What if everything was a signal?

When I started working at Airvet, we had 16 clients. Now, we have 100, and we didn't need to rely on form fills or ad clicks alone to get there.

So how did we gain their trust? And how did they land on our website in the first place? The short answer is, we listened to them before they ever knew who we were.

If you're paying attention, you can track all the tiny signals that work together to tell a story of your buyers' intent and turn them all into pipeline. A signal is any digital breadcrumb that tells you someone is in-market, even if they've never heard of your solution before. Most teams are only looking at the obvious ones: form fills, ad clicks, or website visits. But if you're only going after the people who've already raised their hand, you're missing out on potential pipeline and letting your competitors get there first.

Buyers today are doing more self-research and responding less to cold outreach. Everyone's talking about AEO and SEO and getting in front of Slack channels and advisory boards right now, because that's where people are actually spending their time instead of on your form.

Attention is scarce, but intent is not. How do you bridge the gap?

Here are the non-traditional intent signals that have worked for us at Airvet and helped us get to our buyer before anyone else does.

Off-site research

One of the most common mistakes I see is teams only tracking their own brand keyword (for us, that means literally tracking "Airvet"). We also track the obvious category terms, keywords like "pet benefits." But our competitors are watching those exact same keywords too, so we're all fighting over the pool of people who already know they want a pet benefit.

No one is googling "Airvet" yet, but they are searching for things like "financial wellness," "caregiving," and "burnout." None of these keywords mention pets, but they are related to the problems that our target audience of HR leaders are thinking about every day and that Airvet solves for. By mapping our brand's non-primary keywords, we can see who's in-market before they would think to look for us.

This is exactly how we found target accounts like Waffle House and Texas Roadhouse. Once we started watching these terms, we saw more interest from the food industry, especially that mix of white collar head office staff and blue collar service workers, where someone calling out for three shifts in a row to care for a sick pet could be a real cost to the business.

There's a reason this signal is so valuable. The people searching "financial wellness benefits" are already being retargeted by every financial wellness vendor on the market, but none of those vendors are pet companies. So when we show up in someone's inbox with a more cost-effective, more specific, and completely unexpected solution, we can grab their attention.

When we ran this play, none of the people we reached through off-site research had ever touched pet benefits content, yet roughly half of them opened or answered our cold email despite never having heard of Airvet before that outreach.

That's evidence that you can build audiences, serve ads, and nurture people before they know they need you, and before competition gets to them or they spend their budget elsewhere.

For this signal, the question worth asking is simple. What problem do you solve that your buyers might not yet know you solve, or might not associate with your solution at all?

Event lists

Being on an event's attendee list is itself a signal. The problem arises when you can't email them, and you don't have a booth at the event you're attending.

Sales would love a booth at every single event, but my budget doesn't support that (and I'm guessing yours doesn't, either). So instead, we sometimes sponsor smaller things like happy hours. But if you can't email the list and your sponsorship isn't high enough to get real visibility, you're stuck talking to your audience through your own channels. At Airvet, we have a saying for that: you shouldn't wee wee all over the page. Meaning, if all you're doing is talking about yourself on your own platforms, nobody cares.

This is our fix: run the event list through your ad platforms and start serving them branded ads. You can track engagement, clicks, and even the non-conversions, which tells you who's paying attention even if they never fill out a form.

1. We took the swag we already bring to every event, dog pens and doggy bags stuffed with treats and other swag, and built branded ads around them.
2. We ran those ads to the event's attendee list through Vector, which matched 80% of the contacts on LinkedIn, served them ads, and tracked every landing page visit.

The results

This play resulted in

2,172% ROI on initial spend

80% of the attendee list matched to LinkedIn for targeting

11 on-site meetings booked ahead of the event

5 post-event meetings booked

5 deals sourced (3 open, 2 closed)

The ads, built from swag already going to the event

The real win was being able to tell sales that we don't need a booth for every single conference. After all, a booth is just branding you can stand around.

If you watch for the signals (the list, the landing page visit, the curiosity), you can build pipeline without needing a table to stand behind.

Buying committee activity

A deal stalls. Your champion goes silent. And nobody on your team can tell you why. This happens often, and your first thought might be that something is up with your champion. But it's never just your champion. You need to understand the activity of the entire buying committee to get the full picture. If you're only tracking ICP visits to your website, you're missing valuable intel: the CTO who's looking at your security page, for example.

For late-stage deals, you need to track this activity. Someone from Legal reading your Terms of Service is a clear signal that the deal's moving and people are doing due diligence. This is your opportunity to alert Sales, arm the champion with the right content, and accelerate the deal. If Legal is all over your Terms of Service, offer a meeting with your CEO to talk through any unclear terms. If the CTO is reading up on your SOC 2 Type 2 documentation, offer a meeting with yours.

At Airvet, we built out a whole stack of emails just for this. When we started tracking Legal team activity on our in-flight deals specifically, we started seeing the right action at the right time. Sometimes, we didn't even need to take action: we'd see the Legal team show up on the site, and two weeks later, we'd have a signed contract. In those cases, it worked like a crystal ball.

The lesson is that it's never just one person signing the contract. The signal comes from the whole committee, not the champion alone. For later-stage deals, be aware of everyone's activity and how it impacts the deal.

The headlines

Industry news, leadership changes, funding rounds, regulatory shifts… these are all signals too, but they're easy to miss because they don't live inside your own martech stack.

Here's what you don't want to happen: 20 employees from a single company hit your website in one day because of a news cycle that, in hindsight, you could have anticipated and built content for ahead of time. Instead, you're scrambling to catch up, and by then the opportunity has passed.

Set Google alerts for your top industries so you can avoid that scenario. So many marketers don't do this, but they should be on if you're doing even a little bit of ABM.

Buyer goals

Remember: your buyer has goals, too. They're an employee with a performance review coming up, a promotion they're chasing, a bonus tied to results. We spend so much time selling our products and solutions as innovative and cutting-edge. Are we giving buyers the chance to tell that same story about themselves?

Position your product as a personal win, and you unlock one of the strongest nurture angles available to you. Give the person on the other side of the deal a reason to believe that choosing you makes them look good in front of their own leadership.

The buyer you're selling to is trying to win at their job, the same way you are. Don't leave that off the table when you're building your pitch.

How to get started

Here's what you can do right now to start acting on these signals:

1. 01

   Map your secondary and tertiary keywords with your sales team.

   Sales is the group that actually hears what prospects spend the most time on, what questions surprise them, and what reasons people are really buying for. By doing this, we learned that Airvet is being sold as a mental health benefit almost as often as a pet benefit and made sure that was reflected in our content and campaigns.

2. 02

   Build nurture campaigns for the people who are warm on intent and cold on your brand.

   They already know the problem, even if they don't know your product is the answer yet. Bridge that gap.

3. 03

   Invest in the right tech, not all the tech.

   Figure out the best way for you as a marketer to capture a signal, hand it off to the Sales team, and then do something with it. If you have too much tech, it's going to get lost in the shuffle. But if you don't have enough, it won't be actionable.

That last part is key. A signal you can't act on isn't a signal. The plays above worked because we had a way to see, in real time, who was engaging with our brand and take the appropriate action while it still mattered.

That's what Vector does for us: it gives us a way to track signals, target the right people, serve them content, and track what happens after.

Everything is a signal if you're paying attention and you have a way to do something about it. Your buyers don't need to fill out a form for you to find them. They're already out there, clicking and researching, telling you everything you need to know.