How to Find Top Competitive Intent Keywords

What you’ll learn

This playbook provides a clear, step-by-step guide on using Demandbase One for Marketing to identify the top Competitive Intent keywords for a specific account over a defined period. By following these instructions, you can hone in on the most important competitive intent signals within any Account.

Why is this important?

Third-party intent is a powerful addition to your go-to-market toolbox, but it comes with a flood of signals. Those many signals can leave marketers and sellers struggling to figure out what’s actually important.

Asking your team to manually sort through endless signals isn’t just inefficient—it’s unnecessary, given the technology available today.

Instead, ask yourself: which intent signals truly matter? While the answer might vary depending on your business, there’s one type of intent that’s universally valuable: Competitive Intent.
These are the signals that clearly show when an account is interested in your competitors.

Think about how often you’ve heard the phrase, “The prospect was already speaking with Competitor A by the time we secured a meeting.” That’s exactly the situation Competitive Intent Keywords can help you avoid. These keywords allow you to detect early signals that an account is considering your competitors, enabling proactive engagement.

This playbook will show you how to find and use Competitive Intent Keywords with Demandbase technology, so you can engage accounts before they commit to a competitor. With tailored insights by product, business unit, or region, you’ll stay ahead of the competition.

What you need to get started

Before we do anything we need to understand how we have organized our Intent Keyword Sets within Demandbase One for Marketing. There is no correct or wrong way to do this, it’s all about what makes sense to your go-to-market strategy. If you sell multiple products, maybe you are creating Intent Keyword Sets by Product. If your product provides different values to different users, maybe you set up your keywords by solution or theme.

In this example, we will walk through how to identify the Top Competitive Intent Keywords by Product for Accounts. Since we will be working from a product-focused intent perspective, we want to ensure two things:

1. We know all the intent keywords for each product.
2. We know all the competitive intent keywords for each product. Typically these are competitor names and any type of specific terms for their business.
   • Example – If I were selling CRM software, “Salesforce” and “Sales Cloud” would be listed as competitive terms

Lastly, this step is not required, however, if you wish to have this data sync back to your CRM you will need to create a custom field on the Account object as a long text type.

Step-by-step playbook

Once you have lists of all intent keywords for each product and have identified those which you consider competitive, you can now create a Competitive Intent Keyword Set.

Create a competitive keyword set

1. In DB1M, go to Settings and click on the Intent Data section
2. Click “+ Create New” to create a new Intent Keyword Set
3. You will need to name your Intent Keyword Set, it is a best practice to put Competitive or some type of indicator in the name



4. Once the Intent Keyword Set has been created, you now have a few options in terms of getting your terms tracked

1. 1. You can start searching for available terms in the drop-down menu and select the ones that match your Competitive List.

   

   2. You can click on the Text box, then paste your list of Competitive terms.

   

   3. You can click on “Suggest from URL” on the right side & enter 1 or more URLs from Competitor Pages.Once you click Apply a list of suggested terms will appear on the right and you can select them by clicking on “Add”.
   4. Lastly, once you have terms selected, you can use our AI to find additional keywords based on your current terms by navigating to “Suggest from List” on the right and clicking “Generate Keywords”. Once keywords appear, you can add them to your list by clicking on “Add”.

   

5. After you have added all your desired keywords, you will see green arrows next to all the terms that are currently validated for tracking.

Pro tip: If you see a red X that says either “Too much content” or “Not enough content”, try to rephrase that keyword to be more specific.

Once your list is completed click Save on the right side and then navigate back to the main Intent Data screen.

Nice job, you have now created an Intent Keyword Set.

6. The last step is to mark this as Competitive. Click on the checkbox to the left of the Intent Keyword Set, then click the Take Action button
   1. Select “Set as Competitor” and click “Update”

   

   2. You will now see the “Competitor” label next to your Intent Keyword Set

   

Create a new calculated field

1. Now that we have a Competitive Intent Keyword Set, we want to create a new Calculated Field that will count the Top Occurring Intent Term. In DB1M, go to Settings and click on Demandbase Calculated Fields
2. Click on “+ Create New” to start building your new Calculated Field



3. First you will need to select the type of data to use, since we are creating a field to find the top occurring Intent signals, we will select “Top Occurring Activities”. Secondly, under “Top Occurring Type” select “Intent”.



4. The third step is to create the Field Label, this will be the name of the field in DB1M. Ideally this field label will be mirrored in your CRM via the custom field(s) you have created to hold this data.
5. Now that you have your data type and field name, you want to identify the time period for which you are analyzing the data. We find that using the time period of 1 month tends to be the most impactful. Choose your time period and identify it in the Time Range section
6. Click on the ”Define Criteria” text under the “Only include Activities when…” section. This will bring you to an area where you need to reference the Competitive Keyword Set you have just created.



7. You will want to add two activity cards, Demandbase Keyword Intent and Trending Intent



8. For the Demandbase Keyword Intent activity, you can delete all the constraints except for the Intent Keyword Set and Intent Strength. Similarly, for Trending Intent, you can remove the Activity Date constraint.
   • In both Intent activity cards within the Intent Keyword Set constraint, select the Competitive Intent Keyword Set you just created.
   • Within the Demandbase Keyword Intent activity for Intent Strength, we recommend leveraging all levels of strength as a starting point by using Intent Strength Exists logic.
   • As you get more comfortable with this setup, you can later easily select only certain levels of Intent Strength such as Low, Medium or High.
9. On the top right of the window, click the Edit Logic slider and make sure you have the logic set for “1 or 2”. This step is crucial for this field as we want to find the top intent terms across both types of intent activities.
10. Click Save to return to the field creation screen.



11. The last step is to map this field back to your CRM, however, this is not required if you wish to only use this field in DB1M.
12. You will notice there are drop down menus for Account and People objects. Search for the custom Account field you created in your CRM in the appropriate drop down to map this new field back to your CRM. Once selected, make sure the “Write-back Enabled” toggle is showing blue
13. Click Save and your field has now been created.

The results

Now that you have a new calculated field identifying the Top Occurring Competitive Intent Signals for each Account, you will be able to easily identify which Accounts are showing interest in your competitors.

The easiest implementation of this new data point is to add the new CRM custom field(s) to an Account page layout.

However the goal of these fields is to help provide additional insight to your GTM organization either as a net new insight or as supplemental information to existing insights.

Common Use Cases

• Add these fields to reports for Sales so that they can leverage the competitive information, especially for Accounts showing no engagement or very high engagement in your organization
• Embed these fields in reports for Customer Success to help identify potential threats to cross/upsell opportunities
• Utilize these insights in adjacent technologies such as Webchat and Content Management Systems to personalize the experience to prove why your solutions are better than the competition
• Use these insights in building Account & People Lists to find unengaged people to add to Marketing Program promotions and Nurtures
• Utilize these fields in audience building for advertising to thwart off any competitive interest