Context Marketing: A New Strategy for the Digital Age

If content is king, then context is god says Gary Vaynerchuk. But what does context marketing mean, and how can you implement it in your company?

In this article, you will learn what context marketing is all about, and how you can apply it in your firm.

Thanks to the book The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media, we now have a framework and a methodology to implement context marketing in any organisation.

Written by Mathew Sweezey of Sales Force, it proposes a new way of thinking about your customers, and suggests how you can use the right marketing automation solutions to scale your marketing efforts.

What is Context Marketing?

Context marketing meets your consumers where they are. Unlike traditional marketing, it doesn’t interrupt them.

Rather, context marketing seeks to fulfill your prospect’s expectations in a specific moment, while creating a series of connected moments that incrementally guide your prospects along their particular buying journey.

Why Context Marketing Matters

So why is context becoming a more important aspect of digital marketing? Let us look at three important trends.

#1 Shift from Limited to Infinite Media

Increasingly, individuals are replacing businesses as the dominant creators of noise (consumers make up to 3 times the “noise” of all businesses combined). Hence, businesses need to behave more like individuals.

#2 Context Replaces Attention as Marketing’s Modus Operandi

Contextually relevant, authentic and permissioned messages work better than attention grabbing tactics. Nobody wants to be interrupted. However, they do not mind relevant content from those whom they grant permission to.

#3 From Static Messages to Dynamic Experiences

Contextual experiences that are supported, seamless, and dynamic are preferred over static ones. The full range of customer experiences now become marketing’s role — not just selling itself.

The New Customer Journey

In an age of infinite media, your prospect’s new customer journey begins with a trigger.

A trigger could be internal or external. It serves as an umbrella-like starting point from which your customer can then move to any stage along the customer journey, depending on how much information he or she has.

There are altogether 6 stages in customer journey of the book:

1. Ideation: Consumer has a goal in mind and wants to solve it
2. Awareness: He looks for options to solve that problem
3. Consideration: Next, he weighs the different options and ask further questions to ascertain appropriateness of choice
4. Purchase: Consumer focuses on details of the transaction: price, delivery, warranties, etc
5. Customer Experience (CX): Depending on how the post-purchase experience is like, customer will have an impression of the brand
6. Advocacy: For customers are brand fans, they may take the relationship a step further by spreading the word

5 Dimensions of the Context Marketing Framework

In the book, Sweezey outlined that there are five dimensions in the context framework. This can be seen in the diagram below.

Courtesy of The Context Marketing Revolution

#1 Available

Availability depends on the delivery method for your brand experience. The key here is not to force it on people, but make it as organic as possible. Let’s look at the different examples:

• Forced: Examples include ads on YouTube interrupting your viewing experience, or a TikTok ad ‘disguised’ as an authentic story
• Direct: These may include emails, messages from IM apps, or social media engagement
• Organic: Here, your consumers are the ones who initiative the interaction, be they searching on Google, perusing Facebook, or tapping through Instagram stories

#2 Permissioned

People will engage more readily with things they have asked for (permissioned) over things they have not. There are two levels here:

1. Implicit Permission: This happens when an individual contacts your brand first, eg visited your website, or abandoned a shopping cart. Whether wittingly or not, the consumer has given you permission to engage with him or her (eg via retargeting).
2. Explicit Permission: This is when a consumer takes a direct action like liking your page, filling up a form, or subscribing to your emails.

The more personal data you have from your prospective customer, the more contextual the experience you can offer. To get that data, however, you often need to exchange value (eg offer a free eBook or webinar in exchange for their emails and phone nos).

#3 Personal

This occurs along a scale, from mass all the way to human-to-human. The more personally you can deliver the experience via one-to-one marketing, the better although this may be harder to scale (at least without automation).

• Mass: This is the age of broadcast television, radio and newspaper, and may be less effective in the infinite era
• Segmented: Preferred over mass as you can address a more specific target audience and their needs. You could do this by targeting based on interests, geography, and demographics.
• One-to-One: Harder to scale, this requires you to precisely customize your brand experience, content, channel, timing and delivery. Could require technologies like Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and Bots.
• Human-to-human: These not only deliver an experience which is personalised, but do it personally. So it predicts what you’re looking for, and assigns a community manager to personally interact with you. With the right brand advocates in place, you can scale your human-to-human interactions.

#4 Authentic

In the infinite era, authentic brand experiences look at using voice, empathy and channel consistency to meet expectations.

