What is Intent Marketing?

In a nutshell, intent marketing is the practice of understanding consumer purchase intent to deliver relevant content and information in real-time to promote a product or a service. Intent marketing technology uses actions from consumers that are pertinent to purchase consideration or interest to position a brand’s products and/or services as a potential answer to their needs.

Leveraging customer intent to market your business is a great way to improve engagement and conversion. Here’s a 4-step guide that will help you optimize your business for intent marketing.

Step 1: Optimize Your Local Online Presence

Today’s consumers turn to smartphones, search engines, and business discovery apps/websites when they want to find what they need. A customer’s purchase intent is highest when they have an immediate requirement for a product or a service, and they intuitively use various search engines to explore their options. Making sure that your business is being found while consumers are actively searching for your product or service is the first step to optimizing your business for intent marketing.

Now, “getting your business found” is not just a matter of adding your basic name, address, phone number (NAP) information to these websites. There are a few things to keep in mind when you optimize your local online presence:

  • Make sure that you have accurate business information listed on Google, Bing, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and all other major search platforms
  • Add photos and videos to your business profiles to appear on more local intent-based searches. Google has indirectly mentioned this as a contributing factor to search engine rankings as well
  • Add all your digital profiles to the relevant business categories and include appropriate tags to them. If you’re a fast-casual Thai restaurant, and a customer runs a search for “thai restaurants near me” or “fast-casual near me”, you need to make sure you show up on their search results.

You can use a product like Synup to manage this at scale for your business.

Step 2: Employ Targeted Ads

Social media sites and search engines alike have powerful targeting options that you can leverage to display ads to customers based on their intent. You can use Google’s Contextual Targeting, Facebook’s Ad Targeting, or any other such platform’s targeting options to leverage customer intent to improve conversions. 

A well-rounded performance marketing strategy is one that includes display ads, text ads, and social media ads. You can also use a product like AdRoll to automate cross-platform marketing of your products/services to your customers.

Step 3: Use Remarketing & Behavioral Retargeting

Remarketing is a form of advertising that allows you to target and display ads to users who have previously visited your website. Remarketing and behavioral retargeting uses a tag or a pixel, which is essentially just a snippet of code that allows browsers to target customers with ads based on their website visit history.

Remarketing can be a great way to keep your brand’s product/service on top of customers’ minds at all times and move them along the funnel to complete making a purchase.

Step 4: Build Intent-Based Content on Your Website

Another great way to target high-intent customers for your business is by looking at high-intent keywords that they might use in their searches. For example, if you own a sneaker restoration store, building content around “sneaker care” or “sneaker restoration” might put your business right before your customers in their time of need.

While content marketing might take some time to bring a reasonable amount of traffic to your website, it’s an inexpensive and evergreen source of relevant website visitors.

Stay On Your Toes, Though!

While using these four channels to target customers based on their intent is great, the coming decades will pose a new variety of challenges to brands. As customer intent and purchase behavior changes, the channels that prevail will also change, and brands will also have to adapt to stay ahead of their competition.

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