By Ray Estevez – Chief Data Officer, Anteriad

At Anteriad, our intent-driven demand generation and marketing intelligence programs are fueled by our top-quality intent data stream. We believe that you simply can’t get the quality and coverage of Anteriad’s intent data stream from any other provider.

Sounds great, right? But as with any hot technology, there’s a lot of noise surrounding intent in the marketplace. And intent is definitely hot – a recent survey showed that about half of B2B tech brands plan on investing in intent-based targeting by the end of next year.

Many of the questions surrounding intent center on how providers source and collect online behavioral signals. In this post, I’ll detail how Anteriad’s data collection methodologies set us apart from intent data co-ops and other intent providers.

Intent Tailored for B2B Sellers

At Anteriad, we acquire and curate our intent data from the world wide web. We also include first-party data gathered from our own content syndication and demand gen programs.

Curate is the key idea here. We actively seek only intent data that provides intelligence on the B2B buyers that our clients want to reach. And our own success is driven by the quality of the intent data we add.

This is in stark contrast to intent data co-ops, where publishers and other providers agree to contribute to the overall stream in exchange for access to the resulting aggregate data (either in trade or at discounted rates – it really depends on the co-op in question). Since so much intent data is generated by publishers and other sources that don’t have immediate B2B commerce goals riding on intent-driven marketing, this model can create gaps in co-op intent data streams. Folks with great intent data that serves their specific niche may see little value in joining a co-op.

At Anteriad, if we find that a client needs intent on certain B2B topics, we will search for those topics and then put them through our rigorous data process and the Anteriad Relevance EngineTM. I recently went through this process with a couple of our larger corporate customers, and the resulting ROI on their investment with us proved our approach works.

Market-driven curation of our proprietary B2B intent data is a huge differentiator.

Breadth of Topical and Persona Coverage

Our ongoing search for great sources of intent data also gives us broad data coverage to fuel our advanced intent analytics. You don’t always get this breadth of intelligence with single-source providers, such as publishers.

Even large publishing networks that operate dozens of sites are going to focus narrowly on a select set of topics that are bullseye matches for their core publishing business. This limits their scope of topical coverage and personas that are generating intent signals.

A publisher may extensively cover HR software, for example, but not create a lot of content about the infrastructure needed to run the software or related data privacy issues. The people researching purchases care about a wide range of issues, and complete coverage of all factors that support the topic is essential to meaningful intent monitoring intelligence.

It’s also important to gather intent signals generated by a broad range of user personas. Publishers tend to focus on the C-suite and highly placed managers – the demographics that drive advertising revenue. But B2B purchases are most often made by buying groups that include tactical team members who conduct detailed research at key points in the account’s purchase journey.

Our proprietary data includes these personas in order to support buying group intent analysis, which we introduced in Version 4.0 of our InsightBase™. This breadth of persona coverage helps us meet the commerce-centric goals of our B2B sales and marketing customers.

A Mix of Intent Data to Fuel Big Data Analysis

The source mix for Anteriad’s proprietary intent data includes:

• Cookie data provides our contact intent. We know specifically who is exhibiting intent within an account and can provide the full contact record if needed.
• Other 3rd-party content consumption info. This includes explicit, high-value user behavior like whitepaper downloads and webinar attendance from the web.
• True Infleunce’s own first-party data from content syndication and other demand generation programs.
• Bidstream data. This source provides our inferred intent on domain and location data.

Combined, our data creates a steady stream of billions of signals, which give us the breath of topical, account, and persona coverage to fuel our advanced Identity Graph and Relevance EngineTM analytics.

Let me be clear – not every signal we collect is a clear indication of purchase intent. Far from it. There’s a ton of noise and false positives in the raw stream that we carefully scrub out. Our AI and machine learning analytics evaluate each user action in the context of the account, location, and the individual that created it. And our mix of bidstream, cookie, and direct response intent signals help us refine a clear picture of multi-channel intent, which is essential in complex B2B retargeting and workflows.

This is, really, the essence of Big Data – every piece of data you have is potentially quite valuable, if you understand how to correlate it with other data.

That’s our strength here at Anteriad, and I plan to go into more detail about our analytics in a future post. Here, I’ll just say that our Identity Graph and Relevance EngineTM analytics are so sophisticated that, in many cases, we can map a whitepaper download attributed to a Gmail address to an account, and quite possibly an individual at a business IP address.

It’s powerful stuff, and it’s all driven by the breath and quality of our proprietary intent data.

Intent Data to Drive Your Business

Intent has become a key element in data-driven B2B sales and marketing, and the success of your intent-driven programs will be determined by the quality of the data that fuels them. We’re confident at Anteriad that our intent data provides the B2B topical focus and persona coverage needed to support advanced purchase intent analysis and help you close more business.