The fact is that intent data isn’t predictive… it’s backward-looking, it poses significant latency as a marketing trigger, and it involves a lot more than a subscription with a single vendor. Intent certainly helps identify accounts, but it is a very one-dimensional view of the information needed. Intent data swells up over time, so your intent provider may be pointing this out to you late because they didn’t capture enough of the signal early enough to let you know in time, or you get too many false positives. Marketers often get this wrong, and there is a tremendous amount of pressure to do something with all the tools that they have. But measuring success by delivering content to accounts that display implied intent, at best, will only drive awareness or provide the wrong level of content to prospects who could be in market for a different solution that you have.
If you only leverage an intent-based marketing solution, you need to consider the option of including predictive propensity modeling alongside it. So, rather than marketing at audiences with an abundance of messaging because according to your intent feed provider, it says you have a bunch of companies surging interest in your core topic, marketers ought to act with more precision, letting the audience be defined by process that includes both their needs and timing.
