Buying Intent: What It Is and How To Use It To Skyrocket Your Marketing

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know what your customer’s intentions are?

That’s what buying intent is – knowing what your buyers are looking for and directing your efforts toward satisfying their needs, wants and interests.

Buying intent helps you create a solid customer-driven marketing strategy that keeps your customer interests at the center of your campaigns.

Though only 25% of B2B companies use intent data, the numbers are gradually increasing, with almost 70% of businesses planning to increase spending on intent data.

To help you join the bandwagon of intent data users, here’s everything you need to know about buying intent data.

What Does Buying Intent Mean?

Buying intent, also known as purchase intent, is the willingness and inclination of customers to buy a product or service from a business within a certain period. In short, buying intent is the consumer’s likelihood to buy a product from a company.

Buying intent is an important metric for sales teams to evaluate a lead’s potential to convert into a customer. This way, they can focus on nurturing high-potential leads instead of wasting resources on leads that aren’t likely to convert.

4 Types of Intent in Buyer Funnel

Every visitor land on your website with a different goal and purchase intent. These buying intentions relate to the different stages of the purchase funnel. For instance, a visitor may check your website only for some information, while another may visit to make a purchase.

Here are the four types of purchase intent and their corresponding funnel stages.

1. Informational = Awareness stage

This intent corresponds to the awareness stage of the funnel, where a consumer wants to collect information about something.

For instance, a person wants to know how to speed up the lead routing process. So, they google for tips. Here, they aren’t interested in your product or service but want to find a solution to their problem.

With this buying intent, businesses should only educate leads and guide them toward the solution without making an offer to purchase their product.

2. Investigational = Consideration stage

^At this stage, the leads research. They already know about the solution to their problem and the product or service they are looking for. They take time to pick the right option for them. With this purchase intent type, consumers explore brands, read reviews, compare products and services, and check social media content to find out more about the product.

The primary goal of a person with investigational purchase intent is to evaluate the options that the market offers. You must nurture these leads with relevant product propositions and personalized marketing offers.

3. Navigational = Acquisition stage

Consumers with navigational buying intent are interested in a specific brand.

Compared to the previous buying intent, this intent type is related to people with a stronger desire to purchase. These consumers may be your leads, but they haven’t converted into customers. Hence, they must be nurtured well to prevent them from bouncing to competing brands.

4. Transactional = Service/ Conversion stage

This is the best type of purchase intent for any business. It means that the potential customer is about to make a purchase.

The people with the transactional buying intent are the closest to the required conversion. Hence, they must be considered a priority and showered with the necessary attention from the sales team.

Offer these potential prospects personalized discounts and other promotions to encourage them to purchase. It will also help you retain them in the long run.

Once the sale is successful with these prospects, these customers become loyal to your brand. Hence, they will stick with you and repeat purchases whenever needed.

How To Find the Exact Buying Intent Data?

Before I tell you about buying intent data and how to find it, you should know why you need buying intent data.

Simply said, you need buying intent data to measure the buying intent of your audiences, and it starts with collecting large-scale data. So, how can you collect this data?

Here are the types of intent data you need and the ways to collect them.

Internal or First-Party Data

The first-party purchase intent data is the internal data. You can collect this data in-house via automation platforms or web apps. You can track user activity, like engagement, purchase information, etc., directly on your website.

You can also collect these purchase intent data from second-party sources like search engines and social media platforms. Track online trends and access global user interest reports to get comprehensive purchase intent data.

External or Third-Party Data

As the name suggests, this buying intent data is collected outside the company, but they are extremely important for your sales teams. On average, buyers show 32 third-party intent signals before they purchase. And getting these buying intent data is crucial for closing more sales.

You can partner with third-party providers to help you with collecting buying intent data. They perform professional research via survey panels and internet monitoring and track user activity on other websites to get hands-on data insights.

Now, let’s take a quick look at what individual intent signals include.

• Device – data generated by the device used for browsing – mobile phone, web browser, etc.
• Customer behavior – individual data on page views, scrolls, on-site searches, clicks, hovers, and registrations.
• Survey – brands conduct surveys to obtain customer feedback on the brand.
• Clickstream – session duration, customer ID, time stamp, name of the selected product, category, price, and the sum total of all products added to the cart.

Besides individual intent data, here’s what aggregate web data includes.

• Website – channel sources, distribution, traffic volume, content consumption.
• Consumer behavior – global purchase trends, most popular channels, search trends, and market tendencies.
• Product – general consumer preferences, changes in demand for a specific product, and product value.

5 Benefits of Identifying Buying Intent

Identifying buying intent signals helps you determine where the buyers are in their buying journey. Thus, you can better align your marketing strategies with their specific interests and enable them to adapt to targeted marketing messages.

Check out the top five benefits of identifying and utilizing buying intent.

1. Better lead generation strategy

Comprehensive purchase intent data can help you enhance your lead qualification process. You can determine whether they are ready to buy, targeting them more effectively. Hence, identifying buying intent can be a great asset when building your lead generation strategies.

In the B2B space, prioritizing accounts is one of the hardest parts. 50% of sales leaders use buying intent data to improve their account prioritization.

