Intent-based advertising: how to reach the accounts that are active in your market

With intent-based advertising it’s now possible, in real time, to get your message in front of the accounts as they’re actively searching for your products.

One of the most famous quotes from Lord Leverhulme, the founder of Unilever, is “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don’t know which half”. With most money going into digital, accountability and insights have improved a lot since the days of Leverhulme. And now it’s possible to be even more precise in targeting the right accounts.

Many of our ABM (Account-Based Marketing) clients have enjoyed the benefits of ABA (Account-Based Advertising), which enables them to serve advertising messages to the key decision makers and influencers at the strategic accounts they want to reach. This micro-targeting approach is very powerful in terms of building awareness and engagement to a select number of accounts.

Combining real-time data from Grapeshot with our own IP identification platform, AccountInsight, it’s now possible to advertise in premium quality news sites only to the accounts that are actively searching for your products and services.

It works like this: you select a number of key accounts and you decide which keywords you want your ads to appear next to and which should be excluded. You can even brand your company next to specific products – even your competitor’s. When we discover traffic from one of the accounts you selected, we place your ad next to an article containing the keywords you specified. Then once we’ve identified the individual who actively read the article, you can keep targeting them as they move to different media sites, thereby increasing your visibility and ROI.

After, say, one month of Intent-Based Advertising (IBA) you have sufficient engagement data to move to the next phase; account micro-targeting:

You may have launched your IBA with 400 accounts, for example, and during the first month you learn that 100 of these accounts are actively searching for your products. When you move to the micro-targeting phase we recommend that you select those accounts with the highest engagement score and increase the number of impressions. At the end of a 3-month pilot you’ll be able to provide your key account sales team with invaluable engagement data that will help them prioritize their sales resources and speed up the sales process.

I’m sure that IBA would have changed the mind of Lord Leverhulme.