Your marketing efforts aren’t actually shouting into the void.

Nope, it’s worse than that.

It’s more like you’re trying to whisper to your audience in a stadium more packed than a premier league soccer match over in the UK.

Your emails are getting lost in overflowing inboxes. Your ads are blending into the digital wallpaper.

It's not that your efforts aren’t any good. It's that they’re not targeted enough. And that’s where intent signals come in.

These behavioral cues—website visits, keyword searches, content downloads—are the crystal ball of modern marketing. They tell you not just who might buy but who's ready to buy.

But like any tool, they’re only as effective as they’re used properly.

Let’s talk through six use cases for intent signals that'll make a demonstrable impact on your marketing.

1. Identify High-Quality Leads Sales Wants to Follow Up With

In the never-ending case of Sales vs. Marketing, the endless cycle of accusations is that the former never follows up on leads while the latter only sends over bad leads.

Obviously who is “right” in this scenario will shift depending on the organization. Could be one, could be both, could be neither.

But if you’re sending over a lead whose only action has been to sign up for two webinars, well, you’re going to have a bad time.

Fortunately, intent data is exceptionally helpful in fixing this exact problem.

Let’s say a lead visits your pricing page three times in a week, is actively searching for your competitors, and signs up for your webinar. That's not just window shopping. Nobody reads pricing pages for fun. That's a prospect practically screaming, "I'm ready to buy!"

The trouble is pulling all these disparate points together. Modern intent data platforms are great at sifting through mountains of data, tracking actions across websites, third-party platforms, and social media. The result? A prioritized list of leads that sales will be thanking you for. Well, maybe not that. But they will be asking for more.

2. Personalize Content and Messaging

If you’ve read our blog before, you’ll know that we’re solidly against generic marketing. Today's buyers demand a more personalized experience. Savvy marketers are using intent signals to do just that.

Let's say you're selling project management software. Your intent data shows that someone at your prospect’s organization has been searching for "scalable project management tools" repeatedly.

And that’s Bingo! How?

Now, you can tailor your messaging to that organization to address scalability head-on. You can create personalized or tailored landing pages showcasing how your solution helps growing teams stay organized.

But don't stop there. This insight isn't just for your marketing team. Share it with sales, and they can lead with scalability in their outreach.

Your customer success team can prepare scalability-focused onboarding materials. Suddenly, you're not just personalizing a message - you're crafting an entire customer experience around this prospect's specific needs.

3. Time Your Outreach Perfectly

Depending on who you ask, only one to five percent of your TAM is going to be in market at any given point.

Timing isn't just important in comedy—it’s crucial if you have any sort of outreach motion at your organization. Just blindly shooting off generic marketing to your audience isn’t going to get you any useful information. Likewise, from the sales perspective, cold emailing and cold calling your database is the fastest way to have them on the do-not-call list and have them unsubscribe.

With intent signals, you can ensure any outreach lands at precisely the right moment.

Let’s say a prospect at a tier 1 target account visits your pricing page but leaves without taking action. An intent-driven strategy could trigger a retargeting ad or follow-up email within 24 hours, offering a discount or additional info about pricing options. It's like being a mind reader, but better (because you're actually giving them what they want when they want it).

Plenty of intent data platforms provide real-time alerts when a prospect takes a significant action. These tools can trigger automated responses, ensuring you never miss a critical opportunity to engage.

4. Optimizing Ad Spend with Intent Signals

Ad spend isn’t shrinking any time soon. It’s actually continuing to grow. Yet throwing money at PPC ads without effective targeting is a great way to light money on fire.

Obviously there will always be leakage with any marketing activities but intent signals help you to target your ad spend with sniper-like precision and maximize your ROAS.

Take a B2B cybersecurity provider looking to target businesses interested in advanced threat detection. By leveraging third-party intent data, they can identify companies actively researching similar solutions and focus their ad spend on these high-potential accounts.

That means more effective reach for your spending. Higher conversion rates. Lower customer acquisition costs.

If you’ve got a strong paid media motion at your organization, you should absolutely be integrating your efforts with intent data.

5. Enhancing Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM without intent data is trying to hit a bullseye with darts while blindfolded, and you’re not Mike Tyson. You might get lucky, but wouldn't you rather see what you're aiming at? Again, presuming you’re not Mike Tyson.

Anyway, let’s use a cloud solutions provider as an example. You’ve identified the various tiers of your accounts and have turned the eye of your intent software on those accounts. One day, your intent data reveals that a major target account is researching migration strategies in particular.

Suddenly, you're not just another vendor.

You can craft an ABM campaign that speaks directly to these challenges, addressing the exact pain points of cloud migration.

You can create tailored content, from whitepapers to webinars, that directly addresses the migration challenges they're grappling with. And when your sales team reaches out, they're not just pitching the product—they're focused on the problem the prospect is actively trying to solve, making every interaction more relevant and valuable.

6. Improving Retention and Upsell Opportunities

Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one—not to mention a huge headache.

Intent signals aren’t just for acquisition but can be exceptionally helpful when nurturing existing customers too.

Let's say you're running a SaaS platform for marketing attribution. Your product usage data shows a customer frequently visiting the integrations page but not setting anything up. That's a red flag, and an opportunity rolled into one. You can proactively reach out with a tutorial or offer personalized assistance, heading off frustration and potentially unlocking new revenue streams.

Similarly, you can keep an eye on certain accounts when it gets closer to renewal time. If they happen to be searching for an alternative, it might be time to figure out what would make them want to switch. After all,

Intent Signals Aren’t Magic on Their Own

Intent signals are really nothing on their own. They’re just data points.

It’s only in conjunction with other data points that you can start to get the insights that matter.

When you add intent data into the mix of some of the use cases here, you can see how they make all the difference.

They enhance your existing go to market efforts, making them smarter, more timely, and more effective. Your inferences become less of a matter of guesswork and intuition and more precise hypotheses and theories.

Intent signals are a deep topic and there’s plenty of ways to think about it. If you’re curious to hear more, check out Nick’s issue of the GTM newsletter on this topic.