

First-Party Intent Data

This is the engagement data you collect directly from your target audience. Site visits, product page views, content downloads, or clicks in your email campaigns.

How it’s gathered:

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  Visits to your website and time spent on key pages

  
  
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  PDF or whitepaper downloads

  
  
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  Webinar registrations and attendance

  
  
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  On-platform behavior (like using product tours or free tools)

  
  
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  CTA clicks in email or social media campaigns

  
  

How to use it:

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  Score leads based on their engagement behavior

  
  
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  Trigger retargeting or email sequences based on specific actions

  
  
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  Power demand generation campaigns with accurate behavioral insights

  
  
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  Prioritize high-intent segments for sales follow-up

  
  
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  Personalize nurture sequences and sales strategies

  
  
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  Pinpoint churn risks when activity slows

  
  
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  Reveal poorly performing blind spots

  
  

Example: An enterprise SaaS team notices repeated traffic from a single account to their integration docs. They match it with technographic data showing that the company fits their ideal customer profile.

They’ve also clicked through recent product update emails. Marketing adds them to a custom nurture sequence with tailored use cases. 

Finally, a sales rep jumps in one week later with a hyper-specific pitch with a relevant case study and books the demo.

Second-Party Intent Data

Second-party intent data is someone else’s first-party data, shared directly through partnerships or purchased via a platform. You’re essentially getting access to a known audience that has already shown specific behavior on another trusted domain.

It’s verified behavior, not anonymous traffic, and that makes it especially powerful for ABM.

Where it comes from:

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  Co-marketing platforms (e.g., G2, TrustRadius, Capterra)

  
  
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  Joint venture webinars and gated co-authored content campaigns

  
  
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  Direct data-sharing partnerships with media or event companies

  
  

Example: A SaaS company selling a legal compliance tool launches an ABM campaign targeting mid-sized ecommerce brands. They run a joint webinar with an ecommerce CMS and collect attendee details. The company then runs custom LinkedIn ads and outbound email sequences tailored to pain points raised in the webinar. This leads to three discovery calls in a week.

Third-Party Intent Data

Third-party intent data is collected across the web by external providers who monitor behavior signals on thousands of sites. These signals include content consumption patterns, search activity, and downloading industry reports.

What it helps you do:

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  Identify companies researching competitors or related keywords

  
  
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  Find high-fit accounts early in their buyer’s journey

  
  
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  Fill the top of your funnel with high-fit, high-intent leads

  
  
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  Spot surges in interest around specific topics (e.g., “workflow automation”)

  
  
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  Prioritize companies that match your ICP

  
  

Some platforms combine all three types of intent data to give you a real-time view of where every lead stands. 

Artisan, for example, has an intent data scraper that analyzes hiring news, press releases, LinkedIn posts, and firmographic, demographic, and technographic data.

Is Using Intent Data Legal and Safe?

Let’s get the big question out of the way—yes, intent data is legal to use. As long as it’s collected and processed responsibly, it’s both safe and compliant with major data protection laws.

Intent data originates from two primary sources: publicly available data sources (such as LinkedIn activity and job postings) and consent-based interactions (downloads, clicks, and form fills). 

Providers that collect this data do so within legal boundaries—often through partnerships with publishers, tools, or platforms where users have agreed to tracking via cookies or login-based tracking (activity monitoring when a user logs into a website or app).

What’s also important is that data providers don’t sell direct contact information like phone numbers and personal emails. You typically receive hashed emails or device IDs, IP-based household-level signals, etc. when you purchase intent data.

However, you still need to pay attention to the following regulations:

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  GDPR (EU): Requires clear user consent for tracking and profiling. Data must be collected via compliant cookies or forms, and users must be able to opt out at any time.

  
  
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  CCPA (California): Gives users the right to know what data is collected and how it’s used, and opt out of data sales. Transparency is mandatory when targeting U.S. buyers.

  
  
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  ePrivacy Directive (EU): Focuses on cookie use and online activity trackers. Companies must obtain consent before storing or accessing non-essential cookies used for intent tracking.

  
  

None of these laws ban the use of intent data. They simply require that the data be collected transparently, and that users have the option to opt out or not be tracked without permission.

Here’s what you can do to stay on the right side of the law:

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  Partner only with reputable intent data providers

  
  
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  Make opt-outs easy

  
  
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  Implement strict security infrastructure for sensitive data

  
  
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  Don’t over-personalize in outreach

  
  

For example, simple tools like “convert image from .png to .jpg” collect your data and ask for consent for it to be used in advertisements. 

Pay attention to that line in blue, where it says that the data will be shared with 131 vendors and 66 partners.

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How to Use Intent Data in Marketing and Sales

Intent data shapes your understanding of buyer behavior with a high degree of accuracy. Let’s explore how to integrate these insights into your sales and marketing strategies.

1. Use Intent Data for Lead Scoring and Targeting

Intent data reveals which prospects are actively looking for solutions or sends signals of how much they have researched a given pain point. Having this data helps you score and prioritize leads. 

For example, when someone visits your pricing page often or downloads a product guide, that’s a strong buying signal—so give them a higher score and move them to the top of your outreach list.

Notably, 93% of B2B marketers report increased conversion rates when leveraging intent data.

Another great example is when G2, a leading software review platform, used first-party intent signals from their CRM to identify high-fit accounts already showing interest in B2B buyer intent solutions. 

