Intent-Based Marketing: Targeting the Right Leads at the Right Time

Understanding the right marketing strategy that will yield effective results can be a troublesome job. It can often be frustrating to realize what service a prospects are intending. Will they make the purchase? How to grab their attention and direct them towards your product? How do you convert them into your clients? These issues might have troubled you most of the time. The best solution to all these problems is intent-based marketing.

It is one of the essential B2B marketing campaigns that target the right prospects at the right time—allowing businesses to connect with the prospects in a more personalized approach. Using the intent-based marketing approach, businesses can identify and track the prospect’s interest in the product or service. It also measures the urgency level of prospects to find the solution by analyzing their online behavior, preferences, and needs.

Statistics on Intent-Based Marketing

• A market study shows that 25% of B2B businesses have already implemented intent-based marketing, and 35% plan to use this marketing approach in the upcoming year.
• Also, by the end of 2024, 70% of all businesses will use intent data in their marketing strategy.

Let us now understand the concept of intent-based marketing, its stages, how to implement it, and the potential benefits it can have for your business.

Intent-Based Marketing

• Intent-based marketing is an approach that utilizes the prospect’s intent data to create a personalized experience. It tracks the prospect’s online behavior, needs, and interest that allows businesses to analyze their purchase intention.
• In an intent-based marketing strategy, businesses are able to track prospects that are more likely to make a purchase.

Benefits of Intent-Based Marketing

Businesses can make effective campaign decisions using the intent-based marketing approach. Some of the intent-based marketing benefits are:

1. Pair Prospect’s Intent with Suitable Content

In Intent-based marketing, businesses will be able to analyze the prospect’s reaction toward the brand messaging. Using this insight, businesses can create targeted campaigns with optimized communication based on leads stages. Even if the prospects do not convert into leads, businesses will still be able to create a strong brand impression with a positive customer experience.

2. Marketing Automation

Implementing marketing automation tools are helping businesses to outperform their operations by fully automating marketing campaigns. These automation tools use prospects’ intent and also helps smooth marketing by allowing the employees to focus on other essential tasks.

3. Cost-efficient Marketing

Based on the intent of a client, Intent-based marketing directly targets a client who is already interested in the product. This avoid unnecessary marketing costs and enhance revenues of a business.

4. Focuses on Converting Prospects

Using Intent marketing, businesses can prioritize the clients that are most promising in the entire customer journey. They can then deliver these clients to the sales team, which will close the deal.

Intent Data in Intent-Based Marketing

Intent data is the information on a client’s interest in a particular product or services. It shows what product or services the client is looking for, their needs, and their determination to buy it.

1. Intent data in intent-based marketing can help in successful campaigns. It will help businesses understand the needs of their prospects, which many marketers still struggle to do.
2. The intent data shows the product or services the prospects seek and makes marketing campaigns more effective.
3. Intent data of prospects aids in extracting actionable leads with high buying intention.
4. Businesses can save time and generate high ROI by integrating this marketing strategy.

Intent data in intent-based marketing can be categorized into:

• Active Intent: Active intent occurs when a prospect searches using keywords directly related to a particular product or service and engages with content. Prospects take a set of actions to learn more about the specific product or service, showing a strong willingness to buy.
• Passive Intent: This occurs when clients research using general words in a broader spectrum. It happens when the client is still in the stage of learning the product or service but does not mean to acquire the service any time soon.

Gathering Intent Data for Intent-Based Marketing Efforts

Using intent data, group your prospects based on their search intent and, to each of these segments, offer personalized content about your services or products. To gather intent data, analyze the ways how clients are consuming the data; it gives you a clear picture of the prospect’s interest. Based on their content type, you can get an insight into what the prospect is looking for. Here are a few ways to gather data to perform intent-based marketing.

• Browsing habits
• Topic request
• Website visits
• Product and services reviews
• On page time
• Consumption of content
• Whitepaper downloads
• Scroll speed

How to Perform Intent-Based Marketing

To perform intent-based marketing, understand the intent and apply the insights to your marketing processes. Here are a few ways to perform intent-based marketing.

A Few Effective B2B Intent-Based Marketing Campaigns

Based on client’s intent and their online queries, businesses should adopt data-driven marketing strategies; this allows them to create personalized experience for their prospects. It will result in enhanced customer experience and increased business growth. Now, that we are talking about personalized marketing, here are a few successful intent-based marketing campaigns:

1. Account-Based Marketing

Many businesses who have used this marketing campaigns believe that it outperforms other forms of marketing strategies. With the help of Account-based marketing, companies can create personalized and direct sales campaigns for their clients. This marketing tactic helps businesses to direct relevant sales messages to the client’s queries, aiding in increasing the chances of lead conversion. This marketing also helps them identify the leads journey status in the buying process.

2. Personalizing Intent Marketing Campaign

According to many successful business owners, a personalized campaign increases the chances of creating better business-lead relationships. A personalized intent marketing campaign helps in performing enhanced marketing with targeted and customized messaging, eventually aiding in lead conversion and enhanced ROI.

3. Retargeting Ads Across Other Digital Channels

There may be a possibility where a client may bounce though they are interested in the product or services. In such cases continue performing the personalized campaign with targeted messaging across other digital platforms. It will aid in client remembering about the product or services and may end up making the purchase.

4. SEO

SEO is the old, but still powerful marketing tool many businesses utilize for successful marketing campaigns. It aids in organic growth for businesses. Using intent of the clients, businesses understand the keywords their prospects are searching for, and better implement SEO strategy.

Conclusion:

Now we can conclude that Intent-based marketing will help businesses perform better and targeted campaigns. If used effectively, this marketing strategy will act as a powerful lead-generation tool. The Intent-based marketing offers useful insights on clients that are interested in your product by analyzing their intent. Use this insights effectively and build loyal with long term client relationships.