In my last post, I blogged about Content - the First C of Content Marketing. Content is the obvious foundation of a well-executed content marketing strategy. I wrote about the importance of creating the right type of content to match your customers’ expectations at each stage of their buying journey. There’s another important dimension to content marketing I’d like to explore here – context.

As I’ve said before, if content is king, then context is its queen and together they rule the fiefdom of digital engagement. Context provides an understanding of the “what and when” of a content marketing strategy. Customers demand relevancy, and without context, your marketing team won’t be able to deliver it.

Context comes from each interaction we have with a customer. If we’re able to understand the context of an interaction, we can then start identifying the right content to match to their unique interests.

Let’s explore some points of context…

• Site behavior is an important indicator of context.  How a user navigates our site is provides us with great insight into their needs and wants.  We can often infer important data points like which of our products or services they are most interested in.  For example, let’s say the user comes to our site for the first time – navigates to a specific product category – and sorts by price, low to high.  We can make an educated guess about the type of product the visitor is interested in and their propensity for shopping by price.
• Environment provides useful insight like location.  We can trigger relevant offers using the location of our customer.  While it’s been a mild winter here in the Northeast, a savvy marketer trying to reach me would be wise to offer me a trip to the Islands right about now. 
• Traffic source offers a picture of how the user found our company.  Search keywords are often the first signal of customer intent. 
• The Social Graph potentially provides the most authentic insights into our users.  Facebook Likes are an explicit statement of interest, and should be used to ensure we’re targeting our users with relevant content offers.  For example, a marketer might detect that I’ve Liked a competitive product and then offer me a special incentive to switch. 
• Lastly, for existing customers we often have mountains of data available in our CRM and ERP systems.  Applying that data to our content marketing programs is an excellent way to ensure relevancy. 

These are just some of the ways that you can start understanding your customers with context.  Here's a video I recorded with the Pulse Network on the role of Context in Content Marketing.

Up next, the Third C of Content Marketing – Channels.