It’s no surprise that B2B companies are generating more content than ever before, emboldened by all the recent statistics showing that content marketing really works. The latest stats, for example, suggest that content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing and generates 3 times as many leads. Wow. No wonder many CMOs are convinced that custom content is the future of marketing.
But there’s one other factor that matters, and that’s context. If content is king, then context is queen. If you back up for a second and consider what the goal of content marketing is – to push prospects and potential customers forward from one stage to the next – than it’s much easier to see why “context” matters. Context is what changes when you move from Stage A to Stage B and from Stage B to Stage C. If the context is changing, the content should be changing as well.
For a prospect at the earliest stages, someone who is just embarking on the customer journey, you are going to have to provide very different content than to someone at a much later stage of the customer journey. For example, photos on Instagram illustrating your company’s culture and mission may be better content during the “awareness” stage. But as a prospect begins to learn about your products and services, then the content has to change as well. Here, a “How To” video on YouTube or a brief recorded webinar in the form of a video might be more helpful in moving the customer along.
And there’s one factor that matters in context marketing – different customer personas. Let’s face it, not every customer is the same, and that means even if two customers are at the same point of the customer journey, they may not be open to the same type of content. For example, one customer persona might be the head of operations for a company, while another customer persona might be the director of business analytics. They are both going to be approaching business problems from different angles.
That’s why many companies are embracing content marketing tools such as Sprinklr, which are about context as much as they are about content. With Sprinklr, for example, you have a way for all the employees in the front office of an organization to engage with customers through one, unified platform. And that’s possible over more than 20 social channels, so it doesn’t matter where your customers are hanging out – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or Snapchat – you’ll always have a unified view of how you are interacting with them.
Thus, at the end of the day, content marketing does not just mean creating more and more content, at a breakneck pace. It means taking the context into consideration as well. In most cases, this “context” will include both the stage of the customer journey and the customer persona.
In many ways, content and context are the flip sides of the same coin. Keep them both in mind, and you will start to see some remarkable ROI on your content marketing initiatives.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.