What Is Contextual Marketing and Why Do You Need It?

What Is Contextual Marketing? 

Contextual marketing is a strategy to display advertisements to users based on their searched keywords or recent online activity. It is applicable on websites and other media, including mobile browser content. Several linguistic factors control the advertising media, such as what a user is currently looking at and recent browsing history. Contextual marketing employs automated programs to decide which ads will attract the target audience. 

One modern-day example of contextual marketing is Tesla Inc. Tesla had a conversation with consumers about fossil fuels and a life without them. That's how they studied the data and innovated electric cars that are now significantly sold more than Mercedes-Benz. 

Another example comes from a partnership between Waze and Taco Bell. The popular navigation app, Waze, approached the restaurant Taco Bell for ad pop-ups in the apps to alert the customers about weekly deals, specials, time, and location. 

Similarly, Cotopaxi contributed more than $900,000 in sales of a particular sweater by applying contextual marketing strategies. Outdoor apparel found a way to connect with the consumers and has used goal-oriented communication to show they care about them. 

Benefits of Contextual Marketing 

Looking for more clicks, leads, or sales? Contextual marketing reaps multiple benefits, such as-

• Targeted Traffic: Advanced behavioral targeting is used in contextual marketing to reach specific customers. By focusing your efforts on particular behaviors and demographics, you can catch your prospects just before they make a purchase. 
• Personalized Approach: The technique follows personalized customer interests as each consumer receives an appropriate and well-timed marketing message. It is much better than bombarding them with promotional messages. When they require it, the information reaches them without directly reaching out to them.
• Better Engagement: It creates interactions with customers by anticipating their wants and needs, allowing users to participate. Consequently, putting your products and brand before customers, you also engage them in a discussion about the brand.
• Boosts Profits and Sales: Conversion rates and sales figures increase as the ads get more precisely targeted, tailored, and timed to coincide with the moment your customer is about to make a purchase.

How to Create Contextually Relevant Content? 

The data must be timely, relevant, and authoritative to create informative contextual content. Whether it's an ad or a video, or even an interactive quiz, you must follow the same process to deliver the message out into the world. Here are a few steps that can help you create contextually relevant content.

Define Your audience

Defining your audience is a crucial part of beginning contextual marketing. Many brands analyze their audience incorrectly, which ends their contextual content doomed. Analyzing the audience, area-wise or state-wise, can help you reach a target audience who can purchase your product or submit a request to avail the same. You have to choose the segments carefully based on what you're trying to achieve or which audience you're targeting. 

Decide the Channel

Contextual marketing campaigns begin when you digitize your content. Using social media, such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and others, has proven effective in reaching the goals set by various brands when it comes to contextual marketing. Your message should be clear, unique, and easy to understand so that the buyer reaches out to your product without any hesitation. 

Select the Right Format

Selecting the right format, like quiz, video, ad, post, or any other form, will help you interact with the audience at the right time and in the right way. Decide whether you want to reach a smaller audience or a wider one. If wider, then how much wider. Answering these questions can set a great platform for your digital marketing. 

Create the Content - Keep the Constraints at Bay

You have to ensure you create content covering a larger audience worldwide. For instance, your content is made for people living in Scandinavian countries. Will that work for African people? 

Keeping constraints at bay will lend your support to creating an extended vision for your brand. Structure the contextual content, even the word choice matters, set a different tone, and adopt the key factor - marketing.

Track Results

Your work is not done unless you track the results. Working on constant feedback will help your brand grow in emerging markets. As soon as you publish your content, check how widely it reached, did it satisfy your set goals, and how well the launch went. If changes are required - minor or major, work on them effectively. 

The Importance of Buyer Persona Segmentation

Buyer persona segmentation allows you to segment your target audience into various groups. The audience is bifurcated into segments based on several factors, such as age, job details, attitude, background, buying process, and pain points. You can conduct surveys, online polls, or even collect data from previous sales to identify your brand's buyer persona. 

Visualize your buyer persona to remind you which regions of your contextual marketing are impacted and what content you need to deliver. 

There is no set target for having buyer personas. As long as you can create an effective marketing strategy working for your brand, the number of buyer personas does not matter. Buyer personas are important in decision-making and selecting the right criteria to make your work reach new heights. 

Contextual vs. Behavioral Advertising 

The key difference between contextual and behavioral advertising is how you can target the audience and reach out to them. Behavioral marketing collects user data from past online actions across the web. In that, marketers target a campaign based on consumers' online behavior. 

However, this is not the case in contextual advertising. Contextual ads reach the regularly active audience by using the context of a publisher, such as newsletters, apps, websites, etc. Contextual advertising is like a hit-and-trial method. You are targeting an audience based on research and surveys. If it's a success, then you can enhance the methodology. If it fails, you have to plan accordingly to create an effective strategy. 

Many marketers believe behavioral advertising is better than contextual advertising. According to a series of studies published by Marketing Science, it has been found that behavioral advertising performed marginally better than random guessing. Only 41% of impressions missed the demographic attributes, like age and gender. 

FAQs

1. Is contextual marketing effective in captivating the audiences? 

According to research, it has been found that 69% of consumers engage more with contextually relevant content, particularly ads. According to Kenneth Research, ads in the contextual marketing world are expected to reach $420 billion+ by 2025. Hence, contextual content has proven effective in capturing the audience's attention and is way better than traditional marketing strategies. 

2. Is contextual marketing rising issues in data privacy? 

The tech space is relatively low when it comes to rules and regulations. Consumer privacy laws, such as CCPA and GDPR, have emerged to handle big consumer data. However, they are not perfect. Companies have to think twice before handling their consumer data. Cookies and third-party apps tend to collect consumer data, thus helping marketers reach out to them in a much better way. Many consumers are taking measures, like using incognito mode in Chrome, to save their data and remove digital footprints. 

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