• Voice: Focus on being human and conversational, while still keeping to the core voice of your brand
• Empathy: Nobody cares about your brand until they know how you care about them. Focus on making an effort to view and understand your prospect’s worldview.
• Channel Consistency: Obviously, a TikTok video and an Instagram Story will be quite different from a LinkedIn post, or an Instant Message from a person to a prospect. Ensure that you align your tone to the channel’s culture.

#5 Purposeful

From CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to Co-action (taking action together with customer), purposeful brand experiences helps your brand to create deeper, more contextual customer relationships.

• Corporate Social Responsibility: This is really just the base-level when it comes to being purposeful—at least it demonstrates that your brand has a conscience!
• Branded Actions: The goal is to share a core purpose that is related to your brand without just talking about the product. For instance, if your brand sells outdoor gear, you may want to contribute towards reforestation or marine protection as a cause.
• Coaction: This is the highest level, and may include working with your consumers to help take action on your behalf. A good example cited in the book was Sambazon (I love their Acai mixes!), which asked their consumers to dye their hair purple and share a photo of their purple locks on social media with the tag #purplefortheplanet. For every person who did that, Sambazon would buy five acres of rainforest.

Customer Journeys, Triggers, and Automation

Context marketing shifts away from campaigns towards customer journeys. It looks at orchestrating how your target audiences moves along each stage of the customer journey by asking them questions which ascertain what they are doing, thinking and feeling at each stage of their journey.

By understanding this, you can create targeted triggers for each customer journey stage:

• Awareness: Answer commonly asked questions related to your category (eg “digital marketing”), or use social listening on forums to determine suitable topics
• Consideration: Answer questions focused on your specific product, customer experience and brand. They may also include reviews and product and service trials.
• Purchase: Possible triggers include a very product specific questions (eg “Where can I hire a digital marketing agency for F&B? in Singapore?”), product delivery and warranty, or retargeting/remarketing ads.
• Advocacy: Here, you can trigger your brand advocates—be they customers or fans—by identifying people with a passion for your brand, and nudging them to share their experience.

Automation, Agile, and Attribution

The final part of your journey involves the 3 As: deploying marketing automation, using agile marketing techniques, and devising a way to attribute your marketing performance.

#1 Marketing Automation

With the right marketing technology stack (martech stack), you can share data across different stages of your customer’s journey, from ideations to awareness, consideration, purchase, customer experience and advocacy.

The book recommends at least five tools:

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Sales engagement and purchase history, as well as customer lifetime value
2. Website: Page views, no of visits, search terms, content engagement data
3. Product: Product usage data
4. Marketing Execution: Email opens, chatbot conversations, link clicks, video plays, content downloads
5. Customer Support: Types of issues, frequency, resolution etc

With the right marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, or Infusionsoft, you can automate your triggers before, during and after the purchase stage.

Here’s an example using Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud.

Source of image

#2 Agile Marketing

Agile marketing basically looks at using agile techniques to learn and iterate as many times as possible to improve a product.

This looks at using user stories and customer data to improve each process, while running multiple A/B tests to see which works better.

(See Lean Startup to learn more about agile processes.)

#3 Attribution

In context marketing, your goal is to appropriately attribute your results to the right actions taken along the customer journey. This goes beyond traditional methods such as first touch attribution, equal attribution, or last touch attribution.

The model proposed in the book is the weighted pipeline model to measure value. This looks at each member of your brand audience and the likelihood for each stage to convert into revenue, given your historical business data as well as real-time personal data gathered from your context marketing platforms.

There are four parts here:

• Volume: The number of people in a given stage of customer journey at any time.
• Velocity: This is the measure of how quickly leads move through the customer journey. So it determines the speed at which people move in a certain direction.
• Efficiency: This measures how efficiency they are in terms of the rates of conversion.
• Probability: This measures the likelihood that your prospective customer will turn into revenue.

Using these four variables, you can then calculate your weighted value for measuring your lifetime customer value (LCV). Here’s an example of how this looks taken from the book.

Courtesy of The Context Marketing Revolution

Beyond this, you can also measure your weighted pipeline for measuring your Lifetime Customer Value (LCV), depending on factors like the tenure (how long they stay) and the churn rate (how many of them leave).

Conclusion

If you haven’t already realised by now, you ought to know that context marketing is going to be challenging.

It will require a complete overhaul of most traditional marketing departments, and require a fair amount of data-savvy folks in your organisation. By scrutinising each stage and interaction with your customer, you can engineer the right experiences at the right moment on the right channel. However, this will require a fairly sophisticated system to implement. I guess this is where martech solutions like Salesforce and its ilk could come in.

What are your thoughts on this? I’d love to read them. Also, please get a copy of the book. Its definitely mind-blowing!