Came across Jonathan Mendez’s as-usual excellent thoughts from some time ago, talking about user intention (referenced by my former colleague Dan K). It brought up a point, which is that the best places to reach people online as a marketer are when they are expressing their specific intent that aligns with the marketer’s product or feature set (for example, a branded or category-specific keyword search) and when they are very definitely not, when they are in the “no-intent” zone.

At first this may not make sense. I can understand why you want to identify a user expressing intent at or very close to the time they are expressing it, but why would you want the opposite. It’s quite simple. Most of the time, a user is doing something specific online, something (perhaps a few things) is/are occupying his or her attention and if the advertising is not specific to that task (like search) it is ignored or deemed extraneous.

But, if the user has just completed a task (the closest thing to “emptying the mind” you will see) then that mind which  has now shifted into a “no-intent” state can be filled with other types of marketing messages. The marketer has a unique chance to encourage the user to take some form of action, to consider and act upon a compelling message.

Thus we as advertisers online must think not just of the audience’s intent, but also of the audience’s “no-intent” zones where they are amenable to suggestion. A place their task is not interrupted. A space online where a vacuum has been created waiting to be filled by the best and brightest thing. The former is harder because while intent is often present, you need to match the user’s intent with your product (hence the search keyword, behavioral targeting etc.). The latter is hard information to gather too – but arguably more valuable since it may then apply to lots of different products and services – when the user is in this “no-intent” zone, you could advertise all kinds of things with a much greater response rate than you would get elsewhere.

Advertising done successfully is thus a story of both intent and non-intent.

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