In marketing, context is everything that’s related to your customers, especially when it comes to their characteristics and activity online. Understanding the potential of this context, can help you move your conversations with customers to a whole new level. And iPresso is here to help.
Your customer’s location and other demographic characteristics, their previous purchases, search history, read articles, clicked ads, and followed social media profiles – all these elements constitute the context that we’re talking about today. And context-based marketing (or contextual marketing) leverages it to reach your customers with an effective and precise message.
Knowing who your customers are means an immediate shift to a far more personal level of communication. If you know that your customer is interested in sneakers, you won’t advertise dress shoes to them, right? Plus, you can focus on different aspects of buying sneakers. You can direct them to a blog post where you explain what to pay attention to when buying sneakers, and then you can show them some of your best deals to encourage them to buy. That’s how context-based marketing works.
Let’s have a closer look at this fascinating strategy.
What is contextual marketing?
Put shortly, context-based marketing is all about a strategic approach to delivering marketing and sales content to your customers. This includes:
- Blog posts
- Ads
- Offers
- Emails
- Push notifications
- And other sales/marketing channels
But you don’t just want your customers to see these assets. You want them to see these tools at specific stages of the customer journey. If your customer is still at the top of the sales funnel and they are looking for more information, flooding them with ads won’t be effective. You need to warm up this lead first, e.g., by showing them some guides, comparisons, and how-to articles.
Just like inbound marketing (that we discussed in one of the previous articles), context-based marketing heavily relies on content marketing. Both strategies share commonalities and mutually benefit each other, enabling the delivery of personalized and effective information to the target audience.
However, context-based marketing uses two more tools:
Behavioral targeting
This technique is used to provide relevant information and ads to the target audience based on their interests and behaviors online. Of course, in order to do that, you need to have a way of tracking their activity, but that’s a story for a different article. With behavioral targeting, you can divide customers into specific segments based on their interests. For instance, people interested in buying a gaming laptop would constitute one group. And then, you can reach out to people in this group with content and offers relating to gaming laptops.
Personalization
Knowing your customers entails more than just knowing what they are interested in. You must also know who they are (e.g., what is their first name), where they live, what they’ve purchased in the past, etc. This way, you can address them by their first name and make communication more meaningful. People usually respond better to communication that’s tailored specifically to them.
What are the benefits of context-based marketing?
To some extent, we’ve already answered this question, but there’s more. Thanks to contextual marketing, you can:
- Make the most of your content: Creating content is one thing. Promoting it and getting people to read it is the other. With context-based marketing, you can leverage nearly all of your blog posts and newsletters to attract potential customers and increase the number of orders.
- Boost sales: Personalization and precise marketing message directly helps you get more customers. That’s because your customers get tailor-made and relevant ads and offers responding to their interests and needs.
- Increase CX: Your customers will surely appreciate the fact that your company seems to have all the right answers and provides them with the information they need exactly when they need it.
How can you benefit from context-based marketing?
To some extent, it’s all about the right content. You must prepare first and create diverse pieces of content relevant to different target audiences. Then, these pieces should be interconnected so that you can direct customers from one stage of the purchasing journey to the other. Let’s use a quick example:
Your store sells car accessories, and you have a customer who’s potentially interested in buying a car rack for their car. The journey starts with a blog post showing different types of bike racks. The customer decides to buy a rooftop-mounted bike rack. The next step would be to show them a comparison of different models, along with their pros and cons. Each model described in your comparison post should have a direct link to your online store so that when the customer decides to buy a given model, they can do so without the need to leave the post and browse for it themselves.
In our example, the customer has gone through three stages before they place an order. Going through these three stages helped the customer make an informed decision, but it also enhanced their UX (“Finally, a company that knows what I need!”).
In order to put this scenario to work, you need to HAVE all these elements in place before the journey begins. The rest is just all about putting puzzle pieces in the right order to encourage your customers to move from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the sales funnel.
And by the way, if you’re interested in sales funnel, we encourage you to read this blog post: Marketing funnel – what do you need to know about it?
Use context-based marketing with iPresso
Did you know that everything we do can be labeled as context-based marketing automation? Our platform was designed to help you make the most of customer data and then leverage it in your marketing campaigns. For example, our Customer Data Platform will help you gather all the relevant data in one place. Content automation will help you adjust your website content to the needs of different users. MA scenarios will help you design the entire communication flow tailored to different situations. And our RTM feature will aid you in showing your offers/ads at the right time and in the right place.
Of course, that’s not everything we do. But in order to discover the full functionality of our platform, you need to start using it! And that’s what we want to invite you to do. Start with a free trial, and see for yourself how effective context-based marketing can be!
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