Benefits of Strategizing with Buyer Intent Data
The Benefits of Strategizing with Buyer Intent Data
The term Buyer Intent can be defined as a prospect’s goal during each stage of the buying process. It is of utmost benefit to you when someone clicks on an ad, opens one of your emails, explores your website, or has any other interaction with your company online. These are like tracks that, when analyzed, can reveal almost exactly what the user is looking for.
Buyer intent data captures online research of actual buyer journeys and determines a purchase intent signal from the prospects’ activity. As a result, it creates the most accurate way to predict who is in the market.
A prospect’s goal at the beginning may be to find out if you have a product that solves their problem. The next stage is to go after price information and assurance of quality. Right before making the purchase or hiring the service, some prospects may want to learn about your warranty and/or customer service. Buyer intent is a moving, interchangeable target throughout the entire marketing and sales cycle.
Buyer intent data can improve your marketing efforts in many ways, but four areas that can benefit the most are explored below:
1. SEO Insights
The keywords that people use to search for your product or service can tell you a lot about their intent. For example, consider the three queries, “cheap headphones,” “travel headphone reviews,” and “bose quiet comfort wireless noise-canceling headphones.” The first searcher is probably ready to buy, and they prioritize price. The second user is at an early stage of the buyer’s journey, still digging for basic information about a product category. In the third example, we have someone who may have their credit card out and ready, or they may just be researching the specific product. When you can correlate the use of specific keywords to certain phases of the buying process, you can fine-tune your content with those keywords to drive qualified prospects to your site. You can prioritize and time the use of certain keywords as a means of syncing up your marketing funnel with the buyer’s intent.
2. Optimized Content
When website visitors access your content, you can get an extremely clear indication of their intent by noting the specific information they choose to consume. If they click on a specific section of your site, it’s because they’re interested in the topic covered there. Associating their intent with their content choice, and in turn, with a phase of the buyer journey, will help you anticipate what prospects want to see next. Advancing the buying process one step at a time, with a carefully sequenced collection of marketing materials, is a time-tested strategy to increase sales.
Every stage is important. Whether a prospect needs a final push to make a purchase, or if they’re at the very top of the sales funnel, knowing the next step, from the customer’s perspective, will tell you how to proceed. To make the most of this content-focused approach, you should not only time your messages based on buyer intent, but you should also tailor the content to match the customer’s position in the buying process. During the discovery part of the process, a person has more learner intent than buyer intent — they want information about your product or service. That’s when your how-to articles and helpful blog posts are what that prospect needs to see. Buyer intent is low at this point, so your content needs to be focused on the customer’s problem and show that you can provide the best solution.
The middle phase involves a head-to-head comparison with your competitors, so that’s the time to let prospects know about the specific benefits of your product or service. For maximum impact, this sort of information is best delivered in the form of videos, product images, infographics, slide presentations, reviews, and testimonials. When the buyer is ready to purchase, make it easy for them. The content on your site targeted at people in this phase of the buying process includes your landing pages and product pages. They should all present an easy path to final purchase steps.
3. Maximized Conversion Rates
There are almost always multiple website visits and a series of pre-purchase CTAs strategically presented. No sale occurs until a multi-step buying process has played out. There’s a time to push for that final buying step, and getting it right is a key factor in improving your conversion rates. With buyer intent data and a tracking tool, you can figure out the sign that tells you a prospect is ready to buy. But conversion isn’t just about that final transformation from prospect to paying customer. It can also be converting a one-time website visitor into a frequent visitor or changing a prospect with a casual interest into one who wants in-depth product information. Understanding buyer intent at every phase can help you increase the conversion rate of all your CTAs. You can discover signals that shed light on whether a person should see basic product information, a CTA to join your mailing list, or a friendly email asking if they have any questions, for example. As soon as a signal is given, you can present the prospect with the appropriate prompt that will lead them to the next stage of the buyer journey.
4. Better Customer Retention
You can use buyer intent data to figure out if a customer is more likely to make another purchase or if they’re unhappy and looking elsewhere for the product or service you sell. Using internal buyer intent data, you can track subscription cancellations and respond with a “Please come back” message. External intent data can tell you if your customers are accessing review sites, which may prove that they’re looking for someone else to do business with. You can also track success signals like the number of content shares, new subscribers, and social media responses. Whether you’re targeting customers who love you or those who are thinking about moving on, you can craft a marketing campaign that will solidify your relationship with the former and win back the latter.
5. Track Your Customers Every Step of the Way
Having a handle on your buyers’ intent means that you know what they’re thinking at every stage of the buying process. Leveraging this knowledge can help you refine your SEO efforts, shape your content, up to your conversion rates, improve customer retention, and much more. (Culled from HostPapa)
Are you using buyer intent data when setting up your marketing campaigns?
