The Royal Shift: When Context Stole the Crown 👑
In the bustling landscape of digital marketing, the mantra "Content is King" has long been a guiding star. As marketers and growth enthusiasts, we've dedicated ourselves to producing compelling, engaging, and valuable content, hoping to captivate our audience's attention. But as we navigate through the ever-evolving digital realm, a new contender for the throne has emerged: Context. Let's dive deeper into this royal transition and its implications on growth and performance marketing.
Content: The Reigning King
Content, undisputedly, has been ruling the digital kingdom. The age of the Internet gifted marketers with myriad platforms to reach audiences far and wide, sparking a content revolution. Businesses, big and small, began producing a wealth of content, from blog posts and social media updates to videos, webinars, and more. The aim? To engage audiences, build brand loyalty, and ultimately, drive growth.
This content-centric approach did indeed yield results. High-quality, engaging content proved to be a potent tool in building brand presence, fostering customer relationships, and establishing industry authority. However, as more businesses adopted content marketing, the digital realm quickly became saturated. The result? Today's audiences are overwhelmed, making it increasingly challenging for content to stand out and make an impact, despite its royal status.
Context: The Emerging Queen
In this saturated kingdom, the need for context has never been more critical. Context is the environment in which your content lives. It's the 'when', 'where', 'why', and 'how' of your content. It considers factors such as the platforms used, timing, current socio-cultural climate, and the personal circumstances of the audience. In essence, context is what makes your content relevant, relatable, and resonant.
Imagine your content as a seed. Even with the best quality seed, if you plant it in the wrong type of soil, at the wrong time of year, it will struggle to grow. But, if you understand the context - the right soil, the right climate, and the right care - the seed will flourish. In this analogy, context ensures that your content - your 'seed' - not only reaches your audience but also resonates with them, leading to more meaningful engagement and better results.
Uniting the King and Queen in Growth and Performance Marketing
So, how do we, as growth and performance marketers, integrate this queen into our kingdom? How can we ensure that our king (Content) and queen (Context) work together to rule effectively? Here's a five-step strategy.
Know Your Subjects: The first rule of any kingdom is to understand its subjects. As growth marketers, we must know our audience inside out. This includes their preferences, behaviours, challenges, and motivations. Tools like customer persona profiling and customer journey mapping can be invaluable here. The more intimately we know our audience, the better we can tailor our content and its context to resonate with them.
Choose the Right Throne: Each platform has its unique culture and user behaviour. For instance, what works on LinkedIn may not work on Instagram. As performance marketers, we need to understand the context of each platform and tailor our content accordingly. This could mean adapting the content format, tone, or even the messaging to better fit the platform.
Stay on Top of the Royal Bulletin: Trends and current events can provide a rich context for your content. As growth marketers, staying abreast of relevant news and trends can help us create timely and relevant content. This not only shows that our brand is current and aware but also increases the likelihood of our content resonating with our audience.
Royal Decrees Need Personalisation: Personalisation is a powerful tool in the marketer's arsenal. Thanks to advancements in data analytics, we can now personalise content to a degree previously unthinkable. By leveraging data, we can ensure that the right content reaches the right person at the right time. For instance, using browser cookies and past purchase data, we can recommend products that a customer is likely to be interested in. This level of personalisation makes the content highly relevant to each individual user, thereby increasing its impact.
Trial by Combat: In the world of growth and performance marketing, continuous learning and adaptation are crucial. We must test our content in different contexts, learn from the outcomes, and refine our strategy accordingly. This could mean A/B testing different headlines, experimenting with posting times, or trying out different content formats. By embracing a test-and-learn approach, we can continuously improve our content and context strategy, driving better performance over time.
The Power Couple in Action
Let's consider an example to see this strategy in action. Suppose we're launching a content marketing campaign for a fitness app. The target audience is young professionals who are interested in staying fit but struggle to find the time for exercise.
Firstly, we need to understand our audience (Know Your Subjects). We find that they're most active on Instagram and LinkedIn and prefer short, snackable content.
Based on this, we decide to create a series of short workout videos (Choose the Right Throne). The videos feature quick, effective workouts that can be done at home - perfect for our time-strapped audience.
We decide to launch the campaign at the start of the new year (Stay on Top of the Royal Bulletin). This is when people are making their New Year's resolutions and are more likely to be interested in fitness content.
To add a personal touch, we send a personalised email to each user, recommending videos based on their past workout history (Royal Decrees Need Personalisation).
Finally, we continuously monitor the campaign's performance, testing different video formats, lengths, and posting times to see what works best (Trial by Combat).
Long Live the King and Queen
In the realm of digital marketing, content will always be king. After all, without content, there would be nothing to share, promote, or engage with. But as we move forward, it's essential to recognise the growing importance of context. In a world where content is abundant, context is what sets your content apart. It's what makes your content relevant, meaningful, and impactful.
As growth and performance marketers, it's our job to ensure that our king (Content) and queen (Context) rule harmoniously together. By integrating context into our content strategy, we can create campaigns that not only reach our audience but also resonate with them. And in doing so, we can drive engagement, foster loyalty, and ultimately, fuel growth.
So, let's welcome the queen, Context, to the throne. Together with her king, Content, they're set to rule the digital kingdom. Long live the king and queen!
