Best Practices for Creating Intent Topics and Keywords

Well-defined topics and keywords help your team collect signals that matter and surface intent that's actionable. Use these practices to organize your Audienscope listening and make sure your keywords capture real buyer interest.

Intent topics

1. Start with 5–7 core topics

Begin with a small, manageable set—around 5–7 topics that cover your most important focus areas. A tighter set makes intent easier to understand and act on. You can always refine or add topics as you learn what resonates with your audience.

2. Align topics with what you actually solve

Your intent topics should reflect the main problems you solve, your key offerings, or the outcomes your customers care about. This ensures signals map to real buyer needs, not generic interests.

3. Choose the right level of detail

Topics should be broad enough to capture multiple signals but focused enough to be actionable. For example, "Platform Capabilities" is too generic to guide sales outreach. Something like "Contact-level Targeting" makes it clear what prospects care about and helps you tailor your messaging.

4. Aim for topics that enable personalization

Well-defined topics connect multiple signals into clear interest areas and help you personalize both sales outreach and ad content. This makes it easy to pick the right next message—so buyers see content that matches what they actually care about, not generic copy.

Keywords

1. Include your brand and variations

Add your brand name along with common variations, abbreviations, or alternative spellings. This captures intent from prospects who already know you and are actively researching your company or solution.

2. Include competitor names

Competitor keywords help you spot prospects in evaluation or comparison mode. Tracking this intent lets you tailor messaging toward differentiation at exactly the right moment.

3. Consider how prospects actually search

Think about the language your prospects naturally use when researching a problem or solution. Focus on the terms they'd actually type, not what you think they should search for.

4. Balance broad and specific

Keywords should be specific enough to signal real intent, but not so narrow that signals stay sparse.

• Overly broad keywords ("AI") are vague and hard to act on

• Overly narrow keywords ("boosting team performance with AI") may miss signals

Aim for terms that clearly show buyer interest while capturing enough signals to be useful.

5. Know the keyword policy limits

Some terms can't be used due to policy:

• Words related to identity, identification, authentication, or personal user data are blocked to prevent phishing-related misuse

• Large trademarked brand names (major consumer tech brands) may be restricted to avoid policy or trademark violations

6. Avoid special characters

Don't include special characters in keywords. Influ2 automatically removes them when you add keywords, but it's cleaner to start without them.

7. Add keywords in your audience's language

If you target audiences in multiple languages, add the same keywords in each language they use for searching or content consumption. This gives you better signal coverage.