Equinox sought to target high-end consumers in various stages of intent, on their journey to joining a health and fitness center, in search engine marketing, social media marketing and display advertising. In true direct-response fashion, Equinox's objectives were to drive more Y/Y leads (people who fill out a contact form requesting that a local Membership Advisor contacts them) from search marketing, social media marketing and display advertising, while also decreasing the Y/Y cost-per-lead to drive efficiency.

Intent is the most important marketing variable. Uncovering consumer intent is the key to driving performance for Equinox—across search, social and display. People’s intentions change at different stages of the consumer journey. And different intentions require different messaging. For Equinox, we built a tool, the Intent Scoring Algorithm (ISA), which creates intent segments based on where consumers are in their purchase journey. We uploaded account search keywords to the ISA. In search engines, people use abstract language when they’re exploring. They use concrete language when they’re ready to take action. The creative idea of this campaign was that the ISA would fundamentally shift how Equinox approached digital marketing. Equinox would no longer focus only on the concrete, last-click intention, but also on abstract intentions, for people in the discovery and consideration phases of the consumer journey.

The Intent Scoring Algorithm enabled us to identify consumer intent within specific mindsets (e.g. Exploring, Researching, Considering, Buying). We then dynamically scored these consumer mindsets to aid in the real-time creation of media and content/creative (including landing pages), aligned to those mindsets. For the “Explorer” intent segment, ads and experiences focused on awareness. For the “Evaluator” segment, ads and experiences focused on features and benefits. And for the “Buyer” segment, we focused on driving immediate action.

All search ads, social ads, and display ads were then specifically tailored to each person's intent mindset. This enabled Equinox to deliver 1:1 personalization at scale. To illustrate, intent-aligned brand messages impacted creative. Through creative testing, we found that club imagery worked better higher in the funnel (for the "Explorer" and "Evaluator"), while human imagery performed better lower in the funnel (for the "Buyer"). We also crafted personalized landing page experiences based on the varying consumer intentions. And we remarketed to engaged users (on social media and in display) as part of our acquisition strategy.

Across all digital channels (paid search, paid social media and display), the Intent-Based Marketing approach resulted in a 38% Y/Y increase in leads at a 20% Y/Y decrease in cost-per-lead. Intent-Based Marketing proved that understanding consumer intent, and creating cohesive media, content and creative experiences aligned to that intent—across the full marketing funnel, abstract to concrete—helped Equinox crush its goals.