Context marketing just won’t work for your business/brand unless you utilise systems and data to automatically tailor each step of each customer’s experience; from the very beginning right through to the purchase process. This requires a 360 degree view of your customers and, more often than not, will involve people from all parts of your business.
The first step in making context marketing work for you is to define the customer journey. A customer journey is the story of your customer’s experience with your brand from:
- Initial contact
- Engagement at different touchpoints
- Purchase
- And a loyal, long‐term relationship
Understanding your customer’s journey is an important part of context marketing; the data collected comes from the different interactions your customers have with your business while they are travelling along on their journey. Once you understand the journey they take, your team can shape, guide and personalisation each customer’s journey and provide the right content, to the right people, at the right time. So, marketing in context; context marketing.
Your customer’s journey will consists of many touchpoints and you must learn to recognise these touchpoints and react appropriately. Many brands create what are called customer journey maps as these will help to tell the story of a customer’s unique experience. These maps are really just a general guide because, chances are, you are marketing using different channels; so each customer’s journey is different and don’t forget; every customer is unique. This means that each customer is likely to explore information in different ways, in different places and at different times. The best option it to create a few different maps to start with and then tweak them as you collect more specific interaction information about your customers.
A customer journey map is an important tool for your team since it provides you with a comprehensive picture of the customer experience which, in turn, leads to a more complete view of the different ways customers interact with your business.
Context marketing isn’t just about having complete access to data. The important point is having systematic access to that data in real time. If a customer is presented with informative content about a product once they have already past the research stage and made a purchasing decision, you aren’t doing context marketing. If your business’ content isn’t in the right place at the right time with the right content, the customer may decide your brand isn’t the right fit after all.
Learn more about context marketing here or contact the team at Website Design Centre today.
