Intent-based marketing is a digital approach that focuses on meeting specific needs based on specific questions asked online.When thinking about ways to engage your audience and meet their needs. Intent-Based Marketing: Tips and Benefits . you’ve probably thought about the overall customer experience, the buyer’s journey for your product, and what content might be useful to each potential customer as they make their decision.
What you may not have considered — and where intent-based marketing comes into play — is the opportunity to reach users who are looking for a specific item or information at a specific point in time.
Intent-based marketing theory
When thinking about intent-based marketing and why it’s important, the concept to understand is that it makes more sense to cater your content and tactical efforts to specific user intent and habits of mind, based on the keywords and phrases that are triggered.
Users search for a variety of reasons, and you need to understand those reasons and motivations to optimize your digital marketing strategy.
The difference between intent-based marketing and experience-focused marketing is the ability to engage users at a specific point in the buyer’s journey. You minimize the risk of accidentally serving awareness-stage content to users who are already ready to make a decision. Both approaches make heavy use of SEO and will rely on solid content marketing automation , but with intent-based marketing you can focus on selling and marketing to specific goals.
Navigation Intent
Users sometimes search for a brand name instead of navigating directly to a website. Think about how many times you’ve typed “Amazon” or “Facebook” into your browser address bar, knowing that if the URL doesn’t autocomplete, the website you’re looking for will appear in the first few results. These users are looking for a specific site and trying to visit it.
You might think that navigational intent wouldn’t present many opportunities for an intent-based marketing strategy, but that’s actually not the case. Branded keywords are often taken for granted, so it’s likely that most of your competitors aren’t bidding highly on their own names. Conquesting is a paid search strategy that involves bidding on keywords such as competitor brand names and product names. This then places your name in navigational search results as an alternative for users intending to look for those specific brands.
If you plan to use a conquer strategy, make sure your landing page meta description clearly and concisely positions you as a better choice for branded search queries.
Informational Intent
Informational intent is a basic search by a user looking for information or answers to questions. Most informational searches are not directly related to a purchase transaction. Think about your recent search history. Odds are, most searches you’ve done were for informational purposes, such as “caloric value of apples,” “star wars actors,” “capital of montana,” or “florida native plants.” These types of searches are the most common and are less likely to result in a purchase.
Informational intent is the best opportunity to leverage awareness content for your brand. Think about the questions your ideal customers might be researching that aren’t necessarily related to purchasing, and create top of the funnel content around those topics. As a completely random example, if your product is a marketing automation platform , you could write a blog about “marketing strategies” or “how to market to millennials.”
Consumer research intention
Similar to informational intent, consumer research indonesia telegram data intent is primarily about weighing options during the late awareness and early consideration stages of the buyer’s journey.
These searches may be for reviews, product features, and pricing information on various brands before making a purchasing decision. Words like “cheapest,” “best,” and “reviews” often appear in these search queries, so build content that includes long-tail keywords.
Borrowing from some of our previous examples, let’s say you’re thinking about going to the movies this weekend. You might start with an informational search, such as “Star Wars actors,” and learn that the movie features one or two of your favorite actors. Consumer research intent searches will help you decide if you want to see the movie. This might include a search for “Star Wars reviews” so you can read the opinions of other moviegoers (reviews) and professional critics (influencers) to help you decide if you want to head to the theater this weekend or would rather wait to see it live later.
Purchase transaction intention
This phase of intent-based marketing is the most how to find someone’s phone number urgent and uses phrases that indicate the user is ready to make a purchase. This includes queries like “near me,” “open now,” “today,” or “delivery.” Google My Business and other listing sites like Yelp can help you reach users with this sense of urgency, hoping they’ll make a purchase right away.
For example, if you’re a restaurant, you might want to opt into Yelp, UberEats, and GrubHub to ensure that customers can get a taste of what you have to offer the moment they search for “best burgers near me.”
Continuing with our example, once you’ve found reviews deb directory and decided the latest Star Wars movie is worth seeing, you’re likely ready to buy some tickets. You might search for “Star Wars showtimes near me” or something similar, and maybe even buy tickets for the next showtime online through a ticketing site or at a local theater.
Conduct intent-based marketing
The foundation of effective intent-based marketing is ensuring a strong SEO and marketing automation strategy. If you have a clear understanding of what your ideal customers are actually searching for when they find your product and how their mindset influences their search intent, it’s much easier to satisfy specific long-tail search queries at all stages of the buyer’s journey. Transactional-based messaging can put off people with informational intent, while people who are ready to buy will be frustrated if they can’t quickly and easily place an order.
As part of your overall marketing efforts, accurately measuring open rates, click-through rates, and lead sources can help you inform keyword research and develop intent-based marketing plans. If you use this strategy effectively, you’ll be able to quickly acquire more qualified leads with less effort than if you had a full experience-based customer journey.
Marketers who leverage intent-based marketing can use it as a competitive advantage over the rest of the industry. Find opportunities to optimize your intent-based marketing strategy with SharpSpring’s automated marketing system. To learn more or request a demo, visit us !
