Content marketing has been a popular buzzword over the last five years, but more recently the term context marketing has been bandied about, leaving many asking questions like:
- What is context marketing?
- What’s the difference between content and context marketing?
- How can I get started with context marketing?
Let’s dig into these questions within the context of the classic example of context marketing, Amazon.
Amazon is the most notable pioneer in this space – they’ve built an incredibly extensive business around a smart system that is unrivaled in convenience.
Log into Amazon, click around for two minutes, and the experience is tailored to your tastes. Browse through my Amazon account and you’ll be hard-pressed to escape products related to lacrosse, tech gear, and, well, more lacrosse.
Why? Because every future interaction that you have with Amazon is based on every past interaction.
Amazon gets to know you, understands what you shop for, and prompts you to keep purchasing the things you like. Consumers benefit because it makes the experience incredibly convenient, and Amazon loves it because sales are constantly increasing.
What is context marketing?
Context marketing, simply put, is delivering the right content to the right people at the right time. Simple, right?
How to get started with context marketing
While the idea is simple, the application requires work – and that’s what keeps most organizations from applying context marketing effectively, if at all.
Effectively implementing context marketing requires a detailed understanding of your audience, valuable content that is appropriate for different segments at different times, and a powerful system to consistently engage, deliver, and delight.
Let’s break down those three components in a little more detail.
1. Developing a detailed understanding of your audience.
Developing buyer personas is an important step as you hone in on your target audience. You may be asking, “what is a buyer persona?” I like this overview from the Buyer Persona Institute:
“Buyer personas tell you exactly how and why a representative buyer makes the decision to buy the products, services or solutions that you market.”
What it boils down to is that you need to not only understand the different segments of you target audience, but you also need to understand how they make decisions and the progressive steps of that purchasing process. That gives you the context to produce the right content to implement in your marketing.
2. Producing valuable content for different consumer types at different stages.
Knowledge, on it’s own, doesn’t get you anywhere. You need to apply those buyer personas that you developed into your content production so you can start dominating your sales process.
If content creation is a big hurdle, and it typically is, you should definitely repurpose content that you’ve already created and consider working with a strategic partner to improve your marketing.
Whatever the cost, make sure that you’re producing value-adding content, targeted specifically towards you buyer personas. Otherwise, you’re wasting time.
3. Implementing a powerful system to engage, deliver, and delight.
Developing both detailed buyer personas and compelling content is great, but if you can’t deliver that content to those personas, what’s the point?
Now you need a marketing automation system to streamline the process of getting the right content to the right people at the right time. This is probably a good time to talk to an agency who specializes in long-term online marketing campaigns and is an expert in the marketing automation field.
There are a lot of options in the marketing automation space, but some of the best are HubSpot, InfusionSoft, Marketo, Pardot, Act-On, Vocus, or spinning up your own DIY solution with some combination of WordPress, MailChimp, Gravity Forms, Zapier, Google Analytics, etc. Contact GuavaBox if you’d like expert advice on sorting through the platforms and figuring out what best suits your needs.
Use context marketing and more secrets to grow sales
Implementing context into your marketing is a great step towards creating a buyer-focused sales process. There are a lot of things that go into crafting marketing that people love, and this eBook on insider secrets to closing more sales is a great next step to get your mind cranking.