How To Use Purchase Intent to Improve Your Sales?

Picture this: You've invested time and resources into generating leads, but the lead graph isn't moving the way you want it to. It's like trying to fill a leaky bucket. No matter how much water you pour in, it just keeps draining out.

But, what if we told you that there’s a way to target customers who are ready to buy? What if you get to save your valuable resources on those who aren't?

With purchase intent data, you can focus on marketing efforts for people who are most likely to convert.

Let’s dive deeper to learn more about purchase intent and how to use it to improve your sales and marketing efforts.

What Is Purchase Intent?

Purchase intent is the likelihood or willingness to buy a product in a specific time frame. It is one of the most important metrics for marketers and business owners as it tells them how likely a customer is to buy their product.

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Generally, purchase intent models use a core set of variables, like,

• demographics and firmographics
• purchase history
• website engagement, etc.

to determine whether or not someone is likely to buy something.

Role of Purchase Intent in Your Marketing Funnel

Purchase intention and marketing funnel are closely related.

Here’s what Nick Chasinov, Founder at Techniks, says about using purchase intent “terms” to drive sales.

“Users that are ready to buy are searching with the intent to purchase. This affects the way they search, and often includes transactional queries.”

Implementing the ‘purchase intent terms’ marketing tactic for 6 months for a client, the team at Techniks got some amazing results. Here’s what they did.

“We added purchase intent terms like ‘buy’ to drive an incremental $509k in 6 months.” Moreover, they achieved:

• A 938% increase in CTR for “buy” keywords; and
• A 2,418% increase in clicks from organic search on “buy” keywords

This short success story shows how adding purchase intent data to your marketing efforts can revolutionize results. Hence, if you consider a customer's purchase intent to build your marketing strategies, you can directly impact your revenue.

Now, let's look at the three core steps of an ideal marketing funnel and how you can use purchase intent at each stage.

• Lead generation
• Lead nurturing
• Sales

1. Lead Generation

Lead generation is all about filling your pipeline with leads who are interested in your product. To do this, you need to know what challenges buyers face and what they are looking for to resolve them.

Start with crafting a buyer persona or ideal customer profile. You can use this buyer persona to create content and messages that are more likely to resonate with your audience.

You can use multiple methods to generate quality leads for your marketing funnel, including:

• Cold emails
• Marketing campaigns
• Events
• Webinars
• Media mentions

Before you start creating your campaign, optimize your website for lead generation. However, it's important to note that optimization doesn't simply mean optimizing the loading speed and the copy available on your website. It goes beyond that. You must showcase the your product’s value in a way that compels the visitors to take action. The best way to do this is through an interactive product demo.

An interactive product demo is a great way to showcase the value of your product. It allows you to create a more personal connection with your potential customers, and it will enable them to get hands-on experience with the product.

With Storylane, you can create interactive demos and embed them on your website to convert traffic.

Here's how Semrush uses Storylane's interactive product demos to showcase their platform 👇

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The key here is to drive your audience’s buying intent and you can do it by showing them a solution to their problem.

2. Lead Nurturing

After leads get the information they need, they are pulled into a lead management system for nurturing down the funnel. Lead Nurturing includes three stages:

• Interest
• Consideration
• Intent

Interest - The first stage in the lead nurturing process is to build interest in your products or services. During this phase, you can send emails with valuable content such as blog posts, eBooks, webinars, or other resources.

Consideration - The second stage is about building a long-lasting relationship with prospects by creating trust and showing them how you can help them solve their pain points. Send emails with valuable content, include a call-to-action encouraging the recipients to take the next step in the customer journey, like filling out a form or attending an event.

Intent - Prioritize your leads at this stage based on online behaviors. Assign more points to the ones attending webinars or interacting with your product demo. By doing this, you can segment high-intent leads from the low-intent ones and nurture them differently. For example, you can send more educational emails to high-intent leads to influence purchase decisions and fewer promotional messages.

3. Sales

At this stage, prospects do two things - evaluate and purchase.

Evaluation - At this point, buyers research the product they consider buying. Hence, sending product demos comes in handy here. If a prospect interacts with your product demo till the end, understand that they are more likely to buy from you (given, the pricing’s is right for their budget) . Hence, move them to the final stage.

Storylane makes it simple to track how your leads interact with your demo, allowing you to tailor your marketing messages based on their behavior.

Purchase - A prospective customer reaches the purchase stage when they already know about (awareness stage) and is interested in your product. At this stage, their experience with your brand, free trials or personalized attention from a sales representative, determines how likely they are to purchase and recommend your brand.

Ways to Target Users Using Buying/Purchase Intent

Time to get your message across to people who are already interested in your product!🚀

Here are a few ways to target users based on their purchase intent.

1. Target High-Intent Keywords With SEO and Ads

Have you read Techniks’ success story above on using the purchase intent term ‘buy’?

That’s exactly what a high-intent keyword does.

High-intent keywords denote the user actively looking for a product or service like yours. So, identify relevant keywords or search terms that your audiences use and incorporate them in your SEO strategies. This will result in quick sales.

Tip 💡SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to find high-intent keywords and see how much traffic they receive. Use Google Analytics to discover which search terms bring in the most conversions.

Want to learn more about using user intent in search marketing? Here’s a podcast you must check out.

