You may have heard of content marketing, but do you know about context marketing? They sound similar and serve more or less the same purpose but are distinctly different. While content marketing focuses on creating content relevant to a given market niche, context marketing produces advertising that is more tightly focused on the wants and needs of that audience at a particular moment.
Instead of assuming people will be interested in a product based on their age, gender, or geographic location, context marketing determines relevance based on actual consumer behavior. These habits are derived from the online search history of your target audience, the pages they viewed, and the content they liked. Ads are then tailored to Internet users based on this.
With your brand messaging going to folks who are in a frame of mind to buy, you will be assured of a higher return on your marketing investment. Here are some content marketing tips to help you create a successful campaign:
- Define Your Audience
Before you can go to the crafting of marketing messaging or deciding on which platform to use, you need to have a clear picture of whom you’ll be communicating with. Create a persona of the individual who will be interested in using your products.
What is the age of your envisioned customer? Where in the world/country do they reside and what do they do for a living? Drilling down to their hobbies and Internet/social media habits will help you create more effective messaging.
- Choose The Best Channel
Contextual marketing engages the target audience on the platforms they are most active on. Blasting out promotional messaging on every other social network or online forum not only results in the wastage of precious marketing resources, but it may also have the opposite effect from what you intended.
Defining your audience will help you know which online or social channel to reach them on. If your target is youths in their teens and early 20s, you’re more likely to find them on TikTok than on LinkedIn. The nature of your product will also determine the best channel for your messaging.
- Content Format
Marketing content can be delivered in a variety of formats. The format you choose for your context marketing campaign should be determined by your audience. Based on the data you’ve collected about them, will your audience respond better to a blog post or a humorous video clip?
You can use more than one format if you feel your chosen target may respond to either to increase your chances of interaction. The format(s) that will foster engagement is recommended.
- Create The Content
Again, the vision of the kind of content you need to create should be shaped by the definition of your audience. Your content should have a personalized feel as opposed to communication made for the masses. After creating an accurate persona of the person who is likely to consume your product, try to envision the tone of the content they are most likely to respond to.
Getting professional help from people with experience in the creation of tailored marketing content is not a bad idea. Digital advertising agencies in NYC will help you generate content that will resonate with members of your envisioned audience residing in these parts.
- Engage Your Audience
Marketing parlance traditionally talks about ‘targeting’ an audience but context marketing is about engaging your audience. What’s the difference, you may ask? The former prioritizes the needs of the business while the latter tries to find out what’s important to the consumer.
Call-to-action messages in a context marketing setting seek to obtain more information from the online visitor rather than simply urging them to buy. Once you have a clear idea of the end user’s pain points, you can customize your messaging to explain how your product addresses them.
- Personalize Your Campaigns
What makes context marketing so effective is that it uses real data to create a persona of the intended target of your brand messaging. As visitors navigate your website and social pages, you will use certain tools to gather data on the kinds of content they like, the websites they frequently visit, and what they find annoying.
With this data, you can create more personalized messages for your target, instead of trying to address the needs of the masses. The chances of an Internet user responding positively to a promotional message increase drastically if you’re addressing a real, individual need they have.
- Track Results
A crucial component of any marketing campaign is finding out if your efforts have made any actual impact. To do this, you need to have a system or tools in place to collect real data on the change in the behavior prompted by your context marketing campaign.
From this, you may discover your messaging in a given format or on a particular channel is not quite having the desired impact. You can then do research on why this is so and the steps you can take to improve the outcome.
