Many years ago, marketing professionals realized something crazy: that one of the best ways to capture new business was through creating content that prospects actually—gasp—wanted. This meant blog articles, whitepapers, how-to's, social media, videos, infographics, all of it. Anything that was helpful or educational, yet, didn't feel overly salesy, was the new norm, and not by accident.
It's easy to see that today, most marketers have internalized the content is king attitude throughout most of their projects. They're finally realizing "Yeah, content is kind of important..."
But, to quote inbound marketing celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk, "If content is King, context is God," and you need to follow this principle if you want to drastically alter your marketing efforts, and improve your sales funnel for now, and the future. But, not all content is created equally, and even less is relevant. That's where context marketing comes in.
What is Context Marketing?
Context marketing is exactly what it sounds like.
It's the act of being contextual in your marketing. Duh. But it's much deeper than that. What this means is, context marketing involves publishing of pushing out new content that is relevant now, whether it's through current events, trending hashtags, global headlines, or customer profiles.
On a much lower level, context marketing involves delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time and place. And if you've been paying attention while perusing the internet, you've probably come across many examples of context marketing. More and more companies and marketers are creating marketing campaigns that have different filters per each customer sect. By creating separate buyer personalities for each product, you're able to increase the overall effectiveness of your advertising process.
Example:
Facebook does a great job of targeting their ads towards the different groupings of buyer personalities within their platform. Businesses create ads for Facebook's sidebar, and can choose who to target, whether that means different age groups, locations, genders, interests, religions, etc. Next time you're on the computer, keep track of your history while browsing the web, and see how many of your search results appear as targeted ads to the right of your Facebook sidebar.
Why is Context Marketing Important?
There are three reasons context marketing should be high on your to-do list:
Personalization:
When you build content around contextual information, you're able to provide marketing content that's personalized for each viewer, regardless of who's looking. Not only will the new content be relevant per each user, but the content being shown to the viewer is more engaging (and less annoying). So the viewer gets content that's created for them, minus the headache of sifting through the spam.
Positive Results:
If you're publishing content that's been targeted towards the wants and needs of your customers, it goes without saying that your marketing efforts should see more success as well. You aren't delivering content that's uninteresting, or doesn't relate to a customer's interest... you're delivering content that is streamlined for higher sales.
Efficient Process:
By creating content that's relevant to your audience, you can also help to streamline your inbound marketing process. Now that you have buyer personas for your biggest influencers, you can set them up as groups in your email chains and create content that's automatically filtered for each sect of your customers or contacts. And while the work to establish these personas can be time consuming, the end result is well worth your expended effort.
