We hear a lot about intent in marketing. Few of us are strangers to the term customer intent, and understanding it has always been a cornerstone of good marketing. Yet it seems that, like many fundamentals, it gets easily forgotten in the scrabble to just get stuff done and drive results. 

Intent driven marketing can supercharge the results from your marketing, but only if you understand intent first. A lot of the time when brands and agencies talk about customer intent they’re looking at what customers are doing or searching for, making an inference and then building their marketing around it. This is completely valid, but it’s not really understanding intent, because what’s behind the action (the intent) is left open to interpretation. 

We go a step further and decode customer intent. Why? Because we believe this is the key to serious growth.  

What is customer intent anyway? 

All we’re really talking about here is the why behind someone’s actions. It could be why they are searching for a specific term, why they are looking at a particular product, why they keep coming back to a page on your site. Customer intent is the why behind the what. 

It’s not something magical or confusing. But understanding it can lead to magical results. 

Why does understanding customer intent matter? 

Surely if you know what a customer is doing that’s enough to help you build the right digital experience, or create the right piece of content? Not really. If you don’t understand customer intent properly you can’t respond effectively in a way that genuinely helps customers. You might invest a lot of resources and time into projects that don’t yield the right outcome because your solution is mismatched to their intent.

Using a general (but extreme) analogy, say you’re making a cup of tea in the kitchen for a guest. They ask you a question and you turn to answer them. Being absent minded for a second your hand brushes against one of the mugs which crashes to the floor right on their foot. 

What was your intent? It certainly wasn’t to smash a mug on their foot and leave them with a swollen toe. So while they may be shocked and a bit angry in the moment, if their response is to fly off the handle, scream and shout, smash another mug on your foot you cad, and then hold a life long grudge about the event, bringing it up every time you meet, is that the right response? 

I’d say no. 

But of course if their question enraged you to the point where you flung the mug down on their foot, with the full intention of hurting them, then the response outlined above might make more sense.  

Now, that may sound like philosophical pondering and a subjective can of ethical worms. Let me use a more concrete example from a recent project to make it more realistic. 

As part of a UX review for a client’s site we were using some heatmapping software. This software not only gave you regular heatmaps, scroll depth, dwell time and video recordings of users navigating through the site, it also provided AI “insights” to give recommendations as to issues and potential solutions. Excellent. No need to think. 

Now, one section of the site experienced a fair amount of traffic and pages within seemed to be yielding a lot of what the software deemed “rage clicks”. Its recommendation given the high number of rage clicks was that these pages needed changing to yield a better user experience. 

A quick look at some of the pages (they all followed the same templates) didn’t show anything obviously wrong with them, and nothing that would drive so many frustrated clicks. But watching some videos gave a better understanding of what was happening. And revealed a great deal about the customer intent behind these clicks. 

It was obvious that the users on these pages were highlighting and copy-pasting text from the pages out into some other piece of software. Given the content on these pages and the client’s sector (financial services) this behaviour was actually explainable and expected, as their customers would be doing a lot of research on the company and its employees before making a decision on which business to pick. 

So knowing the customer intent behind the actions helped us to:

1. Avoid making costly changes to site UX that the AI was telling us based on the data.
2. Allocate efforts to other areas, and consider the content on these pages and if it could be improved to support users whose clear intent was to carry out research and comparison as part of their consideration journey. 

How do you decode intent?

Decoding customer intent takes a little time and effort, though it can be surprisingly fast when you combine AI, the right technology, and expert human knowledge. In a nutshell our approach is: 

• Tried and tested techniques – Customer surveys, interviews, on-site observations. These traditional techniques are often excluded by digital agencies but they have tremendous value and we always look to include them, even if it’s done guerilla style on a shoestring budget.
  
• 3rd party platforms – Tools like GWI and Microsoft Clarity help us spot patterns at scale. The ability to look at large audiences through a platform like GWI helps us validate client assumptions and the results of qualitative and desk research, uncover new insights, as well as support tactical considerations like channel mix.
  
• Proprietary tech – We often come up against specific client challenges for which there isn’t an existing tool. So we build in-house solutions to surface behavioural signals faster and smarter.
  
• Expert analysis – All the gear and no idea applies as much in marketing (and probably more so) as it does in weekend warrior athletic pursuits. Our specialists turn data into direction. By analysing and making connections between data points to derive insights, we turn the numbers into actionable strategies. 
  

Remember the UX issue I mentioned earlier: tech is powerful, but without context and human ingenuity it can be just noise. Our job is to bring clarity to the chaos.

How to deliver intent based marketing through the funnel

Intent shifts as customers move through the funnel, we all know this. What someone needs and why is very different at each stage. And of course we all know your marketing needs to move with them, and yet quite often we don’t manage to pull this off. Budget can be an oft cited reason why: “I just need to focus on the bottom of the funnel where I’m going to see a direct correlation between what I put out there and a conversion.” But if you’re not dealing with customer intent from the earliest stage of their journey with you, you’re draining a dwindling well dry. 

So ensuring you focus on intent based marketing through the funnel is essential. 

• Top of funnel: Customers here are about curiosity and exploration, they may not even be aware of your brand at all. So you have to capture attention. This might be with creative ads, PR campaigns, and the like, but also early-stage questions customers have about products and services.
  
• Mid-funnel: Evaluation and comparison. Build confidence through performance messaging, social proof, and smart retargeting.
  
• Bottom of funnel: Decision and action. Remove friction, focus on clarity, and get the conversion.
  

Too often, brands focus on the bottom of the funnel – UX tweaks, button colours, CRO hacks – without investing in the intent that drives people there in the first place.

When you align messaging and channel strategy with intent at each stage, you stop pushing people through the funnel. You guide them to a natural conclusion: your business.

How does intent based marketing help your business? 

Simple. It makes your marketing smarter, faster, and more effective.

• Less wasted spend – No more targeting the wrong people with the wrong message, makes marketing more efficient.
  
• Better conversion rates – Because you’re delivering what customers actually need when they need, your marketing will be more effective in delivering results.
  
• Smarter decision-making – You start allocating resources and picking what to do based on real insight, not assumptions. Remember what Michael Porter said about strategy: it’s about choosing what not to do as much as choosing what to do.
  
• Sustainable performance – Understanding customer intent helps you develop marketing that scales, adapts, and endures. You’ll see quick wins develop into continuing results.

Make decoding intent the future of your marketing

Decoding customer intent isn’t a new trend but a return to marketing fundamentals. Understand your audience, know their context, and act accordingly.

What’s changed is the way we do it. With the right mix of tech, tools and talent, we can decode intent faster and more accurately than ever before.

At Organic, that’s what we do: turn audience understanding into commercial impact. No gimmicks. No guesswork. Just smart marketing that drives growth.Ready to Grow With Intent? Contact us today.