To generate pipeline from 2nd & 3rd party data signals, GTM leaders need to select intent topics to monitor and pull in warm leads. Choosing the right intent & keyword topics will yield exponential results and should be thought through carefully. 

With thousands of intent topics available, Warmly.ai empowers you to gain a deep understanding of what content your target audience is actively engaging with. Mapping intent topics to your sales and marketing strategy will help you:

1. Maximize the value of intent data for your business.

2. Identify the most relevant intent topics for your marketing and sales efforts.

3. Discover new growth opportunities with AI-powered insights into buyer intent.

This guide explores intent topics—what they are, how they’re identified, and how you can select them strategically to drive better engagement with Warmly.ai’s AI-powered solutions.

Overview:

1. Types of Intent Topics & Keywords

2. Our Process of Identifying Intent Topics & Keywords

3. Mapping Intent Topics & Keywords to Your Business Strategy

4. Workbook for Selecting Intent Topics & Keywords

5. Actioning your results: Intent Topic & Keywords Clusters are better for lead scoring

1. Types of Intent Topics & Keywords

At Warmly we provide options to add two different types of intent topics & keywords:

2nd Party: Social Intent

Add any keywords relevant to your business to monitor across public posts on social media sites. Warmly will extract the engagers (likers and commenters) who are engaging in those keywords

3rd Party: Bombora Research Intent

Add up to 12 selected intent topics/keywords from a list of 4000+ relevant terms that best represent your business to monitor across public articles across thousands of websites like Techtarget.com and the NYtimes.com. Warmly, via our partner Bombora, will extract company engagers.

Keywords vs Intent Topics

1. 2nd Party: Social Signal Monitoring with Keywords. Keywords focus on the presence of a word or phrase. This exact-match on social media posts gives assurance that the engager (the liker or commenter) directly engaged with that phrase.

2. 3rd Party: Research Intent Monitoring with Intent Topics: Intent Topics consider the full context of content engagement, providing a deeper layer of insight into buyer intent. Warmly & our partner Bombora uses AI-driven natural language processing (NLP) to analyze content consumption trends and map them to meaningful intent signals

2. The Process of Identifying Intent Topics & Keywords

1. Topic Submission & Data Gathering: AI-driven data aggregation collects and categorizes topic relevance.

2. Training the AI Model: Our NLP models learn from vast public datasets on the internet to classify content accurately.

3. Behavioral Baselines & Trend Analysis: By establishing content consumption baselines, we detect spikes in interest that signal strong intent from accounts.

4. Final Topic Categorization: Topics are refined and mapped to business needs, ensuring they align with sales and marketing objectives.

5. Final Keyword Matching: Keywords are exact matches that exist inside posts that are connected directly to the engagers on that post. Further enrichment pulls additional contact information (emails & phone numbers if available) for that individual

3. Mapping Intent Topics & Keywords to Your Business Strategy

To maximize intent data effectiveness, structure your topic selection based on these categories:

4. Workbook for Selecting Intent Topics & Keywords

Please see the Warmly & Bombora partner Workbook (excel sheet) to help select your initial Intent Topics & Keywords

Step 1. Review the Intent topics groups and enter your Intent topics & Keywords selections in the cells highlighted in purple. Remember that Intent Topics are exact terms while Keywords can be any words (but using the intent topics for ideation will be helpful)

Step 2. Download the latest version of the Bombora Intent topic taxonomy and add it as a sheet to this workbook. A link to the taxonomy is on the placeholder sheet. Use the taxonomy to:

1. Check the Intent topics you have selected are included in the taxonomy. If they are not keep a list of these and email [email protected] with your topic suggestion or submit a new idea here: https://bombora.com/topic-suggestions-form/

2. Match your Intent topic selection to the taxonomy (this is important if you plan to upload your topics). Add keywords that make sense to your business goals and likely align or are similar to the Intent topics

3. Help you identify other related topics in related Themes or Categories.

Step 3. Generate additional Keywords using a free keyword generator: https://ahrefs.com/keyword-generator/. Adding some of your intent topics here will generate additional ideas for Keywords

Step 4. You now have a comprehensive mapping of Intent & Keywords topics relevant to your business. Add keywords into Warmly in the Social Intent tab and Topics into Warmly in the Bombora Research Intent tab

5. Actioning your results: Intent Topic & Keywords Clusters are better for lead scoring

Rather than focusing on individual topics, we recommend you build your lead scoring based on intent topic clusters—groups of related topics that indicate broader buying trends.

• High Engagement (10+ topics) → Accounts ready for direct outreach.

• Moderate Engagement (5-9 topics) → Nurture with AI-driven personalized messaging.

• Low Engagement (1-4 topics) → Engage with top-of-funnel content to build interest.

Warmly will allow you to take these leads and automate outreach to them across email/SEP channels, ads and chat based on the intensity of their engagement & your plans. See this help center article as an example for orchestrating leads from 3rd Party Research Intent