You’ve been researching digital marketing to boost your success online. Then, you must’ve come across the terms content and context marketing. While content is the king in today’s digital marketing scheme, context is what makes your content a great marketing tool.
This article covers context marketing and why every business must integrate context into their written work. Before getting into the main list, let’s see what context and content mean first.
Content vs Context: What’s the Difference?
Content refers to the material you share with your readers. They can be articles, blog posts, newsletters, white papers, case studies, advertisements, pictures, and videos. In content marketing, marketers use the term content to refer to any written work.
Context is what gives your content meaning. It’s the attribute that shapes your content, as it provides a setting for the content idea so that it won’t be misunderstood.
Therefore, the main difference between content and context is that the former focuses on a topic while the latter conveys the circumstances in which the subject takes place.
What Is Context Marketing?
Context marketing speaks for when you integrate context into your content. It’s about delivering useful content to the right people, in the right situation, and at the right time.
Here’s how context marketing can make your business successful:
- Get better lead generation. Providing context within your content helps your potential customers understand how your products or services can solve their problems. Thus, context can lead to your business getting more qualified leads.
- Increase visitors’ engagement. Producing content that answers your visitors’ pain points will reduce bounce rate and improve engagement. When you have context around your content, it ensures the alignment between your content and the visitors’ queries.
- Boost consumer retention. After turning leads into consumers, it’s time to convince them to become repeating ones. Providing contextualized content helps you maintain a positive customer experience.
- Provide more seamless omnichannel. Context ensures your omnichannel marketing is integrated. This is because all platforms you use to support your campaign, whether they’re social media or apps, will be in a big contextualized setting.
How to Integrate Context Into Your Content Marketing Strategy
At this point, you’ve known that content and context are two different things. You’ve also learned that both of them make a good power combo in boosting your brand awareness online.
Content is a vital element in any form of digital marketing. For optimal results, it should convey a clear context. Therefore, marketers need to integrate context into their content.
Below are three tips for integrating context into your content marketing strategy.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
In marketing, nothing is more vital than obtaining your audiences’ attention. Thus, getting to know them is the key to successful contextualized content marketing.
To do this, you can conduct keyword research with tools like Google Trends and SEMrush. Knowing your target audience’s search queries helps you identify their pain points.
Visiting forums like Reddit and Quora may also give you insights into their preferences and interests.
2. Create Valuable Content
Before writing your articles, think about how they will help your readers. The content should serve as a source of information for your readers. That way, it’ll be easier to help them as a business and display your strong brand positioning in the industry.
To make sure you create valuable articles for your readers, here are some tips to follow:
- Have a clear customer persona. Listing your target audience’s key traits will let you provide relevant information in the right tone and style.
- Cover your potential prospects’ needs and pressure points. This is about the importance of getting to know your audience. Your content won’t satisfy your readers if it doesn’t answer their questions regarding the topic.
- Keep the information up-to-date. Ensure to include the latest stats and trends to keep your content fresh. Additionally, avoid referring to old articles as your source of information.
- Convince the readers to take action. Besides providing insightful information, your content should reflect your brand’s purpose. Thus, encourage your readers to turn into leads by adding calls-to-action to your writing.
3. Personalize and Optimize
Personalized content is one of the critical factors in determining your marketing campaign’s success. When you provide personalized content, you deliver the right material, to the right people, under the right situation, and at the right time.
What’s more, it can be a good reminder. Here’s an example — suppose a group of users abandon your website without buying the items in their cart. In this case, you can send an automated email reminding them that they haven’t purchased the said products.
Here are some other personalization ideas:
- Retargeting ads. After a user sees a specific product on your site, you can display the product ad on other websites or apps.
- Store notifications. Take advantage of geotargeting to push notifications whenever someone is close to a retail store or an online shop the user visited earlier.
- Cross-sell notices. Recommend complementary products to your customer as they proceed to checkout.
Conclusion
Throughout this post, you’ve learned about the difference between context vs content. While we can agree that content is king, context holds a key role in giving your content direction.
When combined, context and content can make up for a great marketing strategy. Thus, understanding the importance of integrating context into your content isn’t something you can cross off your to-do list.