There is no doubt that by this time, you’ve heard of content marketing and the important role it plays in lead generation. In fact, in 1996 Bill Gates originally predicted and coined the phrase “content is king.” And he was right. But now it’s the 21st century and we are seeing profligate proliferation (two great words I just had to use) of blogs, emails, web pages and social that is emphasizing content OVER context.
So what does this mean? First, let’s look at Merriam-Webster’s definition of context: “the parts of a [communication] that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning.”
The point is that to make a connection with your audience, you need to communicate with context – deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time, using the right medium. Context marketing paints a picture, it personalizes the experience, it delivers value, it makes you more relevant to your audience, and it removes obstacles in the buying process.
But don’t confuse personalization as the be all and end all way you add context. Saying “Hi {Sarah}, Did you know {ABC Company} could be a leading {manufacturer} if you only had…” is great and it is more likely to make a connection than saying “To whom it may concern, did you know your company could be a leader in its market if only you had…” Personalization is essential but only the beginning. To do context marketing effectively, you need to have a few things in place first…
Let’s say I am in the market for a time tracking system to use with my project management software, called PMRight. I go online and type in time tracking for PMRight. A number of results come up but one catches my eye because it says its integrated project management and time tracking. I didn’t even know that was an option so I click on it and it takes me to the PJTrack site and on the home page there is a Call-to-Action to download a white paper called “How Integrated Time and Project Management Tracking Saves You Money” – I click on this and download the white paper.
PJTrack should now know (and capture several things about me).
Now I immediately receive a personalized email {email personalization tokens} thanking me for requesting the white paper and providing me with a link to it (and hopefully before that, I had a thank you page come up doing the same thing).
A few days go by, I have read the white paper, and I am intrigued. I want to understand more about this feature or maybe I want to see how other people have benefited. I go back to the PJTrack site, and the home page has changed {smart content} – at least my experience with it has changed because the company knew I already downloaded the white paper and they don’t want to serve up the same offer to me again. They want to give me more information that brings me deeper in the funnel. So now on the home page, I see a different Call-to-Action for a customer story. I click on that CTA and now they ask me to fill out a form, but this time, it has different questions {progressive profiling} than the one I filled out for the white paper. Now I am being asked about my industry, the number of projects I typically manage, the number of employees in the company, and what project management tool I am using. Again I receive a thank you page and a personalized email with access to the case study.
A few more days go by and I receive an email that says…”Hi Susan, Did you know that PJTrack has been used by more than 1,000 marketing agencies and in the last year the integrated time and project management tracking has saved 200,000 man hours in tracking and reporting in the last year alone!?”
A week goes by and I receive another email that says…”Hi Susan, As a busy agency owner we know how daunting it can be to think about moving from a project management system like PMRight – you have dozens maybe hundreds of projects, emails, and files; your team is trained; your clients are engaged. We get that. That is why we have a tool designed to move the information for you…”
Tell me you see the pattern…drip emails personalized using what they know about me – my industry, the barriers to me potentially buying, my name, my title (and hopefully full persona), their competition, etc.
The key is to not only personalize the experience but to gather information and then use what you know to give context to the experience someone has with your company.
Susan LaPlante-Dube created PMG in 2002 and acts as one of PMG’s Principals. As a jack-of-all-trades in marketing, she loves digging deep on a topic and finding new ways to spin old ideas. While she would prefer having some high-tech voice software to record all of her blog thoughts instead of having to write them down, she loves the satisfaction of helping her readers learn something new.