Intent Marketing for Your Business

The world of digital marketing is evolving at a rapid pace owing to the growth in digital transformation. Instead of believing promotional messages, today's customers seek information on the products and services they plan on buying. Each time they search for a product or type a query, they are expressing their intent.

Understanding consumer intent can not only enable you to tailor your marketing efforts to suit the user journey, but also customize your offering to provide enhanced solutions to your audience.

With ever-tightening budgets and your customers' rising expectations, intent marketing is becoming more and more important. This post will explore intent marketing and its significant impact on businesses or consumers in 2021.

What is Intent Marketing?

Intent marketing is the process of creating and directing marketing campaigns towards people who shows an intent to purchase a product or service. It enables you to target the people that are highly interested in what your business offers them.

Intent marketing is a form of marketing that relies on the likelihood of a user to perform an action related to a product or a service. Every search on Google expresses an intent (whether low or high).

The path to success in intent marketing comes through data-driven decisions, based on the users' behavior and related factors such as type of search, device, user demographic, etc.

- Ben Bittan | VP of B2C/B2B Business Units at Trafficpoint

For effective intent marketing, you need a credible source of intent data that enables you to identify prospects who are actively searching for your services and solutions online. But instead of only focusing on the prospect's intent, you need to respond to them in the right way regardless of their buying journey stage.

Why is Intent Marketing so Important in Our Modern World?

With the rise in digital interactions, customers are now actively researching businesses and their products or services online. They are now tired of coming across irrelevant ads that do not serve any purpose for them at that particular time.

These changes in customer expectations mean marketers must move from their traditional marketing tactics towards real-time consumer targeting. Moreover, with the emerging AI techniques, businesses can now predict their potential customers’ intent more accurately. This gives them a chance to target them with tailored content customized specifically to match their needs.

So, to remain relevant during these times, you need to assess when prospects are taking action or expressing their intent to purchase from your business. This enables you to invest all your time, efforts, and money to attract the right customers and reach them at the right level of the buyer journey.

Thus, intent marketing has the potential to increase your ROI by improving the conversion rate of your business. The conversions driven by intent marketing are significantly higher than the conversions driven by demographic-based targeting.

If businesses can gain essential user intent data and incorporate them into their intent marketing strategy and align it with business outcomes, they can reach their target customers and drive sales in no time.

Types of Businesses That Can Integrate Intent Marketing

Intent marketing is divided into three categories that prompt businesses to integrate intent marketing into their business’s marketing processes.

The first type of intent marketing s informational intent shows that a potential customer is just looking for information and has not decided yet.

So, suppose you sell healthy diet plans. You are looking for people who search for nutritious breakfast plans, visit your blog posts on healthy recipes, and demonstrate informative search intent in other ways.

We have navigational intent where the customer has decided to purchase a product or service from a particular location. A google search for home design services in Toronto shows that the prospect wants home designing services in Toronto.

The third and final intent is transactional, i.e., when a prospect has decided to purchase a product or service. Still, they don’t know the location where they’ll make the purchase. A search for the best video shows that the customer wants to know about the provider that offers the best video player in the market.

So, depending on your business type, you can easily cater to your prospects after analyzing their intent type.

Benefits of Intent Marketing for Businesses and Consumers in 2021

By leveraging the power of intent marketing, businesses can tap into 2.14 billion people expected to purchase products or goods online. These numbers are steadily increasing owing to the shift towards online shopping due to the pandemic.

Moreover, intent marketing proves effective for B2B businesses that struggle with meeting their sales targets. By conducting in-depth research on their consumer intent, they are now integrating intent marketing as an essential component of their marketing strategy.

Some of The Benefits of Intent Marketing Include:

Get an Edge Over Your Competition

Google processes over 40,000 queries in a second. Among them, some searches will be completely useless, while some lead to business transactions. Gathering this intent data helps you understand your business’s sales cycles and create compelling online experiences that prompt the buyer to convert into a customer.

So, if you are collecting intent data for your business, you have an automatic advantage over your competitors. Moreover, intent data also helps streamline daily business processes, such as identifying new leads and following up with them to gauge their response to your product or service.

Helps You Prioritize Leads

Your business might witness a huge increase in leads, but only intent data can help you recognize the leads you need to prioritize. After assessing your business’s engagement data, you can rank your leads based on their intent to purchase a product or service from your brand.

This shows that intent marketing offers an effective way of separating high-value prospects from low-value leads.

More Effective Content Strategies

Research suggests that content marketing generates three times more leads than paid search advertising. When customers get used to personalized content, they don’t have any qualms about abandoning websites that do not offer them what they want.

Your content marketing campaign's success rests on delivering highly targeted content to your prospects at the right time. This is where intent marketing helps you by offering information on buyer personas, journey maps, the content format and CTA you need to provide, and your keyword strategy.

Well-timed content that offers relevant information attracts more qualified buyers, which results in more sales for your business.

Creates Highly Targeted Campaigns

Intent data helps your business identify prospects searching for content or information on your niche at a specific time. This lets your marketing team boost their marketing campaigns by personalizing them to attract your ideal buyer.

Moreover, you can use intent marketing to create accurately targeted ads for your prospects, increasing the conversion rate and enhancing your bottom line.

Tips to Optimize Your Business for Intent Marketing

The following are some tips you need to follow to optimize your marketing strategies and generate more conversions and revenue for your business.

Define Your Ideal Customer

Through intent marketing, you get comprehensive information on your ideal customer, which prompts you to create accurate and highly targeted marketing materials. Spending money on marketing campaigns without assessing your prospects' preferences means spending huge amounts of money on leads that do not intend to purchase from you.

This is why creating a well-defined buyer persona for your business and targeting them with relevant content is important.

Improve Your Content

There’s too much content out there, which means your prospects are drowning in irrelevant information. To stand out, you need to leverage intent marketing to hone your content and tailor it so that it answers your prospect’s search query.

This means your content ranks higher on the search engine rankings, specifically for the prospects that demonstrate higher chances of converting to a customer.

Incorporate SEO Strategies

It is important to note that Google now ranks the content that answers a user’s question. This means you need to adjust your content so that it follows the latest SEO guidelines and offers an answer to your prospect’s query.

It increases your content’s SEO value, which means your business can enjoy a higher ranking in search results, more traffic, leads, and an increase in conversions.

Remove The Traditional Sales Funnel

The majority of businesses nurture their prospects through the funnel based on their position in the buyer’s journey. But not every prospect follows the same buyer’s journey from researching a product, analyzing its benefits, and making a purchase.

With the digital transformation, consumers are now taking a more non-linear approach towards buying from a business. This is why it’s important to leave all the traditional marketing tactics aside and incorporate intent marketing to observe when your prospect is ready to buy from you.

Offer Personalized Marketing Material

Personalization is the cornerstone of successful marketing campaigns. Create a more personalized campaign that integrates all marketing aspects, including emails, content, social media posts, and online ads. But they need to be highly personalized for the prospect to achieve successful conversions.

In Conclusion

Intent marketing has emerged as a game-changer for businesses and consumers in 2021. It has enables companies to get in touch with the right prospect at the right time with the right content.

By leveraging intent data, it has become easier for you to nurture your leads, making it an important part of your business. If you have not integrated intent data into your marketing campaigns, you are miss out on huge conversion and revenue generation opportunities.