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While most marketers understand the importance of content marketing, there’s one aspect of marketing that doesn’t get as much attention: context marketing.
You may not have heard the term before. But if you’ve ever wanted your campaigns to land with the right person at exactly the right moment, you already understand the instinct behind it.
Here’s an introduction to context marketing and a closer look at the strategies you can use to implement it into your overall marketing strategy.
Table of Contents
- What is context marketing?
- Content vs Context Marketing
- Why is context marketing important?
- How to Start Context Marketing
- Context Marketing Examples
- Frequently Asked Questions About Context Marketing
TL;DR: Context marketing is about delivering the right content to the right person at the right time.
Context marketing is the practice of delivering content, offers, emails, and ads based on a customer’s behavior, needs, and stage in the buyer’s journey. Unlike content marketing, which focuses on what you create, context marketing focuses on when, where, and to whom you deliver it so you can increase conversions, improve retention, and create more relevant customer experiences.
What is context marketing?
Context marketing is the process of delivering marketing content such as blog posts, offers, emails, and advertisements to customers at a specific point in their buyer’s journey. Timing and specificity is critical for context marketing to work.
My favorite context marketing definition is this: delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time.
Let me explain what I mean by context a little more, though. When you have context around something, you have a larger, more telling picture. You know, those little details that lend more clarity to things that would otherwise be pretty general, unspecific, and, well, uninteresting.
The best marketers leverage context about their audience, leads, and customers in their content marketing. They create audience profiles and buyer personas and use that information to create more effective marketing and advertising campaigns.
Now that you have a basic understanding of context marketing, you might be wondering what the difference is between content marketing and context marketing. Let’s take a look below.
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Content vs Context Marketing
Content is the material you deliver to your customers, such as:
- Blog posts
- Articles
- Offers
- Newsletters
- Emails
- Campaigns
- Advertisements
Context refers to the timing and circumstances surrounding how you deliver that content.
A marketer using context would know more about a lead than a first name. For example, they might know:
- The industry they work in
- The type of content they prefer
- The channel they use most often
- Whether they already use another solution
- Whether their company has budget at this time of year
As a marketer, if you were asked to “market” to someone, and all you were given was a first name and the type of company your lead works at, wouldn’t your first question be, ‘What else do we know about them?’
That’s the idea behind context marketing: using what you know about your contacts to provide supremely relevant, targeted, and personalized marketing.
Why is context marketing important?
Context marketing is important for many reasons, but there are two top ones that make its importance even more salient. Let’s go over them below.
Context marketing converts better
Marketing that meets people at their point of need simply performs better. You’re not pushing content that’s misaligned with where they are in the buyer’s journey, or what they actually care about right now.
Think about it: If you know that a B2B lead is getting a new budget in January and it’s December, you can send them precisely targeted content that addresses their needs. Like an offer for a custom demo of your product with a rep that specializes in the finance industry. That’s content they’re pretty likely to convert on, especially if they’ve downloaded a buying guide and visited your product pages.
Hot tip: 贬耻产厂辫辞迟’蝉 helps marketers track prospect activity and deliver more relevant campaigns. It shows which products a prospect views, how often they visit your site, and when they may be ready for a more personalized offer.
Context marketing increases retention
When you have context around your relationship with a contact, you can provide more personalized and relevant marketing content that’s targeted to their needs.
This is great for two reasons. Personalized and relevant marketing is the foundation for creating content people love and engage with. What’s more, personalized and relevant marketing is typically not the kind of marketing that annoys people into clicking “unsubscribe”. If they feel like you’re interested in solving their unique problems, customers are much more likely to stay with you.
Why not use the context around your relationships with your contacts to create marketing that they love and convert on? Let’s look at how you can get started.
How to Start Context Marketing
How does this “context marketing” theory manifest in practice? What would it look like for you, as a marketer? With the help of , here are some examples of where you’d actually use the principle of “context” in your marketing.
1. Create specific offers for specific posts and pages
One easy way you can start context marketing: create offers that extend the value of your website. Bonus points if these offers answer a specific pain point or problem that a customer is trying to solve for when visiting that page.
