The first episode of Hell-Bent on Intent is live! This series explores the world of intent data – what it is, how it’s used, and how marketers can leverage it to power their account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns. 

In this episode, Tapajyoti (Tukan) Das, CEO of LeadSift talks with Tina Bean, KickFire co-founder and VP of Strategic Partnerships, about KickFire’s unique approach to first-party intent. This episode covers how KickFire is used to gather first-party intent data, how marketers use it to drive more leads to their sales teams, as well as some of the benefits and limitations of KickFire and the wider first-party intent data market.   

Here are a few key ideas covered in this episode: 

What is intent data?

In a nutshell, intent data is information about your audience that indicates that they are in the market to purchase your products or services. 

What is the difference between first, second, and third-party intent data?

• First-party intent data is information gathered directly from an owned digital property (ex: a website).
• Second-party intent data is first-party data collected by another company and bought, sold, or shared between other companies (ex: review websites)
• Third-party intent data is aggregated information from third-party sites that indicate increased interest around certain topics (ex: increased content consumption or searches on a specific topic). 

What does KickFire do?

In short, KickFire tells you who is in the market for your products and services by identifying the companies visiting your website and engaging with your digital content. KickFire’s IP address intelligence™ uses proprietary algorithms and a curated firmographic database to allow you to look beyond anonymous IP addresses and identify the exact companies showing buying intent across your website.  

Why should marketers care about intent data? 

From a marketer’s perspective, you always want to get to your next customer quicker than your competition and pass on more warm leads to your sales team. Intent data is crucial in defining and reaching out to your real in-market buyers. 

What about visitors that fill out a form? 

These are fantastic – a visitor has voluntarily raised their hand and said they want more information. Unfortunately, only about 2-3% of your website visitors will ever fill out a form or book a demo. Intent data lets you take action on the other 97% of your in-market audience and convert them into warm sales leads.  

What are some limitations of first-party intent data and IP address intelligence?

• Audience size → Since first-party intent data is derived from owned digital properties; your audience is limited by the number of visitors your digital properties already have. For example, if your site only sees 500 visitors per month, your first-party intent audience is limited to those 500 visitors. 
• Geography → While there are no geographic boundaries to IP intelligence, in general, the more developed a country’s internet infrastructure is, the higher the match rate. This results in relatively higher match rates in countries like the US, UK, and Canada, while countries with less internet infrastructure will tend to see lower rates. 
• ISP and public wifi usage → Without proper filtering in place, public wifi use can create unwanted noise in your intent dataset. This comes in the form of people accessing the internet through public wifi sources like an airport, hotel, etc. Now, when someone visits your website, their IP address will be matched to “Sheraton Hotel” or “JFK Airport.” However, good IP data vendors will provide ISP and wifi filtering, which allows you to filter out these types of traffic from your reporting and only focus on viable opportunities.

How has the rise in remote work impacted your technology?

The shift in remote work has been a tremendous boost for the quantity and quality of our intent signals. At the beginning of the pandemic, like most intent providers out there, we did see an initial dip in match rates as our algorithms were flooded with new data from remote offices popping up all across the nation. But that’s the beauty of machine learning – our algorithms quickly caught up to this trend and are now receiving stronger intent signals than ever.   

What are the steps to activate this data and engage with interested accounts? 

• KickFire identifies the account on your website
• The account interacts with enough website content to reach a lead score
• You target your ICP within the identified account using a third-party contact vendor
• You reach out with personalized messaging
• You also show retargeting ads to people at this company.

Want to learn more? Check out the full episode here: Hell-Bent on Intent Episode 1