Relevance & Intent

The key to converting potential customers is relevance. Your content needs to be what the audience is looking for.

If they want information and get a sales pitch instead, you’ll lose them. Here is where businesses leave money on the table. The content doesn’t meet the intent behind the search, so visitors never become customers.

The intent can be divided into:

• Information
• Curiosity
• Commercial

It’s vital to understand your visitors’ intent to put the right content in front of them and close those deals.

AIDA Model

Perhaps a better way of understanding users’ intent, is to go back to the AIDA Model. This marketing model divides the buying process into four stages.

AIDA stands for:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

When we apply it to content and intent, here’s an idea of what we get:

Awareness: incite curiosity and bring awareness to the problems you can solve.
Interest: give your audience the information they are looking for and more.
Desire: create a genuine desire for your product with in-depth information.
Action: make it easy for users to take action.

Pro Tip: In every stage, remember to overdeliver. Always deliver more value than expected.

Traffic Segmentation, targeting & retargeting

For the AIDA model to work and for you to make sure you meet the visitor’s intent, traffic segmentation is crucial. You need to know where the visitors came from, how they ended up there and how you can send them to the right pages.

With traffic segmentation, you’ll be able to see where your users come from and use that information to optimize your website. If they came from Social channels, search engines or direct, their intents are entirely different and so should be the page to where they go.

The sources can tell you a lot about the visitors’ intent.

• Search engines – information
• Social platforms – curiosity
• Direct – commercial, perhaps final stages before purchase

With the visitor’s intent in mind, you can direct your traffic to the right pages and make sure visitors always get relevant content.

You can learn a lot from your audience by mapping their behaviour on your website and segmenting them. Plus, once you find who converts the most, you can use that information to target a similar, broader, audience and grow your business.

The best thing about this analysis is identifying visitors with the commercial intent, and optimizing your process. In other words, make it easier for them to buy your product or service with a clear call-to-action.

If you identify previous visitors that had a commercial intent but didn’t close the deal, you can retarget them with ads. How fantastic would it be to retarget this user with an ad campaign and convert them immediately?