Why Intent Marketing Matters in Financial Services

Succeeding in the new era of search depends on meeting your customers wherever they're searching — giving them access to all the answers about your brand when they ask questions.

This is the idea behind intent marketing, the practice of marketing your financial services organization based on a consumer's intent to make a purchase decision, as demonstrated by their actions.

Your customers are expressing intent in their search behavior billions of times each day — particularly in the highly specific, multidimensional queries they're now making more often. An estimated 90% of consumers report using search at every stage of their customer lifecycle, and 50% of searches contain four or more words. These natural language phrases have a lower search volume, but they express strong intent to transact — and they convert at 2.5x the rate of single keywords.

Drive revenue with intent marketing.

In building an intent marketing strategy, your financial services institution should focus on ranking for two types of high-intent queries. The first is the classic high-intent search for terms like "buy" or "purchase." The second is ensuring that you can provide answers for those natural language, multidimensional queries that are most likely to convert.

Let's use an example of each: A customer is searching "buy renter's insurance in NYC." They're likely looking to purchase insurance in the near term, while a user performing the search "what kind of insurance do I need?" is probably less familiar with the space, and will probably need to do a bit more research before making a purchase.

Similarly, a search for "financial advisor near me open Friday who speaks Spanish" is customized to a highly specific, near-term need — making it a much stronger predictor of intent than a general search for the keyword "financial advisor." The idea behind intent marketing is that this very specific search is a better predictor of a person's intent to visit a financial advisor than a general search.

Understanding when someone is taking an action that expresses a strong intent to transact with your business is key. It empowers you to focus on the right customers, and reach them at the moment they're most likely to make a purchase. Intent marketing helps your business maximize spend by driving more conversions than you would with more general tactics like demographic-based targeting alone.

If your business can incorporate data to better understand consumer intent and then align your marketing to business outcomes, you can reach customers in the moments that matter, generate a more efficient media spend, and drive more revenue as a result.

According to Think With Google, "people now expect to be assisted everywhere, and that means it's critical that you're measuring and understanding the impact of your media touchpoints on the consumer journey." Success today means, "helping your marketing team understand the intent, interactions, and signals that are driving long-term growth."