Purchase Intent: Identify Prospects Who Need Your Product Now

The most successful, tried & tested, completely free strategies that you can use to identify people ready to buy your product or service.

Richard FrancisRichard Francis· · Updated

Purchase Intent: Identify Prospects Who Need Your Product Now

Purchase Intent: Identify Prospects Who Need Your Product Now

In this article, we describe the main strategies that you can use for finding prospects who express purchase intents. It depends on your business, but you can use ideas from this section and modify them for your requirements.

Search for people or companies by keyword

It may sound obvious, but if you fully understand and leverage the nuances of a search engine, it can yield better results than the most advanced AI.

Let’s imagine that our target audience is B2B sales and marketing agency owners from Canada.

Before we get into it, some things you should know about LinkedIn search:

  • It’s not semantic. If you add keywords to the search bar, LinkedIn will search for exact matches. It will not derive any wider context or consider synonyms.
  • You can use quotes to search for exact phrases. If you search “B2B agency”, it will find exact matches only, and skip “B2B marketing agency”, for instance. So if you need to match both you should use “B2B agency” marketing instead.
  • Keyword exclusion is an invaluable tool for honing in on your target audience.

Let’s start searching for people or companies.

Searching for companies

1. B2B agency

B2B Agency Search on LinkedIn

Ok, we have 332 results. That’s a lot.

2. Let’s narrow it down by trying “B2B agency” in quotes.

B2B Companies

Only 2 results now, which is too narrow.

Let’s take a second to go through our B2B agency results (no quotes) and read the description. Here we should find some keywords that we don’t need and can use to narrow our results:

  • recruitment
  • Staffing
  • B2C
  • PR

And also some keywords that we can use to expand our results:

  • Sales
  • Marketing

3. Let’s try b2b sales “marketing agency” -recruitment -Staffing -b2c -pr. Now we have some good results, and we can narrow the search down using a couple more filters (Location & Industry).

B2B Marketing Agency

This is a great starting point. From here we can expand our filtering and target more companies.

Here’s the search URL used in this example: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/companies/?companyHqGeo=%5B%22101174742%22%5D&industry=%5B%2280%22%5D&keywords=b2b%20sales%20%22marketing%20agency%22%20-recruitment%20-Staffing%20-b2c%20-pr&origin=FACETED_SEARCH

You can use it as a starting point for your tasks on Coldlytics.

Searching for people

It’s also possible to find people using this basic search. No need for advanced tools like Sales Navigator. Just add the job title you need in the Title field.

Here’s what we have now:

Sociation Marketing Agency CEO

Here’s the search URL, which you can use as a starting point: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?geoUrn=%5B%22101174742%22%5D&industry=%5B%2280%22%5D&keywords=b2b%20sales%20%22marketing%20agency%22%20-recruitment%20-Staffing%20-b2c%20-pr&origin=GLOBAL_SEARCH_HEADER&profileLanguage=%5B%22en%22%5D&title=Founder

You can use it as a starting point for your tasks on Coldlytics.

Search people in your industry by hashtag

This strategy works great if you have some popular hashtags in your niche which are being used often (on daily basis or more frequently).

The main idea here is to find such hashtags. Some examples:

  • They could be used by your competitors in their marketing campaigns.
  • #vacancy or #job is always relevant if you are in the recruiting industry.
  • Other more general ones like #sales or #marketing

To start the search by hashtag, you can do the following:

Let’s use the main search field for searching hashtags. That way we can combine them with other filters.

By default, Linkedin chains your keywords together with AND operators. This means that it will show only the results where ALL keywords are present. In our case we want a broad search for hashtags, so we will explicitly use the OR operator.

Here is how the search will look:
#b2bsales OR #b2b OR #sales

Here is the list of people who posted anything with the above hashtags in the past week:

B2B Sales Marketing

And here’s the search URL: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?keywords=%23b2bsales%20OR%20%23b2b%20OR%20%23sales&origin=GLOBAL_SEARCH_HEADER&sortBy=%22relevance%22

The strategy that we can implement here:

  • Use this search URL to scrape profiles.
  • Scrape the post title.
  • Scrape the number of comments

This information can be a nice “ice breaker” for our outreach campaign.

E-commerce shops that are not advertising on Facebook

If you are selling Facebook Ad management services then one of the hottest buyer intents can be that the company is not currently advertising on Facebook. This could be your potential customer.

Here is how to implement it with Coldlytics.

Step 1 — Start with any list of e-commerce companies.

We can start by compiling a list of sources:

As you can see, thanks to our semi-automated approach the source can be absolutely any online platform or website. It’s a great way to procure leads that your competitors can’t.

In our case let’s use Facebook as starting point, and we’ll look for founders who joined a Shopify-themed group in the last 30 days.

Here’s an example keyword search: Shopify entrepreneurs London

Shopify entrepreneurs London

We don’t need huge groups — high chances that such groups are poorly moderated and accept anyone.

Here is the list of groups that I found:

To receive your leads, you don’t need to be a member of these groups, and you don’t even need to join.

Step 2 — Narrow it down

From the first step the size of the audience that we received is huge (>100K members). We need to narrow it as much as possible.

Here are some targets to use for narrowing:

  • Need only Owners/Founders/Co-founders
  • Location: USA, Canada, Europe
  • Join the group in the past Month: we need to use this filter accurately because it can dramatically narrow our audience.
  • Companies that are currently not advertising on Facebook.

Step 3 — Data Points

Think about data points that you will need. These will largely be predicated on the email outreach strategy you decide to use.

In our case we can use the following:

  • First Name
  • Email
  • Company Name
  • Website URL
  • Facebook Group Title
  • Facebook Group Link
  • Job title
  • Location
  • Store niche

So in our email we can write something like this:

Outreach B2B SaaS startups that recently raised funds

This strategy can fit dev shops or any type of consulting business that targets tech startups.

An exclusive feature of Coldlytics, which is not available on other products is that you can use ANY SOURCE of information as your starting point. And then filter that information using our own filter, or even other external tools and sources!

Think of it as a funnel. To illustrate:

  • You can monitor press releases on niche websites, pulling out the companies or people who appear in them.
  • Our researchers will find more information about that company on Linkedin or other platforms (the key decision-maker, number of employees, and more).
  • You can filter based on company revenue or even website traffic.
  • And finally receive each individual’s business or personal email address, ready to sync to your CRM or outreach tool.

This epitomizes Coldlytics’ value proposition — our semi-automated approach means that we can procure data that cannot be obtained via other solutions, and therefore your competitors!

Here’s an example of sources to monitor startups that recently raised funds:

The data points that we will need for our cold email campaign:

  • First Name, Company Name, Job Title, Email — the minimum that we always provide for any task on Coldlytics.
  • Press-release website title, to write in your emails like: “Hey, I read on <site_title> that you raised <funding_amoun>. Congratulations ….>
  • The name of the investor or funds.

Related articles

5 Best Practices for Keeping Leads Engaged in Businesses

5 Best Practices for Keeping Leads Engaged in Businesses

Finding the ideal audience for a business is a challenge on its own. Keep on reading to learn more!

Matthew McQuinn