Every growing company is focused on finding more customers.
For a long time, finding potential customers meant advertising. First, it was simply awareness (or brand) advertising: newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio, TV, etc. This type of advertising helped cover large swathes of the population but had poor demographic targeting and lacked accurate efficacy measurements.
Direct marketing helped dissect various markets into more targeted demographic segments in search for ideal customers and introduced near-immediate sales reporting measures. If you sent a particular product brochure to 100 high-income, no-kids households and sold 15 of those products at your nearby store in the following days, you could measure the level of marketing campaign effectiveness with more accuracy than ever before.
Even with the advent of digital advertising, however, companies realized that demographic information could only take them so far. Google’s own study shows that solely focusing on demographics could mean missing out on up to 70% of mobile shoppers.
Such stats indicate that while demographics certainly play a role in targeting, they don’t answer the questions related to potential customers’ purchase intent. So how can we leverage the latest technology to enrich the profiles of potential customers and make it easier to find qualified leads?
Why Intent Is More Important Than Price
Traditionally, many marketers have believed that purchase intent is closely linked to price. With the right demographic targeting, all it takes to increase purchase intent is to put your products on sale.
Now we know this is not true, or at least that it’s not the most effective way to achieve higher purchase intent. The key, instead, lies in better targeting and prioritizing of sales effort towards those prospects who already exhibit above average purchase intent.
When we talk about purchase intent, we mean a more holistic understanding of the mindset of your audience as it relates to your products or services. It’s not just who they are but also what they want, what state they are in, and what type of content they consume.
As an example, measuring purchase intent on your website lets you determine where and how to assist your potential customers as they navigate your website and provide them with the exact information they need to make a buying decision.
How Purchase Intent Leads to Buying Decisions
Most sales teams today use funnels to estimate conversions, establish quotas, and predict revenue. Those marketing funnels could have a variety of stages, but are generally divided into visitors, leads, qualified leads, opportunities, and customers. Even though funnels are effective sales tools, they rarely consider purchase intent in their calculations.
Buyer’s journey models, such as AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action) and its variants, deal primarily with the stages of purchase intent. So is there a way to leverage both?
The two basic categories of purchase intent are informational (research) and transactional (shopping). Informational intent is all about seeking a solution to a given problem or researching a particular offering. Transactional intent shows a strong inclination to purchase that offering.
Awareness and interest stages are most associated with information or research intent. Marketing funnels would mostly categorize these people as visitors, and sometimes leads. At these stages, you’re seeing the first interactions visitors have with your company. They study your website, consume marketing content, look at prices, watch videos, and more.
Desire and action stages show transactional intent (shopping) that turns visitors and leads into qualified leads and potential customers. Here, your audience can start to request demos, talk to your BDRs, ask specific questions about products, negotiate, and ultimately make buying decisions.
How to Control Your “Consuming Content to Buying Products” Flow with AI
Taking steps to monitor the buyer’s journey on your website will give you a more complete picture of your audience and can quickly impact your sales results.
The problem is that with any kind of volume, you’ll eventually encounter the ceiling of your sales team’s availability. When your BDRs can’t distinguish between informational and transactional purchase intent, they can waste lots of time pursuing visitors who are not yet ready to buy.
What you need in this case is a solution that accurately measures and ranks the level of purchase intent of every website visitor you could interact with. Then your BDRs are able to prioritize visitors with the highest purchase intent first, and increase your conversion rates.
Lift AI is the only AI-driven and self-learning platform that completely automates the analysis of all purchase intent data on your website.
Leveraging over 15 years of sales data across multiple industries, with billions of data points and 14 million live sales conversations, Lift AI is able to rank the purchase intent of any website visitor in real time. The model works with your own visitor data, which gives you tailored, relevant, and up-to-date results.
The magic of Lift AI is that it works on every single visitor, 98% of whom might be completely anonymous, letting your BDRs focus on what they do best — converting potential customers in one-on-one conversations.
When a high-scoring visitor lands on your website, Lift AI would directly connect them to your sales team through the chat platform of your choice (Drift, LivePerson, etc.). If the visitor’s purchase intent is lower, Lift AI would show them a self-help guide or engage them with a chatbot instead.
Such segmentation can improve your chat conversions anywhere from two to 10 times in just 90 days. PointClickCare, for example, boasted a 400% increase, whereas Formstack was able to grow its chat pipeline by 88%.
You can try Lift AI absolutely free for 30 days. To install it, just copy a small JavaScript snippet to your website — no complex integrations required — and get ready for a considerable boost to your sales results due to the cutting-edge technological automation.
