A solid contextual marketing strategy is a method by which companies can drive engagement. It relies on using a combined approach of content and advertising. In today’s ultra-competitive marketplace, there’s a compelling need for businesses to focus on audience expansion and engagement. (For those who don’t know, contextual marketing refers to personalizing message/audience/placement in order to be highly relevant.)
In the simplest terms, this means that companies should focus on giving their audience good information, while also promoting goods and services. By providing valuable content, the advertising and promotion works better.
Contextual marketing strategy is elegant in both strategy and implementation; it educates your clients, informs them, and perhaps even inspires them; while it provides a pathway for them to obtain desired results.
To my way of thinking, the more you can educate your clients, the better clients they will be.
Rather than focusing most on acquiring new clients; to be more profitable with less effort, we should focus on deepening engagement and loyalty with those clients we already have. Ideally, we’d do both, but when that’s not possible for any reason, it’s wise to invest some time and energy into increasing existing interaction.
To develop an effective contextual marketing strategy, you need three things:
A Well Defined Buyer Persona
Buyer personas are thorough replicas of your ideal customer. Developing your own buyer persona(s) in detail will provide insights into the needs and preferences of your customers.
A well-planned buyer persona will enable you to customize your messages, making them much more effective and while making your clients believe you are speaking to, and meeting their own unique set of needs.
Strategy for Different Types of Ads
Pay Per Click – These are ads that target people searching for relevant keywords. Your market research might have revealed particular language associated with a certain market segment. This means you can tailor your messaging to that segment. Relevant real-time events may provide an opportunity to provide context.
Retargeting – Display ads can re-engage people who have visited your site only to bounce. These ads will be displayed elsewhere, displayed only to people who have expressed an interest in your brand.
Social media – One of simplest current methods, as social networks do all the hard work behind the scenes.
A variety of targeting options are available including location, profession, age, gender, interests, or behavior.
Website – You can personalize your website for repeat visits based on an account system (think Amazon tailoring your recommended purchases) or using cookies (think millions of websites everywhere).
Email – Segment your email database to deliver different content to different groups. In B2B that could be by industry, job title, or the stage in the buyer journey.
Starting to introduce contextual advertising will allow you to deliver a much more effective message right away.
The bottom line in all this is, personalized context is only going to become increasingly important as technology and data systems get bigger and better.
This is the right time for you to jump on the contextual marketing bandwagon. In fact, the sooner the better!
What if you could generate an increase in email subscribers and client inquiries from some simple changes to your website? You could make more money from the website visitors you already have. This is the basis for conversion rate optimization– the idea that small changes can stack together and create better results from your existing online presence.
