What is contextual marketing?
According to Philip Kotler, “Marketing is a social process through which people and groups satisfy their wants and needs.” Contextual marketing seeks to satisfy these demands, but at a specific time, taking advantage of the information and data available to us.
It focuses its work on developing real-time actions that work based on the context of the person who perceives that action. By context we mean the time of day, the weather, the location of that person or their consumer profile itself. In other words: we seek to attract a customer's attention at a certain time.
The idea is to create a marketing strategy that “embraces” the customer and moves away from invasive advertising and is as personalized as possible without the customer noticing. Instead of firing a thousand bullets with a machine gun without a scope and only hitting once, we will use a sniper rifle to fire as few bullets as possible, achieving better results. With contextual marketing we fine-tune that shot, achieving a more effective message. We look for the right content for the right people at the right time .
One of the characteristics of contextual marketing is that it uses personalization of campaigns, which increases results. Knowing exactly who you are talking to and what they need is the cornerstone of that context that gives meaning to this type of marketing.
Beyond putting the recipient's name in an email marketing campaign, we are talking about personalizing the campaign so that it addresses them and what they need, as if it were an ad straight out of Minority Report. Using their favorite communication channels, offering solutions to their problems or addressing that person can become an art and is essential when we talk about contextual marketing.
Differences with inbound marketing
It's easy to confuse inbound marketing with contextual marketing, so before continuing we'll explain what the former is so you don't confuse it with the latter.
Inbound marketing is focused on loyalty and brand image, using information about our target audience as a weapon. The better we know our target, the better we can apply gambling data indonesia phone number marketing to them to get them to stay with us. Contextual marketing is a momentary action that serves that person at that moment. It seeks to maximize the profitability of the strategy and not maintain it over time like inbound marketing.
A practical example of contextual marketing
Victoria is a 27-year-old woman, single and childless, who lives in a shared flat in Madrid. She works as an intern at a law firm and in her free time she is passionate about gastronomy, cinema and live music.
As a company, you don't have to know all of this data, but you do have to decipher the digital breadcrumbs that Victoria leaves behind.
Victoria has no plans for Saturday, so she searches online for something to do that weekend. She finds a cooking class, which she saves as a favorite on her computer, and heads to work. At lunchtime, she opens her Instagram account and it shows her an ad for cooking classes. She clicks on it and reads. A couple of days go by, and at dinnertime, she goes to a recipe page and at the top is an ad for the cooking class. It's not that the cooking class is stalking her, it's just that it appears when she needs it.
In this practical case, contextual marketing has arrived in the form of advertisements at different times, but it can be another type of action, such as a social media campaign with content that our audience has requested before.
For example, let's go back to the same case of the cooking course. The company that runs them has an Instagram account and launches a question in its stories with two options to choose from in a quick survey. Which recipe do you prefer, one for Christmas cookies or one for pasta sauces? Whatever the result, the company will offer content on its Instagram account that contributes something to the public based on that answer, in this case a recipe. From that content arises the opportunity to advertise its Christmas cookies and sweets course or its Italian cooking course for dummies on a date when social meals are frequent, such as December.
Contextual marketing actions are not limited to the digital sphere, but can be implemented by combining traditional media with digital media, the so-called on/off fusion. An example: Victoria finally took one of the cooking courses at a shop-workshop that is a couple of streets from her way back to work. A month later, when she was walking home from work, she received a text message when she was near the shop informing her that the sales on kitchenware and cookbooks were starting.
Another simpler example is targeting ads by zip code. This way, a small bakery in the neighborhood can advertise only to customers who are close to its premises, which makes it easier to make a possible purchase.
Advantages of using contextual marketing in your campaigns
- As it is a format adapted and personalized to the current situation of our target audience, it is much less invasive than standard marketing.
- You target potential customers just as they are about to make a purchasing decision, so you increase the likelihood of a sale happening.
- You send the message that the customer needs right when they need it, so it is a personalized marketing action that usually responds to a specific need, the customer will perceive it as a solution to their problem.
- Since these are non-invasive ads that respond to a customer's need, this type of content is more "friendly", which improves the customer's perception of the brand, because it seeks to solve their problem and not simply "sell" to them.
How to include contextual marketing in my digital strategy
The CEO of the consulting firm Edelman told CNBC that “brands need to find solutions instead of selling image. They must be tangible and fast, not generic and conceptual.” To achieve this, data is essential. It is about understanding how your target lives.
In order to include contextual marketing in our strategy, we need to follow several steps:
- Understand our target. It is essential for any content strategy that we know who we are targeting because we will not communicate in the same way to 17-year-old gamers as to their parents or grandparents.
- Implement tools to extract data and personalize actions. You can use big data, CRM and CMS and even use data that can be extracted from social media campaigns. Ideally, the tools you use will learn on their own thanks to machine learning so that they simplify the work and improve it over time.
- Create the content strategy. Once we have collected all the data, we will create the content strategy as in any other type of marketing action, only taking into account the context in which we are going to work and personalizing the actions.
- Use tools to measure the results. As in any action, it is vital that the work does not end with the advertisement or campaign, but that a results report is made that helps us improve in future actions.
According to the World Economic Forum, more than 44 zettabytes are generated every day on the Internet, and this data reflects a person's environment. Their social networks, what they search for on the Internet, their interests. Everything can be transformed into data. In order to manage it, we need to use data analysis and segmentation tools, as well as having the necessary knowledge to use this data and achieve results with our actions.
It is essential to have a team capable of handling this data and redirecting our content to the needs of the client , to make them feel part of the brand and not just another spectator destined to receive and receive mass advertisements that they end up discarding without even discriminating them. A team of professionals trained and experienced in different styles of communication both in social media, one of the most fertile paths to achieve this type of results, and in digital marketing.
