In recent decades, although inbound marketing has taught us to generate non-intrusive strategies and valuable brand experiences for consumers, contextual marketing aims to teach us to optimize the way, time and form in which we deliver that valuable content, to the right consumers, at the right time. Digital marketing branches out into multiple disciplines that differ from each other, according to their objectives and the methodologies they use for it.
Content marketing, for example, is concerned with knowing how to position certain content in search engines. In the case of contextual marketing, your concern is knowing the appropriate conditions for publishing content and which are the best platforms for it. In this sense, if we wanted to define contextual marketing we would have to affirm that it is a technique whose main objective is to show the right content, to the right people, at the right time.
The main reason why contextual marketing is used is that an advertising strategy that does not have a context loses its sense of communicating the correct messages to its consumers. A strategy without context is general, unspecific and uninteresting. The context, on the other hand, gives clarity to the messages that are given in both digital (online) and traditional (offline) media.
What is contextual marketing for?
Although its definition already gives us an idea of the main function of contextual marketing, it can be stated that it serves to:
1. Build your ideal buyer persona:
A buyer persona, also known as a buyer profile, is a symbolic representation of the characteristics that a potential client for your company should have or has. Therefore, knowing the context in which this potential buyer operates will allow you to obtain a greater amount of data to build that profile as accurate as possible.
Contextual marketing will allow you to know if your potential customers: belong to a B2B or B2C company, what industry they operate in, what type of content they consume and like, through what channel they prefer to consume content, at what time they connect most accuracy, etc.
In addition, contextual marketing will be important to put your inbound marketing methodology into practice, that is, spontaneously attracting the attention of your customers with strategic content that is intentionally directed towards them. According to a study by Forrester, the majority of consumers (74%) said they are comfortable with companies using data about them to provide personalized experiences.
2. Know the environment where your community operates:
The context has always been important to understand the message but, if we are also talking about getting in touch with our audience through mobile devices, which constitutes a true driver of contextual marketing along with location-based services, it is essential to understand well. the context in which the interaction is taking place.
In this sense, contextual marketing serves to understand how people operate in their cities and what dynamics they carry out to communicate and investigate.
3. Support you in the buyer’s journey:
Contextual marketing adds to that knowledge the opportunity to know where and when our user is in real-time (whether in the awareness, consideration or decision stage), and, therefore, offers us multiple opportunities to take advantage of their context to deliver a timely message. In other words, thanks to contextual marketing we will be able to know if our customers have a problem, what are the best ways to solve it and what services or products can satisfy their needs.
The importance of contextual marketing
It is well known that those important aspects of marketing, such as price, placement, promotion and product, need to be contextualized according to the needs, desires and particular circumstances of our clients. In this sense, contextual marketing becomes very important, since it helps us improve our customers’ experience, making us ask how their environment works.
Contextual marketing empowers our clients and consumers and places them in the driver’s seat of our marketing strategies, since it is they and their context who guide our marketing plans, especially within an inbound marketing methodology, where Each stage must be carried out in a particular context. Let us remember that this discipline was born to place the client at the center, taking into account all variables related to the situation or circumstances surrounding the consumer.
