Intent-Based Marketing Guide: Understanding and Implementing the Strategy

"How is it possible to recognize when your business-to-business customers that may purchase are prepared to buy?" That issue has puzzled marketers for products and services sold from one business to another for many years. Happily, intent-focused advertising entered the situation to provide a distinct, dependable response.

Behavioral details can be explained as the information gotten from web users' digital material viewing. This means that behavioral detail companies can examine focused niche-related internet pages and recognize what they are about, who visits them, and what sections are most seen.

Targeting according to goals permits marketers targeting companies to come to conclusions regarding the underlying material. This allows them to create campaigns for repeated customers, inbound content, and follow-up strategies that coincide with those questions.

As shown in a Leadfeeder poll, over 76% of the Business-to-Business leaders interviewed use purchaser intention information to guide their revenue and advertising approach, with 65% planning to invest more in the next twelve months.

Intent-Based Marketing

It  is a highly targeted marketing approach that focuses on understanding and utilizing customers' intent data signals to create personalized and tailored experiences. This strategy relies on the use of sales intelligence tools to identify and track the interests of potential customers.

By analyzing the online behavior, preferences, and needs of prospects, B2B marketers can gauge their level of urgency to find a suitable solution. Intent can be categorized into two types:

1. Active Intent:

This refers to prospects who display transactional intent by taking specific actions to gather detailed information about a product or service. These individuals exhibit a strong willingness to make a purchase, often leading to quicker conversions.

2. Passive Intent:

Passive intent, also known as informational intent, involves prospects in the research phase. They are seeking educational content to understand products or services better and are not under immediate pressure to make a purchase.

Intent-Based Marketing employs various tactics to leverage intent data signals effectively. By focusing on segmented audiences that are more likely to convert, B2B advertisers can optimize their marketing budget and resources. Common examples of intent data signals include website visits, browsing habits, whitepaper downloads, product reviews, time spent on a page, content consumption, scroll speed, and topic requests.

Instead of employing broad and generic follow-up approaches, intent-based marketing relies on data-driven methodologies that cater to customers' specific needs and preferences based on their online queries. This approach allows for a highly customized and authentic experience for each potential buyer, leading to better engagement and higher conversion rates.

5 Positive Impacts of Goal-Based Marketing

There are numerous advantages of setting goals and making plans accordingly when promoting a business. Here are 5 rewards of goal-based marketing: To start with, goal-oriented marketing helps boost profits and productivity since the vision and aims are distinct from the beginning. This facilitates assessing outcomes and judging if additional effort is requisite. Furthermore,

Statista found that the majority of United States customers think that marketing substances that are personalized is "relatively" to "extremely appealing." Specific goal targeting can simply achieve that: discover what sort of data probable patrons are exploring for and grant them with written content, messages, and other contact points that resolve those queries.

Advantages came from purpose-based targeting contain raised involvement and alteration rates, progressed client experience, and sharper understandings into customer demands and choices. The following are some noteworthy examples worth mentioning:

Intent-Based Marketing offers several benefits for B2B marketers, leading to more efficient and targeted campaigns. Here are five key advantages of using intent marketing:

1. Reduces Outbound Marketing Costs:

By focusing on prospects who have demonstrated clear buying intent, advertisers can optimize their campaigns and allocate their ad budgets more effectively. Targeting users who are actively searching for solutions reduces wasted ad spend on irrelevant audiences, leading to cost savings and improved ROI.

2. Leverages Programmatic Advertising:

Intent marketing can seamlessly integrate with programmatic advertising platforms, allowing marketers to display dynamic and relevant ads based on users' online behavior and interests. This approach ensures that ads are shown in context, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversions.

3. Integrates Account-Based Marketing (ABM):

Intent marketing aligns well with account-based marketing strategies, which focus on highly targeted and personalized outreach to key accounts. By leveraging intent data, marketers can tailor their messaging to address the specific research needs of prospects, enhancing the effectiveness of ABM campaigns.

4. Enhances Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs):

Intent data insights can be combined with other criteria, such as revenue, company size, industry, geography, and technology usage, to create more refined and accurate ideal customer profiles. This enables marketers to identify and target high-value prospects more precisely.

5. Boosts SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

Understanding the keywords, topics, and content styles that are in high demand among the target audience allows marketers to craft content that aligns with user intent. This leads to improved SEO performance, generating more organic traffic and visibility for the brand.

To access intent data for your intent-based marketing efforts, you can follow these steps:

1. Invest in Website Visitor Tracking Software:

Implement website visitor tracking software on your website to collect first-party intent data. This software can track the actions and behavior of your website visitors, even if they are anonymous users. By capturing data from forms, gated content downloads, and IP addresses, you can gain insights into the interests and needs of your prospects.

2. Use Behavioral and Demographic Filters:

With website visitor tracking software, set up behavioral and demographic filters to segment your leads based on their web activity. This segmentation allows you to identify prospects showing active intent based on their interactions with your website.

3. Explore Third-Party Intent Data:

Consider utilizing third-party intent data to expand your insights beyond your own website. Third-party intent data provides information from various sources across the web, including your competitors' websites. This data enables you to offer prospects relevant content based on their online behavior and interests.

4. Utilize Intent Data Tools:

Employ intent data tools that can analyze intent data signals from multiple sources on the internet. These advanced tools can determine the semantic meaning of the most-searched website pages by your ideal customer profiles (ICPs), helping you understand their interests and priorities.

How Does Intent-Based Targeting Work?

The success of intent marketing campaigns depends on the sum of inbound and outbound marketing efforts. While the steps may vary between industries and the size of your total addressable market, this is the standard structure to develop a solid intent-targeting campaign:

1. Craft your target account list.

A target account list (TAL) is the catalog made of your qualified ICPs, handpicked by your sales and marketing teams out of your total addressable market. 

This document should state every detail you know about your ideal customer, for it will serve your team as a step-by-step guide on which company must be reached first, at what time, and through what channel.

2. Select your intent topics.

Identifying what keywords, topics, and content approaches are most relevant to your company is imperative for establishing brand awareness. 

This allows marketing teams to narrow down how the brand they represent will be found online and what content is already being used by prospects to fill in their research process.

3. Leverage intent-based marketing tools.

Intent marketing heavily relies on the performance of intent data tools. While first-party data can be collected directly from your website, intent data requires advanced software to access, process, and cross intent signals from all over the web.

Through intent data tools, B2B marketing teams are able to match their TAL with the intent signals that are most relevant to their brand. This way, it is possible to find out which ICPs are actively searching for solutions that are similar to the ones you offer.

4. Create intent-based content.

Customers’ online signals can be used by content creators as guides. Intent targeting analyzes the top-performing blogs, social media profiles, and landing pages across the web that are related to the online searches performed by your ICPs.

As marketers already know what their potential buyers are looking for, they can craft post entries, whitepapers, product reviews, and other content pieces by implementing data-based insights so creators are certain to craft highly appealing content.

5. Launch intent-based ads.

Users actively searching for certain topics, keywords, and content pieces in other landing pages trigger intent signals that are highlighted by intent datatools. Intent-based targeting can launch display, video, and audio ads to lure such users inside your website so they can enter your sales pipelines.