How Contextual Marketing Can Help You Better Reach Your Customer
By: Kimberly Grant
How well do you know your customers? Really?
As a marketer, it is paramount to know who is buying or potentially buying your products or services. Knowing your customers likes, interests, behaviors, and even family status are all a part of making sure you’re getting the right message to the right person. Personalizing your communication efforts has been a staple of marketing for years. In fact, personas are built to give marketers a holistic view of who their customers are.
There’s also such a thing as contextual marketing. Contextual marketing is a strategy in which customized communications are sent to consumers using different media, like displays ads, social media, email and web recommendations. These customized communications are based on user search and browsing.
How It’s Done
Many companies use contextual marketing for the following reasons:
Industry Context
An industry that has always done well in implementing contextual marketing is the entertainment industry. Whenever a big budget (or Blockbuster) film is about to be released, there’s product promotion everywhere. There are offline trailer ads on television, radio, movie theaters, and newspapers. There are online trailer ads on social media networks, YouTube, and even as a banner ad for online news and magazines.
Watching an action movie trailer while waiting to watch a newly released action movie is contextual marketing at its finest. Let’s get a better example.
For contextual marketing, streaming services like Amazon Prime Video do a great job of promoting their content. Amazon has always been in the business of contextual marketing since the time before the company had a streaming service. Amazon has always been a disruptor when it comes to innovation in advertising products and services their users will be interested in. In fact, Amazon was one of the first companies to start the “Customers who bought ______, also bought ______” type of marketing.
Prime Context
Here’s an example of how Amazon Prime Video puts their marketing efforts in context. Amazon Prime Video’s Reacher has been marketed for a while. The series’ TV, radio, and in-stream ad frequency has increased as its release date draws closer. The digital presence of Reacher’s trailer can be seen on Instagram, YouTube, Imdb.com, and even email reminders.
Here’s another way that contextual marketing comes into play. Existing Amazon Prime Video customers who like action TV and movies will see ads for Reacher on their Amazon Prime feed. Users who have an affinity for action films and TV based on their browsing history will see display ads for Reacher on certain websites that they visit. Likewise, Xfinity customers who have past watch histories for action TV and movies will be served ads for Reacher, as well.
The Science of Context
Contextual marketing is not an exact science. There’s no sure fire way to really know if someone who likes to watch TV shows in the Arrowverse would like to watch a television series about a larger than life former soldier whose been arrested for murder. However, that doesn’t stop Amazon from trying to win my viewership of the series.
At first glance, I would say I’m not interested in Amazon’s Reacher, because I prefer the Tom Cruise films. However, Amazon knows that I write and read action novels. After all, my novels are published on Amazon. So, Reacher, based on a popular novel series, would be right up my alley.
It goes the same way for contextual marketing. You want to get as close to customized as possible for your customers and potential customers. Putting things in context will allow you to know your customer and ensure they pay attention to your ads.
Interested in more digital marketing tips? You can read my post about pricing strategies here.
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