They created contact lists in HubSpot, synced them with LinkedIn, and launched a targeted marketing campaign promoting a webinar showcasing their product. 

This resulted in a 25% drop in cost per lead, a 45% landing page conversion rate, and 138 qualified leads generated.

2. Personalize Outreach with Relevant Messaging

Intent data lets you shape your cold outreach around your audience, so every email, ad, or landing page actually feels made for them.

Let’s look at how you can personalize your outreach. 

Email campaigns

Write subject lines and email content that match exactly what your leads are interested in. This simple tweak boosts open rates, drives more conversions, and even improves retention.

The cherry on top is that with the right tools, like Artisan’s AI sales agent Ava, you can quickly generate highly personalized emails and send them at scale. 

Outreach becomes 10 times faster, and engagement shoots up, with a 13% boost in positive replies across our sales team at Artisan.

You can also train Ava to sound like you, so all emails feel human-written. This powerful personalization feature means that you don’t have to sacrifice the all-important human touch when sending hundreds or even thousands of emails every week. 

Ad targeting

Run ads that match what your prospects have been researching. Intent data helps you target based on real interests, not guesswork.

For example, a dermatology clinic utilized real-time intent data to serve targeted ads to individuals searching for skincare solutions. By aligning the message with what prospects actually cared about, they hit a 25:1 ROI, surpassing all previous campaigns.

Landing pages

Customize content to reflect your prospects’ interests and stage in the buying journey.

Take Campaign Monitor, for example. They used dynamic text replacement on their landing pages to match each visitor’s search terms. If someone searched “email marketing automation,” that exact phrase showed up in the headline. 

This campaign resulted in a 31.4% increase in conversions, solid proof that aligning your page with user intent is effective.

Automate your outbound with an AI BDR

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3. Boost Sales with Intent Data

Intent data helps salespeople focus on leads with real buying intent. The result? Deals close faster.

Here’s a sample B2B sales workflow using intent data:

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   A prospect downloads a whitepaper, showing clear interest.

   
   
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   Your intent data platform flags this as a high-intent signal.

   
   
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   Sales gets notified and sends a personalized email focused on the pain point the white paper addresses.

   
   
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   The prospect replies, wanting to learn more.

   
   
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   A call is scheduled to dig into their needs.

   
   
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   Using actionable insights from the intent data, the sales rep addresses key pain points and closes the deal.

   
   

A great example is the collaboration between Siemens and Bombora (Surge). Siemens used intent data to mend a broken outreach process, where MQLs were ignored and sales cycles were too long.

By identifying B2B companies actively researching automation topics early, Siemens personalized outreach, improved targeting, and cut through incumbent bias.

This tactic yielded the following outcomes:

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  MQL acceptance jumped from 1% to 90%

  
  
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  99% drop in tele-qualification costs

  
  
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  80% lower CPC in ads

  
  
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  400+ new pipeline opportunities

  
  
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  94% win/loss ratio

  
  

4. Improve Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Campaigns

Using intent data in ABM strategies helps marketers spot and engage accounts that are actively showing interest, so efforts go toward the opportunities most likely to convert.

There are three steps to developing your first ABM campaign:

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   Early identification of in-market accounts: Monitor intent signals to detect accounts researching solutions in your vertical.

   
   
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   Personalized campaigns: Create relevant content and messaging that addresses the specific interests and pain points of these accounts.

   
   
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   Integrated marketing efforts: Align sales and marketing teams to coordinate outreach efforts for a cohesive, omnichannel approach.

   
   

Okta ran an ABM campaign and achieved a 24-fold increase in conversion rates, demonstrating the power of targeted, intent-driven marketing.

Lucid, a visual collaboration software, also achieved remarkable results after running a full-funnel ABM strategy on LinkedIn. They targeted senior decision-makers at Fortune 1000 companies with video content for top-of-funnel engagement and retargeted interested leads with account-specific ads.

Here are the results of Lucid’s campaign:

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  72% decrease in cost per lead (CPL) year-over-year

  
  
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  120% increase in lead generation completion rate

  
  
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  229% increase in brand awareness 

  
  

5. Influence Content and SEO Strategy

Intent data isn’t just for sales and outreach. It’s a goldmine for content and SEO teams, too. 

By tracking the topics your target accounts are researching, you can align your content strategy with what buyers actually care about.

Say, for example, that third-party intent data shows that a cohort of your target accounts is increasingly consuming information about data automation.

You could create a gated white paper titled "How to Automate Data Privacy Compliance in 2025." Then promote it via paid LinkedIn ads to these accounts in exchange for an email address. 

Expect higher download rates, more qualified leads, and better content ROI because you’re solving the exact problems your prospects are actively researching.

Ready to Use Intent Data Ethically and Effectively?

Intent data tells marketing and sales teams who’s in-market, what they care about, and when to reach out. Used in the right way, it’s more than just useful information. It’s your competitive edge.

But remember, with great data comes great responsibility. Respect consent, stay transparent, and always focus on delivering real, relevant value, not just aggressive pitches.

An AI tool like Artisan meets all these criteria. Artisan handles the complexities of gathering intent data and sending personalized outreach to in-market accounts, freeing you up to focus on closing deals. 

Automate your outbound with an AI BDR

Meet Ava—your AI BDR who handles prospecting, outreach, and follow-ups, so your team can focus on closing.

Book a Demo