Buyer Intent Marketing: Stop Fishing in the Same Pond

Buyer intent marketing is the practice of identifying where a prospect sits in their decision-making process and matching your marketing activity to that moment. Done well, it tells you not just who might buy, but when they are most likely to act, and what message will move them. Done poorly, it becomes an elaborate justification for spending all your budget on people who were already going to convert anyway.

That second version is more common than most teams want to admit.

What Buyer Intent Marketing Actually Means

The term gets used loosely. In its narrowest form, buyer intent marketing refers to using third-party intent data platforms to identify companies or individuals who are actively researching a category, then targeting them with advertising or outreach. In its broader, more useful form, it describes any approach that uses behavioural signals to infer purchase readiness and shape how, when, and what you communicate.

Those signals can come from many places: search behaviour, content consumption, website visits, review site activity, social engagement, CRM interactions, or direct product usage data. The common thread is that something a prospect has done, rather than something you have assumed about them, is informing your next move.

That distinction matters. Intent-based marketing at its best is responsive rather than presumptuous. It replaces demographic guesswork with behavioural evidence. But it only works if you are honest about what the signals are actually telling you, and what they are not.

If you are thinking about how buyer intent fits into a wider go-to-market approach, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the broader commercial framework it should sit within.

Why Most Teams Get Buyer Intent Wrong

I spent the early part of my career in performance marketing. I was good at it, and I believed in it. We tracked everything, optimised relentlessly, and reported strong return on ad spend numbers that made clients happy. What I did not appreciate until much later was how much of what we were taking credit for was going to happen anyway.

Someone searches for your brand name. They click a paid ad. You count a conversion. Your attribution model says performance marketing delivered that sale. But that person already knew your brand. They had already made a decision. You did not create that intent. You just intercepted it, and charged for the privilege.

Buyer intent marketing, when it is reduced to bid management and retargeting, makes this problem worse. You build an increasingly sophisticated system for capturing demand that already exists, while the pipeline of new demand quietly dries up because nobody is investing in creating it. The numbers look fine until they suddenly do not.

This is not a theoretical concern. Vidyard’s research on GTM team pipeline challenges points to a consistent pattern: teams are over-indexed on converting existing pipeline and under-invested in generating new demand. Intent data has accelerated that tendency because it makes lower-funnel activity feel scientific and measurable in ways that upper-funnel investment does not.

The result is a self-reinforcing loop. You optimise toward people who are already close to buying. Your conversion rates look good. You put more budget into the same pool. The pool gets smaller because you are not replenishing it. Growth stalls. Someone asks why the pipeline has dried up and the answer, usually, is that you spent three years fishing in the same pond.

What Intent Signals Can and Cannot Tell You

Intent data has genuine value. I am not arguing against using it. I am arguing for using it with appropriate scepticism about what it actually proves.

What it can tell you: that someone is actively researching a category, that a company has had multiple employees consuming content on a relevant topic, that a prospect has visited your pricing page three times in two weeks. These are real signals with real commercial implications. They are worth acting on.

What it cannot tell you: whether your brand was the reason they converted, whether they were going to buy regardless, or whether the signal you are seeing represents genuine purchase intent or casual curiosity. A prospect reading a comparison article about your category might be a serious buyer. They might also be a competitor, a student, or a journalist. Intent data does not distinguish between them reliably.

There is also a quality problem with third-party intent data specifically. The methodologies for collecting it vary enormously, the coverage is uneven across industries, and the lag between a signal being generated and it reaching your platform can be long enough to make the data less useful than it appears. Forrester’s work on go-to-market challenges in complex categories highlights how intent signals can be misread when the buying process is long and involves multiple stakeholders, each of whom may be at a different stage.

First-party intent data, the kind generated by your own website, your own content, your own product, is considerably more reliable. It is also harder to scale. The best intent-based programmes I have seen treat first-party signals as the primary input and third-party data as a supplementary layer, not the other way around.

How to Build a Buyer Intent Strategy That Creates Growth, Not Just Efficiency

The distinction I keep coming back to is between demand capture and demand creation. Buyer intent marketing, in its conventional form, is almost entirely a demand capture exercise. It is efficient in the short term and strategically limiting in the long term. A strategy that uses intent signals well does both.

Map the full intent spectrum, not just the bottom of it. Purchase intent is the most obvious signal, but it is not the only one worth tracking. Early-stage research behaviour, category awareness signals, and problem-recognition content consumption all tell you something about where a prospect is in their thinking. If you only act on late-stage signals, you are entering conversations that others have already been having for months. You are always the last brand in the room.

Use intent data to inform content and messaging, not just targeting. One of the most underused applications of intent signals is content strategy. If you can see which topics your in-market prospects are researching, you have a direct read on what questions they are trying to answer before they buy. That should shape what you write, what you say in sales conversations, and what objections you address in your product positioning. Most teams use intent data to decide who to show an ad to. Fewer use it to decide what the ad should say, or what content should exist to support the conversation.

