Do You Need Bombora? What the Intent Data Provider Brings to the Table

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Intent data is an essential piece of the account-based marketing puzzle. It’s the type of data that can give B2B companies a competitive edge as they look to identify engaged, active prospects at prioritized accounts that show a clear pattern of interest in a product, service, or solution. As importantly, intent data can pinpoint signals in a buyer’s journey that lets you know what their next step might be, helping you target them with personalized, contextual messaging.

There are a couple of flavors of intent data, but in this case, third-party intent data is the focus. 

Third-party intent data originates from external sources and may include many potential online interactions that have occurred away from your website and your company’s interactions. Website visits at competitor sites, webinar attendance, downloads, product reviews, social media interactions, and online subscriptions to publications in your industry or sector are fair game for third-party intent data insights. Like an intricate spider web woven from numerous data points, third-party intent data offers a view of online behavior for potential prospects as they traverse their buying journey.

Of course, third-party intent data must be procured through a vendor specializing in accumulating, compiling, and delivering these valuable nuggets of knowledge in a way that can be easily integrated with your ABM program. For marketers looking to leverage third-party intent data, one of the premier vendors in this space is Bombora.

What Does Bombora Do?

Bombora is a third-party intent data provider (among other solutions) that collects a massive amount of B2B intent, demographic, and firmographic data at scale. The company captures intent signals from the B2B online universe across multiple content sources, continuously monitoring content consumption of over 7,000 business topics.

Interestingly, Bombora uses what they call a “Data Co-operative.” Many companies subscribe to this program and contribute their data to gain access to Bombora’s whole dataset for their use, a bit of a “win-win” for both parties. According to Bombora, their B2B Data Co-op is the largest of its kind with:

• 21.7 billion average monthly content consumption events per quarter
• Coverage across 4,000 websites
• 3.2 million average unique domains in their Company Surge® dataset

Bombora’s Surge product mentioned above is a proprietary data analytics AI-powered tool that delivers insights most applicable to your company. This tool offers an easy way to identify B2B organizations and teams that indicate they may be interested and in need of your offerings, based on the most recent online behavior that’s being tracked. The tool is easily integrated with Salesforce, as well as other popular marketing automation tools. 

Is Bombora a Good Option for Your B2B Company?

The co-op methodology for compiling third-party intent data is a strong differentiator for Bombora. That’s because many other providers in this space typically get their intent data from either the bidstream or publishers.

Bidstream data is gathered through ad exchanges across biddable online advertising inventory, which allows for unmatched coverage and volume of data, but less in-depth analytics. With Bidstream data, the intent is usually measured with keyword context. This type of data is collected only from websites that auction off advertising and is compiled from only the ad impressions available for auction.

With publisher data, it’s the publisher’s own portfolio of web properties that is the sole collection point and source. Standalone data is often higher quality but lacks the coverage of bidstream and co-op data vendors.

Many companies looking for third-party intent data turn to bidstream over publisher data due to lack of coverage. But even bidstream has shortcomings in quality.

With bidstream:

• Intent is surfaced when businesses interact with keywords that are scraped from content on web pages.
• There is no discernable context or cadence of the interactions with a keyword.
• Historical norms are not gathered over time, so no baseline consumption is created.
• There are specific shortcomings when used to determine a person or business’ interest in products or services.
• While scale is large due to the billions of daily advertising bid requests, only a fraction of the events contain a robust data set.

How Bombora Works within an ABM Campaign

When we look at the relationship between third-party intent data and an ABM program, it’s clear there’s a strong connection. In fact, third-party intent data and ABM go hand-in-hand. Adding third-party intent data to the ABM mix can help marketers more effectively target prioritized accounts, make more accurate predictions, and personalize marketing messaging to prospects within a buying team. More specifically, adding a third-party intent data technology as part of your omnichannel ABM tech stack offers easy access to valuable B2B buyer journey information. 

Bombora isn’t the only third-party intent data vendor on the block, though. Several other companies offer comparable solutions, including 6Sense, ZoomInfo, and TechTarget’s Priority Engine. Each vendor has its unique differentiators and proprietary analytics tools.

But, for marketers who choose to partner with Bombora due to its unique co-op methodology, the proprietary Surge tool offers an easy way to integrate third-party intent data into your ABM program.  Although the software is AI-powered, there’s still some work to do in term of tailoring it to your B2B prospect team (this is where an agency plays a key role), but still offers valuable efficiencies in account-to-account personalization.