5 Steps for Implementing a Contextual Content Marketing Strategy

Have you ever found yourself scrolling
through your inbox loaded with marketing emails?
I think we all have. Irrelevant product
offers, flash sales newsletters and endlessly boring feedback forms.
And it's not just email marketing.
People are now exposed to over 5000
marketing messages per day and nine hundred percent increase from the 1970s.
More and more businesses are producing digital marketing content through social
media, online blogs, podcasts and videos, making it extremely difficult for brands
to cut through the clutter and have their voices heard. Not to mention our time
poor lifestyles, and ever-shrinking attention spans
which don't help the cause for content marketers.
So with all of these factors against us, how are content creators supposed to make
their marketing messages stand out from the crowd?
To answer this question, it's important to consider what consumers
crave regarding the content that they consume; that is content directed towards
them and highly relevant and helpful to their personal situation.
Because of these preferences,
prospects tend to favour brands who communicate based on a personalised
matter and provide the most valuable content that meets their individual needs.
And that's where contextual content marketing comes into play.
Hey, guys, it's Jack here
from Neighbourhood, where we help brands find cell and keep their people.
So what is contextual content marketing?
Essentially, contextual content marketing is all about delivering the optimal
content to the right customer at the right moment.
It's all about relevance and personalisation.
For example, a clothing company having
an end of season sale may choose to advertise different discounted items
to different groups of contacts in an email campaign based on their
demographic characteristics and past purchase behaviour.
A strategy like this would be much more effective than simply sending every
contact the same catalogue of discounted items.
It's a no brainer.
Executing contextual marketing successfully relies upon five key aspects:
customer data, target audience segmentation, timing,
tone of voice and the optimal delivery channels.
Now let's look at the steps to forming
a contextual marketing campaign from start to finish.
Firstly, establish customer data collection.
While executing contextual marketing
doesn't require an enormous investment, it is essential to have the right data
to develop the context for your communications.
To do this, you must set up customer data collection through a customer relationship
management or CRM tool, of which there are stacks of options even
for those who are a little tight with their money.
CRM software is basically a tool that allows businesses to better store,
organise and access, often large amounts of customer data.
And given we've established that customer
data is the backbone to any successful contextual marketing strategy.
You can see why they're pretty handy to have.
Next up, buyer personas and buyer's journey segmentation.
Once customer data has been aggregated
buyer personas, a fictional representation of business's ideal customer can be created.
Doing this will allow you to classify your
contacts and determine the type of content and the delivery platform,
which would best allow you to reach them and achieve the highest conversion rate.
Segmenting via buyer's journey stage's is also super important.
For instance, an informational blog post
probably wouldn't suit the context of someone in the decision
stage of the buyer's journey, who's ready to make that purchase.
Similarly, a product demonstration wouldn't be overly appealing to those
in the awareness stage who need to first be informed of who your business is
and what solution you provide to address their challenges.
Third, timing.
So you've just woken up at your usual time before work on a Friday morning.
You pick up your phone, jump onto your favourite social platform
and come across an advertisement for Domino's.
Undoubtedly you scroll straight past, barely noticing the ad because the last
thing on your mind at 6:30 in the morning is pizza.
But what if you saw that advertisement that same evening on the train home after
a long day at work, you're hungry, you're tired, you can't be bothered to cook.
So you give in, click on the advertisement
and order pizza to be delivered when you arrive home.
Now, that's delivering content
to the right person at the right time. Utilising timing in a similar fashion,
the crew here at Neighbourhood implemented
a Facebook ad strategy around the New Year for one of our clients Enable College.
The timing for the campaign,
entitled Start the New Year with a New Career,
was pivotal to its success as it aligned people with the changes people were
looking to make in their lives come January 1st.
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Next, tone of voice.
To create contextually relevant content,
you must speak to your buyer personas in a way that will resonate with them.
Ask yourself, who am I talking to?
If you're reaching business people via LinkedIn in a professional context,
you might consider communicating in a more formal tone.
Alternatively, if you're an owner of a quirky café,
you'd be better suited to humanising your brand by using colloquialisms and letting
your unique brand personality shine through your content.
Now let's talk delivery channel.
And now for the final step of implementing a top notch contextual marketing strategy,
choosing the right digital channels to deliver your content.
Looking at your buyer personas,
you must determine the channels the target audience are most engaged with.
It's also important to remember that not everyone consumes content in the same way,
so you can repurpose material into different content formats.
Applying this concept to create unique
pieces of content, you might write a blog post on your website,
summarise the blog in an info graphic to be posted on Instagram and use the blog
as your basis for a video on your YouTube channel.
So that's contextual content marketing in a nutshell.
By following these five steps to create
personalised contextual content without going overboard and making your target
audience feel like you're stalking them, you'll be well on your way to cutting
through the clutter to increase your return on investment and grow conversions.
If you found this video helpful, then feel free to share it with someone
you know that needs a hand with contextual content marketing.
You can also subscribe to our blog where
you'll find a bunch more tools, tips and templates to Help you Find Sell &
Keep your people, just like Neighbourhood does.
So that's it for me. Happy marketing.