Social Savvy: Welcome to the intention economy – June 2025

By Irene Williams

For the better part of a decade, we’ve lived and worked in the “attention economy.” Marketers and business leaders have crafted creative content and maximized budgets to vie for customers’ eyeballs and interest across an ever-expanding landscape of social and traditional media channels. Today, technology, particularly the proliferation of AI tools, has ushered us into a new season in which attention is no longer the primary currency. In the intention economy, we must access customers’ core objectives to effectively connect and close sales.

MARKETING TIPS
If this seems a little techie and intense to you, I get it. The mention of AI tools and “accessing customers’ objectives” may lead you to think you’ll have to overhaul everything to stay viable in the marketplace. Allow me to allay your tension and ease you into this promising new approach with these tips.

Understand that it’s about understanding. At its foundation, the intention economy is all about understanding your customers more proactively than ever before, so you can anticipate and provide what they want and need. From this proactive stance, you’re positioned to market with emotional intelligence that naturally nurtures trust and loyalty. From my vantage point, this new/renewed focus on human understanding is extremely refreshing in a world saturated in pervasive technology yet short on meaningful connections.

And, good news, you’re not starting from scratch; you’re already tuned into your target audiences. You track key metrics (social media engagement, website data, email marketing stats, etc.) and adjust messaging and strategy accordingly for better results. For you, the attention-to-intention shift can be relatively simple to achieve.

Pinpoint the person in personalization. Personalization in marketing isn’t new. For example, countless brands-maybe even yours-have included customers’ first names in email salutations and employed social media ad targeting for years. What is new is the level of nuanced, hyper-personalized tactics the intention economy requires. In this season, it’s imperative to utilize all the details you’ve ethically and properly collected about customers so you can market to individual prospects, not just groups of similar customers.

Review your marketing dashboards to ascertain the quality of customer data points you have on the ready.
• When and why they opted into your list
• What they’ve purchased from you, if anything
• Ways they click and engage with your content (email, website, socials)
• Where they’re most likely to interact with your brand-and your competitors’
• Who they are (demographics, customer type, etc.)

Do a segmentation renovation. Detailed audience segmentation is essential in this new season. Look back at the data points I just listed. Have you used those to separate out audience segments? When’s the last time you cleaned house on your audience segments? If you’ve been sending and sharing pretty much the same stuff to pretty much everybody on your customer list, you’re overdue for a segmentation renovation. In keeping with the focus on personalization, aim to create smaller, highly specific segments for your list.

Invite customer conversations. Incorporate mechanisms for customer conversation early in your shift to marketing for the intention economy. Distribute an incentivized survey via email to find out what customers are interested in and looking for. Use polling posts on social media to generate feedback. Rally your sales team to reach out to existing customers to ask for insights so you can best personalize your ongoing outreach to them.

Highly strategic intention marketing seeks to anticipate customers’ desires, even before they themselves are aware of them, via tech-driven analysis of their actions and engagements. Regardless, you’re always best-served by going directly to the source. Reciprocal person-to-person interactions offer a treasure trove of actionable knowledge.

Out with campaigns; in with intelligent experiences! In the AI-driven intention economy, rethink traditional campaigns with a focus on generating intelligent digital experiences that auto-customize based on consumer data and engagement. For example, you may start an experience with an ad featuring a QR code that invites customers to scan to see a landing page. While that action will be the same for everyone, the landing page hosts click points to propel customers into increasingly personalized journeys. The more bespoke the experience, the more likely the customer will stick around to take action and make purchasing decisions.

Prioritize privacy protocols. As mutually beneficial as marketing for intention is, customers may be on alert when receiving proactive messaging that so uniquely addresses their interests. The onus is on you to protect the data your customers choose to provide and respect the privacy of every individual in your database. Build measures into your standard protocols to ensure transparency and compliance with all privacy laws and requirements. Infuse your communications with authenticity and openly address your brand’s commitment to secure interactions.

As more and more brands use intention-focused tech, hyper-personalization will become what your customers expect. It’s time to move beyond “one-size-fits-all” strategies.

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