While Inbound marketing) is now being discussed and promoted, possibly are more important topic - especially for e-commerce businesses - is context marketing.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is providing customers and prospects with relevant content. Lots of content is aimed at answering questions that consumers might ask as part of a Google search. It aims to capture market share and to reduce the dependency on pay per click to drive visitors to your website. Many, many companies now operate blogs and curate other material on their sites to keep customer visits up.
What is context marketing?
Context marketing is content marketing taken to the next level.
It is using the tools that a good Marketing Automation Software - such as HubSpot - gives you and uses it to better target your customers and prospects. This isn't about accuracy - it is about timing.
Its giving right prospects the right content at the right moment.
And while that sounds very simple, it is actually very complicated to do well. It is about asking questions of your prospects and customers so you know when the right time to present the next stage is. It is ... all about the context.
Why is context marketing so important to e-commerce?
There are a number of advantages but the most important two are:
- More personalised and relevant material: you will be able to match your information and offers better to the customer's buying cycle. By providing material which resonates better, you will get higher click through rates and more social shares. You are more effective at communicating.
- Increase sales: by presenting more effective material at times when customers are more ready to read and take action, you will increase your conversion rate. And in e-commerce, it is all about increasing the volume and value of each sale
Is there anything I should be doing about this?
As a professional content marketing agency, we work hard to get this right but this is a challenge for even the best. It requires lots of data and also dedication to build the right work flows to ensure this process is automated. Inbound marketing tools (such as HubSpot) will make this possible and much easier to achieve.
You do need to have a good volume of visitors to your site to make this work and a good way of doing this is via effective blogging. The visitors and their behaviour will then give you the information on which to model how your work flow will operate.
Anything else
Dynamic Calls To Action are very useful here. Your software will be able to correlate and remember what CTAs a particular contact has been presented previously. It will also be able to place where in the buying cycle that contact is and will have potential CTAs for offer to them at each particular point.
Dynamic Forms are helpful too
Again, this is using the functionality to your advantage. Dynamic forms allow you to collect more information from a contact in a drip-feed manner. It will remember what you're previously collected and will present more form fields for completion when the previous ones are completed. That means you don't over-ask too early in the relationship and put a prospect off by requiring too much too soon.
Good content marketing agencies will be able to do this for you if you don't want to do this for yourself.
If you liked this blog then you probably would like this previous blog too: Five real values of Conent Marketing
