9 best practices for intent-based marketing campaigns

1. Align intent signals to funnel stage

Most marketers treat intent signals like a simple green light: “This account is researching our topic, let’s target them.” But intent alone doesn’t mean readiness to buy. And not all engagement is created equal.

Think of intent like a conversation:

• Someone searching “what is multi-touch attribution?” is in awareness mode, doing their research.
• But someone diving into “[your competitor] pricing,” or “switching from legacy CRM” is far deeper down the path.

Here’s how to activate this insight:

Bucket your intent topics by funnel stage:

• Top-of-funnel: Educational queries (e.g., “how to reduce churn,” “best lead scoring models”)
• Mid-funnel: Comparison and solution queries (e.g., “ABM software vs marketing automation,” “salesforce integration tools”)
• Bottom-funnel: Decision-stage keywords (e.g., “[competitor] alternatives,” “platform pricing,” “deployment timeline”).

Match your playbook to the signal:

• TOFU → Serve ungated content, video explainers, SEO-driven blog posts
• MOFU → Launch nurture streams, demo invites, targeted case studies
• BOFU → Trigger SDR outreach, product-focused assets.

The real power of intent data lies in pinpointing where an account sits in the buying journey. Once you understand that, you can tailor your messaging, format, and timing to match their actual needs.

Example → Let’s say a B2B SaaS company in the compliance automation space is using Bombora intent signals to tie early-stage keywords like “risk mitigation” and “audit prep.”

Instead of immediately hitting those accounts with demo CTAs, they can build a nurture stream offering industry checklists and a maturity assessment.

Once the account has progressed to mid-stage signals like “GRC platforms” and “compliance software comparison,” they can now move them to a sales workflow.

Related → How To Implement a Target Account Strategy for ABM Success

2. Build tailored content journeys around buying group personas

It’s common knowledge, and even expected, that B2B deals involve more than one decision maker. You have a buying committee that includes champions, users, influencers, blockers, and final approvers, each with their own priorities.

As such, seeing ‘strong intent’ at the account level means nothing if the message doesn’t resonate with the right persona in that group. That means, if your campaign only speaks to the technical user and not the champion you lose traction.

To unlock this pipeline, you need to build content journeys that align with the personas inside the account.

Here’s a an example:

Tailored Journey Example: Account Showing Intent for “Security Automation”

Related → ABM Content Strategy: Top 3 Mistakes Marketers Make and How to Fix Them

3. Orchestrate sales and marketing touchpoints from the same signal

The reason why a lot of intent-based marketing efforts fail is because of the lag between insight (marketing) and action (sales).

• Marketing sees intent surging and launches a nurture campaign.
• A few days later, sales gets wind of the same account and cold-calls them with a generic pitch.

This confuses the buyer who now feels bombarded.

Meanwhile, when sales and marketing teams respond to intent signals as they happen, together, they create seamless plays that engage the account with unified messaging.

• For example; if an account surges on a late-stage keyword like “pricing comparison” or “deployment timeframe,” marketing should:
  • Trigger retargeting ads with case studies and ROI calculators
  • Drop them into an email stream focused on customer proof and urgency.
• At the same time, sales should:
  • Be notified in Slack or their CRM
  • Be provided with talking points relevant to the specific intent topic
  • Be equipped with personalized outreach templates that match what the buyer is seeing in ads and emails

When done right, this kind of orchestration creates a unified buying experience where every touchpoint feels timely, relevant, and coordinated.

Related → Collaborative Success: Strategies for Aligning Sales and Marketing

4. Create cross-channel plays that activate signals in real time

Intent data loses power when it’s siloed in dashboards or only used for ad targeting.

To maximize its impact, you need to build multi-channel plays that kick in as soon as a relevant signal is detected across marketing, sales, and even customer success.

The goal here is to move from static campaigns to orchestrated engagement, where email, ads, outbound sales, and content are all synced to the same signal.

Here’s how this works in practice:

Let’s say an enterprise healthcare account suddenly surges on topics like “HIPAA-compliant CRM” and “patient data security.”

That should trigger a coordinated set of actions:

• Ad team: Launch personalized LinkedIn ads about your HIPAA-compliant feature set
• Email marketing: Drop them into a nurture stream with whitepapers focused on data protection in healthcare
• BDR team: Get alerts via Slack or CRM and reach out with a relevant POV: “We noticed you’re exploring HIPAA-compliant platforms. Here’s how we helped [similar brand] meet those standards without slowing sales.” 
• Website personalization: If they visit your site, serve tailored banners or CTAs related to HIPAA and compliance.

The key to pulling this off comes down to two factors:

1. Centralizing the signal (through your intent platform + CRM/CDP integration), and
2. Orchestrating activation rules by channel (using marketing automation or revenue orchestration platforms).

5. Prioritize accounts based on signal strength

It’s tempting to focus all your energy on your Tier 1 ICP accounts. But in intent-based marketing, your approach should be a mix of fit + intent + timing.

This is because you might have an account that matches your ICP perfectly: right industry, right size, right persona. However, if they’re not showing any buying signals, you’re likely wasting effort trying to force urgency.