2. Create Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Strategies

ABM can be another marketing tool to make your arsenal stronger.  Building strong ABM strategies and campaigns using purchase intent data can improve your sales cycle and retain the best-fit customers.

Adam New-Waterson, Chief Product Officer (Interim CTO), says, “ABM is a framework that goes deeper into personas and segmentation.” He considers ABM as “the spear to capture your high-value targets.”

In fact, statistics say that ABM strategies can boost your revenue by 208%. That’s how beneficial ABM campaigns can be for your business. Then, why not use purchase intent data to achieve ABM campaign success?!

3. Remarketing

Do you remember Facebook's ‘poke’ feature? Remarketing is just like that. It involves nudging users who have previously visited your website or engaged with your brand.

Remarketing is an effective way to reach users who have shown an interest in your products or services but haven't made a purchase yet.

You can offer them a lead magnet to obtain their email address and build a relationship with them. Further, you can run re-nuture drip campaigns to move them into your marketing funnel and convert them into loyal customers down the road.

Here’s a B2B remarketing case study for further understanding.

Lumension, a leading endpoint security software company, leveraged the effectiveness of remarketing campaigns. They retargeted both online and offline audiences.

• First, Lumension worked with website publisher partners who covered events that their target audience was interested in. Then, the company cross-referenced site visitors with the event attendees to retarget them online.
• Secondly, Lumension worked with media portals to retarget visitors interested in the competitors’ content. Further, they also used cookies (dropped by media portals in visitors’ browsers) to track potential leads in the IT security market.

The result?

• Their lead volume increased by 81% despite a 30% PPC budget cut.
• Their targeted influencer traffic increased by 10%.

4. Intent-Based Advertising

When you know your audiences’ purchase intent, you can create intent-based marketing strategies to influence purchasing decisions. For example, intent-based ads. They are a great way to optimize advertising campaigns and generate higher conversions.

Intent-based advertising is cost-efficient and it ensures that the right ad will reach the right people. YouTube campaigns using intent-based targeting on mobile devices have experienced 50% higher brand awareness compared to campaigns using demographic targeting only.

Different Ways to Increase Buyer Intent

There are many ways to increase the intent of consumers. Some are more technical, while others focus on human psychology. Here’s a rundown of some common tactics:

1. Focus on Showcasing the Product’s Features and Benefits

Less product information prevents your leads from taking action. That's why it's essential to use an interactive product demo that helps you address your leads’ concerns about the product's functionality, performance, or other aspects.

An excellent product demo can work wonders for increasing buyer intent. You can create a demo adhering to the story-telling format or you can also experiment with different creative ideas.

For example, the GoTeam App product demo. This tablet-based app created a demo focused on instilling a sense of excitement in customers. They used 3D animations and motion graphics to offer an action-driven demonstration of the product and the perfect customer experience.

Read more about this product demo here.

2. Use Social Proof To Build Trust

Social proof plays a crucial role in the buying journey.

People look for reviews and feedback to know more about the product from its existing users as it makes them more confident about their purchase.

Social proof is significant for B2B companies, where most of the sales process occurs online. If you can show that other businesses have used your products successfully and achieved great results with them, you'll build trust in your brand and increase conversion rates.

Look at how ClearVoice adds social proof to its website.

Here the content marketing company features the brand logos under the heading - “you’re in good company with ClearVoice.”

Further, the company adds client reviews and statistics to back their claims.

3. Offer Unique Value

The best way to build trust and create a great product is with unique value. A unique value is something that your competitors don't offer, and it can be almost anything from free training to exclusive discounts or a perfect buying experience. You must focus on creating something different than what's already out there to attract new customers who wouldn't have purchased from your competitors otherwise.

There are several SaaS brands that have got just the right value proposition to attract their target audience. For example, Dropbox. It has a clear, casual, and friendly value proposition that connects to almost everyone 😍

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4. Create Urgency

Creating a sense of urgency through limited-time offers or exclusive promotions, can increase buyer intent and speed up the buying process. These offers encourage potential customers to take action before it's too late.

Here is how Zoom uses urgency in their email to encourage subscribers to take action:

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5. Position Your Product as a Pain Killer and Not a Vitamin

Tell your customers how your product falls into the category of need-to-haves rather than nice-to-haves. We mean convey the indispensability of your product. This becomes all the more important when the economy slows down and the budgets get cut down. If you’re a vitamin, you’re most likely going to get slashed down.

Want to learn more about must-have and nice-to-have products?

Check out this podcast.

6. Offer a Free Trial

Offering a free trial is another great way to encourage customers to take action. It's a plus for your sales strategy as it allows B2B buyers to try your product or service without having to commit. It also provides valuable data about their usage habits that can help you improve the overall experience.

Why not use the freemium model?

Free trials create a sense of urgency, leading to higher conversion rates. The median free-to-paid conversion rate for trial products is roughly twice that of freemium ones (approximately 14% versus 7%).

Wrapping Up

Giving customers what they want is like magic🪄

They look for something and boom! You present it right before them!

This magic of understanding purchasing intent can significantly improve your marketing activities and sales. You can tailor your market strategies to target and convert high-intent prospects effectively.

While you plan to utilize purchase intent for your market plans, Storylane can be your buddy in this learning journey.

It can help you create interactive product demos that showcase all of the features and benefits of your product in the most fantastic ways, making it easier for customers to understand your product.

Want to know how you can gain more conversion with the interactive product demo? Schedule a free demo with us now!