“If content is king, context is God”, says Gary Vaynerchuk who is one of the leading entrepreneurs of the digital era. I love the way he has emphasized the significance of ‘context’ in comparison with the most popular phrase on the internet, ‘content is king.’
If you wish to clearly understand Vaynerchuk’s quote, let’s take a very common example. Let’s say that you are browsing through an ecommerce site to buy a pair of sports shoes from Puma. Your choice of shoes is out of stock. So you close the window and wait for the product to be available soon. In the meantime, whenever you are busy browsing through different websites or even social media sites, you see Puma ads. There will be a list of choices similar to what you’ve been looking for. It’s likely that one of the pairs catches your attention and you click for purchase.
A list of Puma shoes and their information (content) arrives in the moment and at the right place (context). And that’s when you are longing for your favorite pair. This is known as ‘context marketing’. The king was able to accomplish his mission only when God created for him, the perfect opportunity.
So you see, Puma crafted an ideal experience for you in that specific moment of need. Above all, it tried to help you out which builds trust, creates motivation, and drives engagement.
What does all this mean for a business? Keep reading for actionable insights!
In layman’s words, content is the material that your brand can share with the audience. This material can be in the form of blog posts, image-based ads, videos, product descriptions, reviews, case studies, and so on.
For a long time, businesses have been making the most of content to promote their products and services online. This way, they have been using ‘content marketing’ to create, publish, and distribute content for a targeted audience.
Content marketing is about telling great stories that attract people. It is a long-term strategy that focuses on establishing a strong relationship with your prospects and customers. You do this by providing them with high-quality content that is relevant and consistent over time.
But what if this content doesn’t fulfill the desires of your audience when most needed. That’s when context and context marketing comes into the big picture.
In comparison, the context has a very broad definition. Context can be an experience happening at the right time, at the right place. It could be a situation that evokes a sense of nostalgia for your reader. Or, it could also be a personalized approach that solves your customer’s issue or teaches the audience something new.
Hence, when content meets customer aspirations of any sort, content marketing changes into context marketing. It is the act of delivering content that speaks to an individual consumer’s needs and desires at specific times in their lives. The total effect of this kind of advertising also depends on a person’s past brand interactions.
Today, context marketing is critical to your online advertising strategy. It’s high time your business must now learn the best times to place personalized content in front of consumers for maximum lead generation.
A practical example will provide you with a clear picture of how context marketing is accomplished. As we are serving the health and wellness industry we have picked up a relatable example for you.
Johnson & Johnson, the American pharmaceutical and wellness goods brand sells a range of skincare products called ‘Clean & Clear.’ The target audience for this product is teenage girls. Nowadays, young girls are not found active on a website or reading a blog post. They are most likely found at places online where visual and highly shareable content engages them.
Hence, Johnson & Johnson used a context marketing strategy for Clean & Clear. The brand created shareable digital postcards that teenage girls could send to each other. These electronic cards were exciting as they contained links to free skin analysis as well as samples of Clean & Clear. The cards encouraged girls to share postcards with as many friends as possible. And this inexpensive way of positioning the product to the right audience at the right time went viral.
Now think the other way round. Could this advertising campaign achieve viral results if the same postcard content was displayed on their website? That’s how ‘context’ makes all the difference for the ‘content.’
Now, placing the ‘x’ before the ‘n’ is no magic. There’s a defined path to winning customers through context marketing and here it is.
As explained previously, your ‘one size fits all’ content will not reach your audience that’s so diverse. So, to begin with, your brand should pay full attention to the thought process of the consumers. You can achieve this by diving into the detailed user personas. Plus, you also need to have deep knowledge of buyer journeys that give you insights into what factors influence a customer to purchase certain products.
After thoroughly understanding your audience, you can create tailored content that helps them move forward.
When we talk about content, it is most likely that we think of a text on the website, in an email, or on social media. But content is much more than words. As we discussed earlier, it can be in the form of infographics, images, animations, short stories, videos, podcasts, and much more.
Today, internet users don’t like to read just plain text. They love browsing through videos, podcasts, animations, etc. Hence, it becomes inevitable to make the most of different forms of content in the right context — to serve your audience at a personal level.
In the digital space, the context is God because of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Because it has all the data about what your audience does on your website and where it goes.
Today, popular ecommerce sites use algorithms to show you content that is contextual to you at the moment. And that’s how their content drives maximum engagement.
AI and machine learning are opening the doors to more avenues to gather data. Businesses need to identify the opportunities lying with the advancing technology to refine connection with customers.
So now when you have AI and data by your side, it’s time to personalize your content. But there is an enormous amount of data that you need to sieve through. And you need to keep and maintain data is valuable and leave the rest.
In digital marketing, consider two kinds of data: Implicit and explicit. You can use both to convey your brand message in the right context. The former looks at consumer behavior online like the pages visited, type of device used, location, etc. The latter provides more details about name, email address, a form filled, etc.
You can combine both types of data to provide a personalized user experience to your customers.
Think about the ecommerce giants. How did they crack the code of marketing in real-time? As technology evolves, they keep testing new ways of context marketing. They keep providing different types of personalized customer experience until they see end results.
Every business can keep trying hard to provide a unique and personalized user experience. And it’s absolutely fine if you don’t get 100% results. Because customer behavior can be unpredictable at times.
But the key is to keep learning from past failures and keep optimizing content in the right context.
You know the Xⁿ expression in math. The variable ‘x’ is the base whereas ‘n’ is the power or exponent. If x is the context and n is the content, then you can use content multiple times to intensify the contextual experience.
You can actually apply this beautiful mathematical rule to your context marketing efforts. How? Well, let’s make this simple by explaining it through an example.
A new wellness center in a specific location wants to promote itself. So, the center creates a variety of content to reach out to its audience.
It creates an image ad that shows up for a suitable target audience like someone living nearby and searching for a wellness center through Google.
Then it creates a video ad that reaches a different set of audiences searching for a wellness center on social media.
It also launches email campaigns for audiences that visited a particular product page on their website.
Moreover, it also leverages smart mobile ads like when users are in the vicinity of the wellness center the ad pops up on their screen.
This way, the wellness center uses different content in different contexts and intensifies its reach.
Finding the pain points and obstacles users go through online is PulsAero’s key expertise. Using these deep insights we create a strategy that caters to your branding and marketing needs in every dimension.
For businesses of different scales, we provide a well-planned strategy that helps in making your content marketing a contextual success.
Do you wish to promote your content in the most effective context? Are you looking to get a complete content + context marketing package for your brand or a specific product? We are here to provide intricately customized solutions.
Hope you got the idea of the importance of placing 'x' before 'n' :)
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