Meanwhile, another account slightly outside your top tier may be lighting up your intent dashboard with surges on keywords like “best enterprise data management tools,” “pricing,” and “alternatives to [competitor].”

That second account may be more worth your time—even if it’s not on your Tier 1 list—because they’re in-market now.

Here’s how to make this work:

• Assign intent scores to each account based on signal frequency, volume, recency, and diversity (e.g., multiple people from one company surging on different but related topics).
• Create prioritization tiers based on signal strength (e.g., High → Medium → Monitor).
• Sync these tiers with your CRM and campaign workflows so that:
  • Sales can prioritize high-intent accounts
  • Marketing nurtures mid-intent leads until they’re ready
  • Dormant accounts aren’t wasting budget

Related → How to Effectively Prioritize Accounts in Sales

6. Combine first-party and third-party intent for context

First-party and third-party data on their own can give you a partial picture. But when combined, they reveal the full story of what your buyer is doing before, during, and after engaging with you.

For example:

• If a target account is consuming competitor content (third-party) and visiting your pricing page (first-party), that shows high-intent.
• If they’re engaging with your emails but haven’t shown third-party research activity, it may be nurture-worthy, but not yet sales-ready.
• If they’re spiking on third-party research but haven’t touched your site, it’s a signal to warm them up fast, before your competitor does.

Here’s how to combine both:

Integrate your data streams: Most modern ABM platforms like Demandbase allow you to ingest and map both first-party data (from your CRM, MAP, website, etc.) and third-party intent from partners like Bombora or G2.

Create unified account timelines: Map actions chronologically across both sources to understand the buyer journey:

• When did research start, when did your brand enter the picture, and how are they progressing?

Build multi-tiered engagement strategies: Use tiers based on signal combinations:

• Tier 1: Accounts with high third-party + active on pricing/demo pages → Sales-ready
• Tier 2: Accounts with high third-party, no first-party → Nurture with personalized ads + outbound
• Tier 3: First-party activity only → Educate, score, and watch for external signals

Blending first- and third-party data lets you align your marketing plays with where the account actually is in their journey. That means smarter spend, sharper targeting, and better-timed outreach.

• First-party intent is what happens inside your system, i.e., website visits, form fills, email clicks, chatbot interactions, demo video views.
• Third-party intent is what happens externally, i.e., research activity across blogs, forums, comparison sites, and publisher networks you don’t own.

Related → The Undeniable Impact of Account Tiering for a Modern ABM Strategy

7. Use ai to score and prioritize intent signals

When you’re tracking thousands of accounts across dozens of topics, manually interpreting signal intensity, keyword trends, surge behavior, and technographic overlays isn’t scalable.

AI changes that. Instead of relying on basic topic matches like “they searched for ‘cloud security,’” AI models evaluate a combination of deeper, multi-dimensional signals. This includes:

• Frequency and recency of activity
• Breadth of interest across personas within the account
• Role-specific behaviors (e.g., a CFO researching cost savings vs. an end user reading product specs)
• Cross-channel engagement like ad clicks, email opens, and website visits
• Signal decay or momentum (i.e., is interest growing or fading?)

This scoring helps your team focus on the right accounts, maximizing impact while reducing waste.

Related → Understanding AI Lead Scoring: Definition, Benefits, and How to Get Started

8. Personalize campaign creative based on intent signals

Traditional personalization usually stops at the surface: company name, industry, maybe job title. But with intent data, you can personalize based on what a buyer is actually thinking about right now.

This is the shift from the usual firmographic personalization to behavioral personalization.

Here’s the difference:

• Firmographic (generic): “Hey [Name], we help SaaS companies improve retention.”
• Intent-driven (personalized): “Hey [Name], saw your team is exploring churn mitigation strategies in SaaS. Here’s how we helped [similar company] cut churn by 21% using automated product nudges.”

To implement this, you need to:

• Match creative assets to top surging topics: This could mean designing ad copy, landing pages, and email subject lines that directly reflect high-intent keywords (e.g., “multi-touch attribution,” “CRM integration issues,” “AI sales forecasting”).
• Create modular campaign templates: Design emails and ads with interchangeable sections like a dynamic hook (based on topic spike), tailored social proof (from a peer company), and a CTA aligned with funnel stage.

You can even personalize visual assets like swapping header images, product screenshots, or testimonial quotes based on vertical or use case inferred from intent.

Related → How to Measure Account-Based Marketing (+ABM Metrics)

9. Commit to continuous testing and optimization

Intent-based marketing is a strategy that’s dynamic by nature, and needs to evolve as buyer behavior, keyword trends, and market signals shift.

What drives engagement today might fail next quarter. That’s why ongoing testing and optimization is a practice that keeps your strategy relevant and revenue-focused.

To stay ahead, build a structured testing framework across three key dimensions:

Audience & Topic Testing.

Don’t assume the same topics will stay relevant. Use your intent platform to track changing research patterns across your ICP. Are they shifting from “ABM platforms” to “revenue orchestration”?