Connect intent signals to your full commercial process. The best use of buyer intent data I have seen was at a B2B technology company where we integrated intent signals directly into the sales team’s workflow. High-intent accounts were flagged in the CRM with context about what they had been researching. Sales conversations started from a more informed position. The close rate on those accounts was meaningfully higher than on cold outreach, not because the intent data was magic, but because it allowed the sales team to be relevant rather than generic. That is the right use of the technology.

Do not let intent data narrow your market definition. This is the trap I see most often. You start with a broad addressable market. You apply intent filters. You end up with a smaller, more actionable list. That list performs well. You invest more heavily in it. Over time, you have effectively redefined your market as the people who are already looking for you, which is a much smaller number than the people who could benefit from what you sell. BCG’s work on commercial transformation makes a similar point about go-to-market strategies that optimise for existing demand patterns rather than reshaping them.

The Relationship Between Intent Marketing and Product Quality

There is something uncomfortable that I think is worth saying directly. The companies I have worked with that had the strongest customer experience and the most genuinely useful products needed the least amount of intent-chasing. Their existing customers referred new ones. Their reputation preceded them in sales conversations. The funnel filled from the top without much engineering.

The companies that invested most heavily in intent data and lower-funnel optimisation were often the ones with a more fundamental problem: the product was not differentiated enough, the customer experience was not good enough, or the market positioning was not clear enough to generate organic demand. Intent marketing became a way of compensating for those gaps rather than addressing them.

I am not saying intent marketing is only for weak products. I am saying that if your intent marketing is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting, it is worth asking why. Sometimes the answer is that you are in a genuinely competitive category where every brand needs to work hard to be visible at the right moment. Sometimes the answer is that something upstream needs fixing, and no amount of bid optimisation will solve it.

BCG’s analysis of evolving customer needs in financial services makes a point that applies broadly: the most sustainable commercial models are built on genuinely understanding what customers need at different stages of their lives, not on intercepting them at the moment of transaction. Intent data is most powerful when it is part of that deeper understanding, not a substitute for it.

Measuring Buyer Intent Programmes Without Fooling Yourself

Measurement is where most intent programmes go wrong, and where the self-deception tends to compound. Because intent-based activity is targeted at people who are already likely to convert, conversion rates look impressive. Cost per acquisition looks efficient. The programme appears to be working exceptionally well. What the numbers do not show is the counterfactual: how many of those people would have converted anyway, through a different channel or no channel at all.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and one of the things that process taught me was how rarely brands measure the right things. The entries that impressed me most were the ones that could demonstrate genuine incrementality, not just correlation between marketing activity and sales outcomes. That is a much harder thing to prove, and most teams do not attempt it.

For intent marketing specifically, incrementality testing is the most honest measure available. Run holdout groups. Compare conversion rates among intent-targeted audiences against similar audiences who were not targeted. If the difference is small, you are mostly capturing demand that would have arrived anyway. If the difference is large, you have evidence that the targeting is genuinely accelerating decisions rather than just intercepting them.

Beyond incrementality, track pipeline quality over time. Are the accounts flagged by intent data converting at higher rates through the full sales cycle, not just at the first conversion point? Are they retaining better? Are they more valuable customers? If intent signals are genuinely identifying good-fit buyers, those effects should show up downstream. If they are just identifying people who were going to click anyway, they will not.

Tools like those covered in Semrush’s growth toolkit overview can support the measurement infrastructure, but the harder work is designing measurement frameworks that are honest about what you are actually proving. The tools are only as good as the questions you are asking of them.

Where Buyer Intent Fits in a Full-Funnel Strategy

Buyer intent marketing works best as one layer of a broader go-to-market approach, not as the whole strategy. The analogy I use is a retail one. If someone walks into a clothes shop and picks up a jacket to try on, they are significantly more likely to buy than someone who just walked past the window. Intercepting that moment matters. But if you spend all your energy on people who are already inside the shop, you eventually run out of customers. Someone has to be doing the work that gets people through the door in the first place.

Intent marketing is the fitting room. Brand building, content marketing, category creation, and customer experience are what fill the shop. Both matter. Neither works without the other.

The practical implication is that budget allocation should reflect both. A common failure mode is to let intent-based activity expand to consume most of the marketing budget because it reports the best short-term numbers, while upper-funnel investment gets cut because it is harder to attribute. That trade-off feels rational in the moment and tends to look like a mistake two or three years later.

Real-world growth examples consistently show that the brands with the most durable growth trajectories are those that invest in both demand creation and demand capture, rather than optimising exclusively for the latter.

There is more on how to balance these priorities across the full commercial strategy in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, which covers the broader decisions that sit above any individual channel or tactic.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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