What's better - Wild Turkey or a milkshake?
They're completely different.
Intent data topics have two advantages:
Most marketers and sales leaders are less concerned with abstract volume and prefer to balance quality. Rather than just pour extraneous signal into a nurturing engine, like gasoline into a Hummer, they look for leads which can be qualified and engaged.
That takes insight and context. Typical examples of questions include:
An opaque topic doesn't provide the granular insight necessary to personalize the marketing and sales outreach.
And personalization is key.
If you use intent data for marketing, ask yourself whether, without detail, you could tailor your email, social and phone script messaging to the specific problem you know your prospect is wrestling with? Or adapt your approach appropriately to their stage in the buying journey? Or have your event marketing team engage with them to connect at the event you're investing in...that they're also attending?
If you use intent data for sales, would you be able to effectively up-sell or cross-sell if you didn't know what specific solutions they were exploring?
Professional, personalized execution requires granular insight. And contact level intent data is critical too.
Here's the rub. Building this will take substantially more work than simply clicking on three topic titles. You'll probably invest three to six hours between the up front process of building your custom algorithm and the follow up process of gradually tweaking it.
We're all frantically busy and a half a day isn't an insignificant amount of time. But...you're spending part of your demand generation budget on it, presumably expecting actionable information. Isn't it worth a bit of work to ensure that what you get is actually actionable?