• Refresh your target topic clusters every 30-60 days.
• Test adjacent or emerging terms that align with buyer interest.
• Validate your assumptions by experimenting with new segments or buyer roles surfacing in intent data.

Channel & Message Testing.

Even with the right audience, delivery matters. A surge in interest might respond better to LinkedIn ads for one persona and outbound email for another.

• Run channel-specific intent plays across channels (ads, email, SDR outreach, content syndication).
• A/B test message formats: short-form vs. long-form, emotional vs. logical framing, low vs. high friction CTAs.

Creative & Offer Optimization.

Intent tells you what your audience is researching, your job is to figure out how they want to hear about it.

• A/B test creative assets: search-based headlines vs. branded headlines, static images vs. motion.
• Experiment with different offers: urgency-based (“How your peers are solving X”) vs. educational (“2024 Guide to Solving X”).
• Iterate visuals, CTAs, and formats to match both the message and channel.

Common mistakes to avoid in intent-based marketing

Not measuring intent activation properly

B2B teams often pour time and budget into intent data—launching campaigns, triggering ads, and alerting sales. All good, except they can’t accurately measure whether those efforts are actually working.

Without proper measurement, intent activation becomes a guessing game. You may know an account engaged with an ad or downloaded a resource, but if you can’t tie that engagement to pipeline, opportunities, or revenue, it’s pointless.

This lack of visibility leads to two major risks:

• Overinvesting in tactics that look active but aren’t converting
• Underinvesting in quieter efforts that actually move deals forward

To avoid this, you need a clear framework for tracking intent performance across the full journey (from signal detection to deal close). That means setting up proper attribution models, aligning sales and marketing reporting, and monitoring metrics like engagement-to-meeting rates, campaign-sourced pipeline, and influenced revenue.

Related → How to Use Advertising Performance Metrics to Elevate Your Account-Based Strategy

Neglecting mid-funnel nurture

Another common mistake in intent-based marketing is focusing too heavily on either top-funnel (brand awareness) or bottom-funnel (sales outreach).

What gets lost in the ‘middle’ are high-potential accounts showing real interest but not yet ready for a call. The mid-funnel is where real intent is developed and guided.

This is your opportunity to educate, build trust, and help buyers make sense of their options without prematurely pushing for a meeting. That could mean serving tailored content based on recent activity, retargeting with use-case-specific ads, or creating email sequences aligned with the buyer’s research path.

Neglecting this stage leads to stalled deals, confused buyers, and intent signals that never convert.

Relying solely on third-party intent data

Third-party intent data plays a valuable role in identifying accounts showing interest across the broader web, i.e., externally. However, relying exclusively on it limits your ability to fully understand your audience.

Meanwhile, your first-party intent data provides as much value and clearer view into what prospects are doing on your own channel. These are high-intent actions that reflect interest in your solution.

When you ignore these signals, you create a major blind spot. You also lose the ability to validate and enrich third-party insights.

For example, if an account shows a surge in “cloud data protection” on a third-party platform but hasn’t engaged with your content or visited relevant product pages, it might be a false positive. tiOn the other hand, if that same account downloads your security whitepaper or returns to your pricing page twice in a week, that’s confirmation—and a signal to act quickly.

Overloading sales with low-quality intent leads

Intent data is valuable, but it’s still only a signal. For example, a spike in interest tells you that an account is researching, but not why. It also doesn’t reveal the specific pain point they’re trying to solve, the stage they’re in, or which solution areas they care about most.

Unfortunately, many marketing teams rush to hand off these signals to sales without enriching them with critical context. The ripple effect is an overwhelmed sales team with leads that may look active but lack actionable insight.

Sales ends up wasting time chasing accounts that aren’t truly ready, while genuinely engaged prospects don’t get the tailored follow-up they deserve.

To avoid this, marketing should enrich every handoff with context: what was searched, what content was consumed, who engaged, and how that aligns with pain points or product interest.

That way, sales teams can prioritize effectively, personalize their outreach, and focus their efforts where they’ll have the most impact.

Demandbase One: Because “interest” shouldn’t go to waste

Right now, someone at your target account is Googling your category keywords. Tomorrow, they’ll visit your competitor’s demo page.

Next week, they’ll download a buyer’s guide. Next month, they’ll sign with whoever was smart enough to notice their interest and act on it.

The question is: will that be you or your competition?

Demandbase One helps you in scenarios like this to spot buying signals the moment they happen. With this, you can see exactly which accounts are in-market, what topics they’re researching, and which personas are engaging.

Demandbase One also connects that insight across your entire go-to-market motion. Marketing can launch precisely targeted campaigns. Sales can prioritize the right accounts with full context. RevOps can align teams around a single source of truth.

Read Case Study → Visier sees a 234% higher click-through rate with an ABM approach using Demandbase + LinkedIn

• 95-100% of their OEM opportunities engage with their campaigns on LinkedIn
• 84% of our top enterprise prospect accounts have visited our site from an ABM ad
• 234% higher click-through rate with an ABM approach using Demandbase + LinkedIn

When It Comes to Buyer Intent, Timing is Everything … and We Know When

Activate Interest with Demandbase One