Most blog posts in 贬耻产厂辫辞迟’蝉 library feature an offer that’s directly related to the topic of the article. For instance, in our blog post about creating a marketing plan, you can download a marketing plan template — a resource that anyone wanting to create a marketing plan might need.
Come up with content offers that benefit your readers and website visitors depending on the page they’re visiting. For instance, if you sell hiking shoes and you’re writing a blog post about going on a solo hiking trip, you might feature a downloadable solo hiking checklist.
2. Add smart calls-to-action (CTAs) to your website
You can take personalized offers to the next level by featuring smart . Let’s say you have a variety of offers you want to use to convert traffic into leads, leads into qualified leads, and qualified leads into customers. To increase your lead conversion rates, you probably wouldn’t want leads visiting a case study webpage with a CTA that leads them to a blog post.
Think about the disconnect: they’ve visited the case study page, which signals they’re close to a decision, but the CTA points them to an introductory blog post. That’s the wrong offer at the wrong moment.
However, not everyone who visits a case study page on your website is necessarily ready to talk to a salesperson. You don’t want to turn them away, either, with a CTA that’s too pushy.
Fortunately, smart CTAs match offers to each visitor based on criteria such as:
- Lifecycle stage
- Industry
- Business type
- Location
- Past activity and behavior
This helps marketers present the next best conversion step instead of sending every visitor to the same offer.
For instance, if you’ve already downloaded an offer from 黑料吃瓜网 you might see a CTA like “Start the course” on certain social-media-related posts.
But if you haven’t downloaded an offer before, you’ll see a default ‘Download now’ CTA.
This type of smart content can help you capture your audience’s information at all stages of their buyer’s journey.
Hot tip: 贬耻产厂辫辞迟’蝉 marketing automation software lets you create dynamic, personalized CTAs with little technical knowledge.
3. Create smart forms that shorten the conversion cycle.
Smart forms know if someone has already filled out the form fields you’re asking for. If you use smart forms, for instance, your site visitors won’t see “First Name” and “Last Name” every time they fill out a form. Once they answer a list of questions, they won’t need to ever again.
黑料吃瓜网 smart forms collect new lead data with each conversion and use past interactions as context. That helps marketers shorten forms, learn more about each contact, and create a smoother conversion experience.
Here’s one example from 黑料吃瓜网 Academy. This is what I see when I’m logged into the 黑料吃瓜网 CRM:
The form knows I’m a current 黑料吃瓜网 customer and doesn’t require me to create a new account. All I need to do is click one button: “Start the Course.”
But this is what I see when I’m not logged in:
Ultimately, smart forms will help you gather even more context about your visitors, leads, and customers, and help increase conversion rates over time.
Hot tip: You can easily create smart forms inside 贬耻产厂辫辞迟’蝉 marketing automation software.
4. Leverage dynamic email content and workflows
Your forms and offers aren’t the only things that need to be smart. Your email database, especially if you want to maintain your space in people’s coveted inboxes, needs to be segmented into highly targeted lists, as well.
I happen to be subscribed to Grammarly emails on both my work and personal emails. Because I only use the Grammarly Chrome extension at work, I receive emails like this:
In my personal account, however, I use Grammarly’s web app regularly and review thousands of words for a personal project. Here’s the email I get:
Throughout the email, Grammarly prompts you to upgrade to the premium version and take advantage of its other tools. Because I don’t use the Chrome extension in my personal email account, it includes a call-to-action to install the extension. It’s delightful to receive an email that uses my account activity as context.
Beyond email segmentation, your email marketing campaigns should be able to pull in contact data such as:
- Lifecycle stage
- Past engagement
- Product usage
- Interests or preferences
- Other CRM details relevant to the message
That context helps each email feel more timely and personal.
黑料吃瓜网 uses contact data, behavior, and list segmentation to help marketers send the right email to the right person at the right time. That makes email campaigns more relevant and gives teams a scalable way to run context marketing.
