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Putting contextual marketing into context

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In simple terms, contextual marketing is about listening to, and acting on customers’ buying signals.Market traders know many of their customers well, what they like, and what they are looking for at any moment in time.But for enterprises this level of intimate knowledge, and the ability to leverage it, is much more challenging, especially when customers are shopping across multiple channels.Contextual marketing aggregates real time signals of intent (for example what customers are looking at or researching) and uses this data to personalize marketing, either through 1-to-1 messaging, or through highly personalized bulk marketing.Why is contextual marketing important in today’s world?Imagine a consumer walks into an electronics store with the intention to purchase a television. The consumer walks around the television section and identifies a particular brand of television that he had researched ahead of time—before coming into the store.At that moment, if a store employee were aware that the consumer came prepared with research and intended to make a purchase, they might propose a rebate or exchange deal to increase the chances of sealing the deal and selling the television.That is what good contextual marketing is about. It means understanding where each customer is in their buying process in real time.What does this mean for customers?A consumer’s brain is programmed to cut out any marketing “noise” that is irrelevant. If the consumer is bombarded with mostly irrelevant messages by a company every day, the brain is going to start ignoring the messages, which makes it more difficult for the company to reach the consumers even when it has relevant messages to address. This can result in the consumer going to the competition.In fact, 92% of the respondents to a survey from The Straits Times in Singapore said they would go to a competitor if bad service was repeated.Contextual marketing revolutionises marketing from bulk "push" messaging to personal communications that are directly relevant to individual communications.When done well, it looks much more like great service, and is often not perceived as marketing at all.Fixing marketing starts with fixing the data issue.According to a Forbes Insights report, companies use an average of 36 different systems to capture customer data. This gives marketers a massive headache when it comes to profiling customers, and consequently it’s nearly impossible to get a current contextual view for any particular customer.The start of every contextual marketing initiative is to solve the data issue: after all, you can’t personalise if you don’t know the person.By pulling together data scattered across separate silos, say in service department, sales department, or marketing department, we can start connecting pieces of relevant information to make marketing more targeted and relevant. This needs to combine explicit data, such as recent purchases or transactions (or purchase preferences captured through previous transactions) with implicit information such as potential purchase intents inferred from real time website browsing activity.Ian Kinsella is COO of APJ and China at SAP hybris CEC

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