After I posted about \u201cPR Math\u201d several people asked how \u201cpersonalization\u201d and \u201cdistribution\u201d fit into the equation.\u00a0To me, these both fall under \u201ccontext marketing.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
1. The Right Content<\/strong><\/p>\n Content marketing isn\u2019t just pushing the same asset at all of your prospects.\u00a0 You are marketing to people with a range of content needs, in a range of stages along the buyer\u2019s journey, so you need a range of assets.<\/p>\n For people early in their purchasing process something lighter like a video or an infographic is great.\u00a0 As people become more interested, meatier assets like whitepapers are more appropriate.<\/p>\n Your assets may also need to be customized for the different market segments you serve.\u00a0 What one of our automotive customers needs to make a decision can be quite different from what a medical customer needs.<\/p>\n Make sure that you have well developed personas for your prospects.\u00a0 Can you answer this question: \u201cwhat do people need to consume in each stage of their journey to advance to the next stage?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 2. The Right People<\/strong><\/p>\n Have you ever looked at what people were searching for before they clicked on your AdWords or when they arrived on your website?\u00a0 Are you spending money marketing to people who are not your targets?<\/p>\n I work for are a B2B company selling computer chips to engineers who make products for consumers.\u00a0 That means we sell chips for things like \u201cHDMI video.\u201d\u00a0 Unfortunately a lot of consumers search for things like \u201cHDMI video cables\u201d and click on my ads for \u201cHDMI video chips\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 3. The Right Time<\/strong><\/p>\n Be careful as you infer a prospect\u2019s place along the buyer\u2019s journey, and assign assets to serve them at each stage.\u00a0 Serving the wrong content at the wrong time to the wrong people will ruin the efficacy of your digital marketing programs.\u00a0 Experiment, run small-scale tests.\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n If you have a lot of money, and headcount, you can buy a big AI based system to help match content with context.\u00a0 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\u2019s journey, onto your website.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That will create a poor customer experience and drop your yields. A solid taxonomy, organization, and visual structure will help the clutter problem.<\/p>\n 4. The Right Place<\/strong><\/p>\n Where people are is another aspect of context that marketers will sometimes overlook.\u00a0 Here are two aspects of that to consider: 1) what \u201cplace\u201d my prospects are in and 2) what \u201ccountry\u201d they are in.<\/p>\n We noticed that our yields on Google AdWords were low.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Our potential customers were most likely doing searches for our type of product on their cell phones while they commuted to and from work. \u201cOn the move\u201d was their \u201cplace.\u201d So we mobile optimized our site and saw yields rise.<\/p>\n Over half of our customers are from outside the US.\u00a0 Speaking to Chinese and Japanese customers only in English is not the way to reach people.\u00a0 So we have translated all of our web pages and emails into those two languages.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We are now starting to also generate content in China & Japan.\u00a0 Native content in a native language is effective.<\/p>\n Summary<\/strong><\/p>\n So how are you doing on the 4 \u201cR\u2019s\u201d of content marketing?\u00a0 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?\u00a0What is the one change you are going to make?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After I posted about \u201cPR Math\u201d several people asked how \u201cpersonalization\u201d and \u201cdistribution\u201d fit into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[19,20,21,18],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marketing","tag-content-marketing","tag-context-marketing","tag-digital-marketing","tag-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhunterdigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhunterdigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhunterdigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhunterdigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhunterdigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dhunterdigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284,"href":"https:\/\/dhunterdigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions\/284"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhunterdigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhunterdigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhunterdigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhunterdigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}