Context Marketing Examples
While context marketing may sound complicated, it’s actually quite simple in practice. In fact, as a customer, you may have seen or enjoyed context marketing yourself. Let’s look at some examples.
1. Google’s Product Ads Carousel
Have you ever looked up a product on Google and seen a carousel at the top (as opposed to just the plain search results)? The products you see are typically ads for the exact same thing you searched for.
This is a prime contextual marketing example. Google uses your behavior and search query to deliver ads that are contextually relevant. Imagine if, when searching for instant coffee, Google delivers ads for french presses instead. While you might be interested in French presses and even searched for them before, you’re looking for instant coffee right now.
That’s why it’s important to answer your customer’s specific pain points and queries, and to do so at the right time. And you don’t have to be a highly sophisticated search engine to do so. Remember those offers we spoke about in the previous sections? That can function in the same way as Google’s product carousels.
2. Asana’s New Feature Pop-Up
There isn’t a more powerful place to carry out contextual marketing than right within your own product, website, or store. Asana’s example shows that you can upsell to customers easily by marketing a new feature and prompting them to try it for free.
This is an excellent example of contextual marketing, because you wouldn’t be interested in trying this new feature unless you were a current Asana user. For instance, if Asana had placed this pop-up on their homepage, they likely wouldn’t have much success with it. But because it pops up after you log in, you’re more likely to say, “Sure, I’ll try it.”
You can achieve something similar by instituting a website personalization campaign. When people visit your product page, for instance, they might see a popup to schedule a meeting with a salesperson. But when they’re on the blog, they might see a popup to subscribe. These simple changes can help you capture more leads and use the context from their activity to deliver an offer they won’t resist.
3. LinkedIn Company Page Sidebar Ad
When you visit a company page on LinkedIn, you see a little sidebar ad that prompts you to find roles at that company that match your skills.
LinkedIn does this because it knows you might be open to opportunities even if you don’t list it on your profile. And if you’re looking at a company page, you might be interested in working at that firm. LinkedIn uses this context to deliver a relevant ad that you can’t help but click on.
Another reason this is such a great example is that it also lists a job title that relates to yours. So if you’re a financial advisor and are looking at JP Morgan Chase’s company page, LinkedIn will automatically advertise financial advisor roles at the firm.
Frequently Asked Questions About Context Marketing
What are the 5 C’s of marketing context?
Context marketing often uses five core context signals: customer, content, channel, timing, and circumstance. Together, these help marketers deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
What is an example of contextual marketing?
A simple example of contextual marketing is showing a product ad based on a user’s search query, like Google displaying instant coffee ads after someone searches for instant coffee. It can also mean changing a CTA, form, or email based on a visitor’s behavior or stage in the buyer’s journey.
What is context in marketing?
In marketing, context is the information that explains a buyer’s situation, such as their behavior, location, device, timing, channel, and stage in the customer journey. That context helps marketers make messages more relevant instead of sending the same content to everyone.
How is context marketing different from content marketing?
Content marketing focuses on what you publish, such as blog posts, emails, and offers. Context marketing focuses on when, where, and to whom that content is delivered so it feels timely and relevant.
What data do you need to execute context marketing?
You need customer data that helps explain intent and timing, such as page views, past conversions, email engagement, lifecycle stage, location, device, and firmographic details. The more unified and accurate that data is, the easier it is to personalize campaigns effectively.
How does AI help with context marketing?
AI helps marketers analyze customer signals faster, segment audiences more accurately, and personalize content across channels at scale. That makes context marketing easier to execute without relying on manual rules for every campaign.
Context Marketing is the Next Evolution of Content Marketing
Without context, you risk reaching the wrong people at the wrong time. When you use context in all of your marketing and advertising campaigns, you’ll see an exponential increase in conversions, exceed your lead acquisition goals and increase revenue at your company.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
Content Marketing Planning Templates
Plan your content strategically with these handy templates.
- Editorial Calendar Template
- Buyer Persona Templates
- SWOT Analysis Templates
- SMART Goal Template
Download Free
All fields are required.
Form not available
You're all set!
Click this link to access this resource at any time.
