The Complete Guide to Targeting Customers Who Want to Buy

The biggest waste in B2B marketing isn't bad creative or wrong messaging — it's targeting people who aren't buying. Most campaigns spray budget across broad audiences and hope the right person sees the right message at the right time.

Intent-based targeting flips this model. Instead of starting with your ideal customer profile and hoping they're in-market, you start with the people who are actively researching and work backward to qualification.

Identifying In-Market Buyers

In-market buyers leave trails. They visit vendor comparison sites, download whitepapers, attend webinars, search for specific solution categories, and engage with competitor content. The challenge is connecting these fragmented signals into a coherent picture.

Identity resolution is the enabling layer. Without it, you see anonymous signals from anonymous accounts. With it, you see named individuals at specific companies exhibiting specific buying behaviors.

Building a Targeting Strategy

Start with your best customers. Analyze the behavioral patterns they exhibited before becoming customers — the content they consumed, the pages they visited, the search terms they used. This creates your intent model.

Then apply that model to your prospect universe. The individuals who match the same behavioral fingerprint as your best customers are your highest-probability targets.

Activation Across Channels

Intent-based targeting works across every channel: programmatic display, LinkedIn, email, direct mail, and outbound sales. The key is consistency — the same individual should see a coordinated message across touchpoints, not disconnected campaigns from different teams.