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Exclusive Forrester Report on AI in Marketing
The success of contextual marketing can be encapsulated to one main idea: the capability to identify and give customers exactly what they want. In an environment in which ads are a noisy nuisance, transitioning into a “best-friend brand” is the only way to break through the marketing clutter and grab a piece of customers’ wallet share. A surge in technologies for real-time hyper-targeting, catering to micro-segments of customers, embodied the vision of contextual marketing. On a practical level, the marketer’s job is to back the customer’s context to deliver cycles of real-time, insight-driven interactions. This will drive deeper engagement and will help the brand to learn more about the customer. But to do so successfully, brands must gather a diverse and holistic set of customer data: behavior, demographics, preferences, content, devices, time, location and more. Enriching this view with predictive analytics, activity tracking and real-time capabilities results in a richer 360° customer view.
Contextualized marketing enables customer-centric brands to perfectly iterate the customer brand experience by optimizing factors that unconsciously play a role in a customer’s purchase decisions. That said, brands encounter significant barriers on their way to customer centricity, such as gaps in customer data accessibility and the ability to take insight-based actions. A 2018 study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by SAS researched the importance of real-time capabilities. 560 business leaders ranked the most important factors for establishing real-time customer interactions, versus their success in achieving them. Let’s look at some of the factors and figures:
These figures explain the inherent gap between the brand-customer experience. To bridge the gap, and to create a direct path to their customers, brands need to harness customer context and create a contextualized marketing strategy. To execute the strategy, they must have a system of insight and engagement, the people to operate it, and the supportive processes in place.
The power of context lies in the ability to transform marketing campaigns from static to interactive, minimize broad targeting in favor of personalized engagements, and exceed customers’ expectations in terms of efficacy and value overspend. HBR mapped three capabilities needed to dominate contextualized real-time marketing:
As brands move beyond traditional campaign execution, they must integrate technologies that help them understand the customer’s contextual requirements, orchestrate the message delivery, and test, measure and optimize.
To capture the most accurate customer context, brands should constantly enrich their 360° customer view and strengthen areas in the customer journey that lack information. Brands can achieve this transparency by adding new real-time interaction points. Tracking real-time activity is a supplementary data layer that takes contextual marketing to the next level. By recording on-site and in-app activity of individual users in realtime and turning the raw activity inputs into actionable insights, brands get a higher-resolution customer segmentation used to deliver a more engaging customer experience. A true ace in customer context is Amazon. When a user adds a kitchen appliance to her cart, she gets different types of recommendations: complementary goods –for other products from the same category and highly rated alternatives. When the user visits the books category, Amazon highlights the Cookbook, Food & Wine category – an interaction that matches the user’s in-the-moment context. In-the-moment interactions must consider the user demographics, behavioral and transactional activity where potential customers are in their buyer journey, their preferences, search query history, browsing behavior, etc. Data collected at each interaction point will ideally loop back to the operating system – analyzing results and generating new insights, testing, and tweaking – a loop in which underperforming marketing actions and tactics are optimized and/or replaced quickly to maximize performance.
The art of conversation is still possible in the age of digital disruption. Today’s customers are savvier and are better than ever at filtering their marketing messages, but they’ll be happier to share their preferences with brands, if in return, they’ll receive a relevant customer experience that suits their current context. Brands that create a contextualized experience using real-time tracked data and engagement will be rewarded with continuous cycles of effective customer interactions with increased revenue, retention, enhanced customer experience, and business growth.
We conferred all that was discussed here and much more on our recent webinar. Listen here: Driving Engagement with Contextual Marketing
Exclusive Forrester Report on AI in Marketing
In this proprietary Forrester report, learn how global marketers use AI and Positionless Marketing to streamline workflows and increase relevance.
Writers in the Optimove Team include marketing, R&D, product, data science, customer success, and technology experts who were instrumental in the creation of Positionless Marketing, a movement enabling marketers to do anything, and be everything.
Optimove’s leaders’ diverse expertise and real-world experience provide expert commentary and insight into proven and leading-edge marketing practices and trends.