Marketers and sales teams can prioritize accounts with high purchase intent and determine the most effective ways to nurture them. Also, targeted ads and marketing automation become more accurate in identifying and using purchase intent data.

2. Improve your content strategy

99% of large organizations use buying intent data in some way, and one of the ways has to be the content strategy.

Though there are SEO tools to assist you in optimizing your content, buying intent data can help you improve your content marketing approach. Once you identify buying intent, you can tailor content strategies that align with what your ideal customers find interesting and engaging.

Buying intent data is invaluable for businesses to build a solid content strategy. The data gives you an idea about what the high-potential prospects want to learn about your brand. Thus, knowing your audience’s intent and what they are searching for, you can create content that answers their queries.

3. Improve Lead Scoring Quality

You need a certain degree of accuracy in the visitor behavior data to identify whether a lead is a high or low score.

Buying intent data can help you identify users searching for a purchasable solution. This enables you to focus on these priority leads who have a high chance of converting. Additionally, buying intent data can help you score your leads better, and lead scoring allows you to tailor marketing campaigns to increase conversions.

Further, buying intent data can give you insights that you won’t find in your CRM. Comprehensive buying intent data helps you understand your target market at a deeper level and tailor the best user experience.

4. Improve Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

B2B buying intent data can significantly contribute to creating connections and engaging with the right consumers. This data helps you discover more consumers within the market, improves accuracy in lead scoring, and shapes your ABM strategy.

Further, the data can significantly enhance your online experience using technologies like live chat, which engages the right people at the right time. In short, with buying intent, you can proactively hold conversations with high-quality leads and improve their experience via instant feedback through live chats.

5. Engagement via Time-Targeted Ads

Another benefit of identifying buying intent is that you can avoid wasting advertising resources on people with no intention of purchasing your product. Buying intent data can help you fine-tune your advertising efforts by focusing on leads with high purchase intent.

Once you have your prospects with high purchase intent, you can share your product demos, content, guides, and other materials in various ways. Implementing effective lead nurturing programs like personalized email campaigns can also help you convert more.

All in all, buying intent can help you accelerate your business growth. With an impressive 99% of businesses witnessing sales/ ROI increase by using purchase intent data, you can be sure to see results as well.

How To Map Buying Intent with your Marketing Strategy?

According to research, 50% of leaders said that buying intent data helps with aligning sales and marketing and 55% of sales leaders witnessed an increase in conversions with intent data.

However, you need to map buying intent data with your marketing strategy to align sales and marketing and boost conversions. But how?

Here’s how you can align buying intent data with your marketing strategy to enhance your marketing tactics.

Content Strategy

Why are people downloading your guides and eBooks? Why do they read your blogs? Why do they visit your product pages?

By understanding your buyer’s intent, you can identify which stage of the customer journey they are in. Hence, you can build the right content strategy that serves their needs. Further, you can create the perfect educational content that can push them a little toward making a purchase decision.

Buyers with an intention to learn generally search for terms like ‘lead management best practices’ or ‘content marketing strategies.’ These keywords do not indicate purchase intent. Meanwhile, buyers who want to compare solutions search for ‘reviews,’ recommendations, and ‘benefits’ that help them in decision-making. Further down the sales funnel, buyers will have a clear and high purchase intent and search for a specific product or service. These buyers are the ones that are ready to buy.

Use relevant headlines for your content that state your buyer’s intent to make the most of this knowledge. This way, they will know that the content is relevant to them.

With this, let’s look at the second way to map buying intent with your marketing strategy – keyword optimization.

Keyword Optimization

If you discover the ‘why’ behind your buyer’s use of specific keywords, you can map out your content better with specific priority keywords.

Buying intent data and keyword metrics can help you map keywords considering your buyer’s behavior. Thus, your SEO efforts can be more effective in reaching buyers closer to making a purchase.

Different keyword tools can help you analyze keywords and target the right ones. If you are starting out with keyword optimization, target the long-tail keywords, as they are easier to rank for. Evaluate the keyword difficulty and then target keywords accordingly.

Copywriting

You already know that with buying intent, you can create content that’s relevant to your target market. When you create content backed by buying intent, your brand stands out. Thus, you can capture prospects better and prevent them from going to your competitors.

In the awareness phase, buyers intend to learn. So, at this point, you must give them more guides, eBooks, blogs, how-to articles, etc. Though the purchase intent is low here, you should help buyers to position your brand as a trustworthy one.

In the next phase, buyers explore solutions. You can offer them case studies, reviews, videos, testimonials, etc.

Finally, when buyers are ready to purchase, you need to get the best copywriting skills. Since they do not need any more convincing, you should offer them a quick way to purchase your product. Landing pages, product pages, and sales pages with the right content can help them make the purchase decision quickly.

Final Note

Analyzing buying intent is something every B2B business must consider to build effective marketing strategies and speed up their growth.

Once you have real-time buying intent data, you can run personalized campaigns, nurture leads better, and increase consumers’ willingness to purchase.

To enhance your marketing strategy and accelerate growth, combine buying intent with a lead conversion platform like RevenueHero. While buying intent data can improve your marketing efforts and lead scoring, RevenueHero can help you capture leads, route them in real time, and instantly schedule meetings without wasting time.

Request a demo to learn more.