After I posted about “PR Math” several people asked how “personalization” and “distribution” fit into the equation. To me, these both fall under “context marketing.”

Context marketing is the complement of content marketing: it is distributing the right content, to the right people, at the right time, at the right place i.e. distributing in the right context.

1. The Right Content

Content marketing isn’t just pushing the same asset at all of your prospects.  You are marketing to people with a range of content needs, in a range of stages along the buyer’s journey, so you need a range of assets.

For people early in their purchasing process something lighter like a video or an infographic is great.  As people become more interested, meatier assets like whitepapers are more appropriate.

Your assets may also need to be customized for the different market segments you serve.  What one of our automotive customers needs to make a decision can be quite different from what a medical customer needs.

Make sure that you have well developed personas for your prospects.  Can you answer this question: “what do people need to consume in each stage of their journey to advance to the next stage?” If you know this, then you not only do you have a great content program, but you also have a solid foundation for a nurturing program.

2. The Right People

Have you ever looked at what people were searching for before they clicked on your AdWords or when they arrived on your website?  Are you spending money marketing to people who are not your targets?

I work for are a B2B company selling computer chips to engineers who make products for consumers.  That means we sell chips for things like “HDMI video.”  Unfortunately a lot of consumers search for things like “HDMI video cables” and click on my ads for “HDMI video chips” – wasting precious marketing dollars. So we have systematically built lists of negative keywords for our AdWords program to filter out people who are not looking for our product. This helps to ensure that we are marketing to the right people.

3. The Right Time

Be careful as you infer a prospect’s place along the buyer’s journey, and assign assets to serve them at each stage.  Serving the wrong content at the wrong time to the wrong people will ruin the efficacy of your digital marketing programs.  Experiment, run small-scale tests.  By definition, if you are expanding your programs you will get some things wrong, but what will drive your success is if you learn from your mistakes and use those learnings to do better next time!

If you have a lot of money, and headcount, you can buy a big AI based system to help match content with context.  For those of us with smaller organizations there are quick and cheap things you can do. For example, you can drop a full array of content, assets that you know people access in different parts of their buyer’s journey, onto your website.  Then people can self-select what they want, when they want it. The challenge here is to have the broad array of assets, but not so many that your web pages become cluttered and confusing.  That will create a poor customer experience and drop your yields. A solid taxonomy, organization, and visual structure will help the clutter problem.

4. The Right Place

Where people are is another aspect of context that marketers will sometimes overlook.  Here are two aspects of that to consider: 1) what “place” my prospects are in and 2) what “country” they are in.

We noticed that our yields on Google AdWords were low.  When we started digging in we realized that even through our site had less than 20% of its traffic from mobile, our AdWords traffic was a solid 50% mobile.  Our potential customers were most likely doing searches for our type of product on their cell phones while they commuted to and from work. “On the move” was their “place.” So we mobile optimized our site and saw yields rise.

Over half of our customers are from outside the US.  Speaking to Chinese and Japanese customers only in English is not the way to reach people.  So we have translated all of our web pages and emails into those two languages.  We are also localizing by using Weibo, WeChat, and YouKu, as their American counterparts are blocked in China, and, more importantly, people in China prefer their native platforms.  We are now starting to also generate content in China & Japan.  Native content in a native language is effective.

Summary

So how are you doing on the 4 “R’s” of content marketing?  Are you dropping the right content, to the right people, at the right time, in the right place? Does your marketing program have context right? What is the one change you are going to make?