What is contextual marketing?
Simply put, contextual marketing is a marketing technique that uses information about the target customer to craft personalised marketing messages and experiences aimed at them.
If you wish to find out more about this concept, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: How does contextual marketing work?
As we have seen earlier, contextual marketing works by using all the available information about the target customer to craft tailored marketing messages and experiences aimed at them.
Examples of the types of information you can use to do contextual marketing include:
- Search keywords the target customer use
- Websites the target customer visits
- Purchases the target customer makes
- Places the target customer visits
- Videos the target customer watches
- Songs the target customer listens to
- Text content the target customer consumes
The more you know about your target customer, the more personalised the marketing campaigns you can create and the more effective they become.
Question #2: What are the benefits of contextual marketing?
The main benefit of contextual marketing is that it allows you to present the right offer to the right people at the right time, significantly increasing your odds of closing the sale (or just getting the prospect to take whatever action you need them to take).
If, for example, you run a camera store, instead of just showing your ads to as many people as possible and hoping for the best, with contextual marketing, you can target prospects who satisfy the following criteria:
- Have watched camera review videos on YouTube
- Have searched for camera related content on Google
- Has spent on camera-related accessories in the past month
By targeting only people who are already interested in what you are selling, you significantly increase your odds of making a sale—and you can apply the exact same principle to virtually any business you could think of.
Question #3: What are the downsides to contextual marketing?
The main downside to contextual marketing is that it can make some prospects feel creeped out, especially those who are particularly concerned with their privacy. But unless you make your marketing messages too specific, most people should not have a problem with being presented with personalised ads.
Besides, people who are very particular when it comes to their privacy would most likely not see personalised ads anyway because there is a big chance they have already opted out of ad personalisation on the online platforms they use.
Question #4: How do I collect the information necessary for contextual marketing?
The short answer is you do not have to collect the information necessary for contextual marketing. The platform you would use to run your digital ads would most likely already have all the information you need to target the exact people you want to reach.
This, however, does not mean you cannot do any information collection yourself. In fact, most businesses with an online presence have mechanisms in place that do exactly that.
Examples of such mechanisms would be:
- Free webinars
- Free reports
- Free downloads
- Free trials
- Promos
- Contests
All these are designed to encourage prospects to give up their information in exchange for something valuable to them.
In addition to this, however, you can also configure your website to automatically take note of everyone who visits it and then run retargeting campaigns aimed at them. After all, the fact that these people visited your website means that there is a big chance that they are at least curious about what you have to sell.
Question #5: How can I do contextual marketing?
The easiest way to do contextual marketing is to use a platform with powerful targeting features. Examples of this would be Google Ads and Facebook for Business. All you have to do is create the personalised ad you want to run, use the targeting features of your chosen ad platform, and you are good to go.