Marketing is all about knowing your audience. Traditional marketing used to focus solely on demographics and segmenting your audience into groups based on age, gender, income level, etc. As marketing has evolved, we’ve started to segment audiences by purchase intent data because demographics don’t always tell the whole story. For a better understanding of purchase intent, we’ve broken down some of the basics below.
What is purchase intent?
Purchase intent is your target user’s mindset about your product or service in relation to buying. The best way to understand this is to ask yourself this question: based on what I know about my target audience, how likely are they to make a purchase?
How do we know purchase intent?
To arrive at purchase intent, we look at a wide range of factors of your audience. This can be several things such as what channels they are using, what keywords they are searching on, what web pages they are visiting, and other behavioral triggers. All of these together with demographic data helps to create a clearer picture of your audience and where they are in the buying journey.
Moving prospects through the funnel
With this data, we can effectively target your audience with content based on where they are in the purchase journey and engage with them to move them further down the marketing funnel towards making a purchase.
Purchase intent can be highly effective at identifying the correct prospects for you to target, as well as helping you serve the correct content to the right people. However, developing a complex system can be challenging. You can start small with purchase intent by scoring leads based on behavioral triggers like email opens and specific website page visits. Once you’ve mastered this, you can scale up to business intelligence platforms or custom intent audiences.