Why Understanding Customer Intent is the Key to Customer Intimacy

Customer Intent refers to a customer's genuine purpose for connecting with your business. While it is undeniable that customer engagement and its journey have shifted toward being more mobile-focused, and time-sensitive it is essential to determine what prompted the customer to purchase things in the first instance. Examining a customer's intent might help you identify situations where you are unclear on how to continue.

Customer intimacy is a marketing approach in which customers make purchasing decisions that aim to comprehend unique consumer requirements in order to provide the "best comprehensive solution." Your top-level executives, all the way down to your support employees, must believe in and be willing to make the required investments to achieve this.



Fig 1 - Customer Intimacy as a value strategy

Online customers tend to find what they are searching for, whether it is a product, a solution, or a service. They frequently turn to their mobile phones. To engage with individuals, companies must target these intended micro-moments. Experiencing the pandemic period, you must target consumers with relevant and personalized content that will entice them to buy.

Marketers that have a fine knowledge of customer intimacy can create better content, which leads to actionable outcomes

Customer intent focuses well beyond the obvious (what customers want and where they want it) and concentrates on the underlying purpose of the encounter. It is a matter of why rather than what. Finally, it is an effective approach to keep ahead of customers' expectations across all aspects.

Products or services that are continually being personalized to client needs and niches. Nordstrom, Home Depot, and IKEA are a few examples.



Fig 2: Customer Intimacy in 'The Age of the Customer’

How can you determine what customer intimacy is?

1. Collect Appropriate Customer Data

Every activity, no matter how trivial or repeated, should be recorded: buying views, streaming or any other rich content views, enrollment, publishing, browsing, and anything that entails customer service engaging with your website. The more data you have to work with, the easier it is to identify patterns, which should be reevaluated and modified on a regular basis.

2. Choose Key Customer Starting Points

You're aware that the buying cycle begins before a consumer visits your website, but how far back does it go? It's often farther than you expect.

Consumers to search with one of four intentions:

• They would like to know more
• They would like to go for it
• They would like to do something about the product or services
• They just want to purchase from you. 

Users who want to buy are the simplest to develop rich content for, but in general, these purchasing channels are getting less and less straightforward.

A customer may like to go, then inquire, and finally purchase. Alternatively, a user may want to know and then immediately want to buy. Irrespective of the road (the term itself becoming more irrelevant), your material must reach the user in elements of his or her aim.



3. Strategize Pre-Intent Content

You can capture 'I want to purchase' consumers before they understand they would really like to purchase something if you think strategically. To do this, consider what typically triggers an 'I want to purchase' moment and create material around such issues to make your website a go-to resource for that customer.

4. Identify Hidden Agendas

We are all aware of the major business holidays, but there are several additional occasions when a user will spend their money. For working professionals, tax season is a perfect example. Don't allow conventional holidays to determine what you write. Rather, analyze customer intimacy for your target audience's lifestyle and big events and produce content around certain topics.

5. Familiarize Yourself with Query Classification

Search engine inquiries are often classed as informational, analytical, promotional, or financial by SEO specialists. However, like with other elements of SEO, there are a variety of opinions around this topic. Understanding query categorization allows you to understand customer intimacy cross selling strategy via keywords, which you can then build your approach on.

As we frequently say about business ideas and concepts, the one and the only constant is change—where customers make purchasing decisions and form better customer relationships. Each new technological innovation (particularly in mobile technologies) has the potential to upset your view of your target market's route to purchase. Collect meaningful data, grasp the logic of your vertical's consumers, and research their actions to determine their genuine purpose. Then you'll be ready to assist in making those aspirations a reality.

Targeting the intended message can result in considerable revenue growth. Customer intimacy may be used to activate timely, relevant, and targeted marketing strategy in different contexts.



6. Build a Lasting Relationship with Your Customers

To remain at the pinnacle of your industry, the audience must see you as a reliable and well-known brand. When you complete a transaction, your relationship with the consumer does not stop. Consider it the start of a long-term romance. It is simpler to nurture this relationship when you have context and information about what to chat to them about. That's where customer data or intent data comes in.

Broadly stating, you must add intent data into your client database. You'll be able to locate intelligent information that organically appears on their accounts using this. Now, if just one of your connections is promoted or a team adds a new decision-maker, you will be alerted immediately and will be able to get in touch with them. Consider how time-consuming it would be to manually enter the customer anything else that entails data.

Keeping up with modernization customer obligations would be nearly difficult. This is where using out-of-the-intent data may save you a lot of money. All you have to do is focus on improving your relationship with your consumers and let the intent data handle the rest.

According to Think with Google -Marketers who exclusively rely on demographic information to target customers risk missing more than 70% of potential mobile shoppers.



Preventing the Churns in Customer Intimacy

Your consumer has lots of alternatives in this cutthroat competitive marketplace and will not stay an extra second if they see anything better. Fortunately, customer intimacy may assist in the generation of insights that can reveal some of the behind-the-scenes activity of the consumer who is likely to leave. Connecting with your desired audience even before the timer goes off is also a smart move.

Upscaling and Expanding on the go with Customer Intimacy

Whenever you gain a customer and they like your service, don't let them go when they're done with your company. Take advantage of this chance to increase their utilization of your service and get more out of it.

Getting a new customer might cost up to 5x more than maintaining an existing one. Furthermore, by examining customer intimacy, you can easily determine whether or not your consumers are searching at your competition

Conclusion

A very well researched customer intimacy strategy can aid in anticipating what a client may want assistance with. Interacting with your customers can say a lot than just relying on customer research history. Try out the above-mentioned practices and you are guaranteed to leverage the best out of them.