Reader Forum: The new era of contextual marketing

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If you ask a marketer to define “contextual marketing,” they’ll most likely say it’s an online marketing model where people are served with targeted advertising based on search terms or recent browsing behavior. You’re in the market for a new car; you go online to do a few searches and read reviews on fuel-efficient models. Next, you go onto a news site and the pages are wrapped with ads for hybrid car – ads you may or may not care about.
According to a report published by Gartner on context-aware services and the opportunities they present communications service providers, “Context-enriched services have the potential to create new revenue opportunities and improve the customer experience. These opportunities come at a time when carriers need to capitalize on the wealth of contextual information they hold about their customers.”
So what does contextual marketing mean for mobile?
You’re a 34-year-old male from Seattle who is an avid sports fan. After landing in Johannesburg, you receive an offer to download a 2010 World Cup app so you can keep track of the schedule, access the latest news, and watch event videos. An offer that aligns with your interests and current needs – you may even thank your service provider!
By evolving “contextual” from one or two targeting dimensions – offers based on search behavior and location – to a multi-dimensional approach which leverages a vast amount of customer knowledge – age, gender, location, product purchase behaviors, adoption tendencies, social connectedness, service usage, psychographic data, and more – mobile has the unique ability to empower entirely new kinds of communications, decision making, transactions, and entertainment. The success of delivering solutions that add value to consumers as they live their everyday lives, however, is dependent on being ‘context-aware’.
Greg may be a 34-year-old male from Seattle who happens to be traveling to Johannesburg during the World Cup but he’s there for a business meeting and has zero interest in soccer. He would never download a World Cup app – and may even find the message annoying – but an app highlighting the top local restaurants would definitely appeal to his interest of trying local cuisine when traveling to new cities. Or better yet, an app surfacing last night’s TV content that he actually wanted to watch.
By leveraging in-depth customer profiling and predictive analytics to expand targeting beyond the “who” to include the “when”, “where”, “what” and most importantly “why,” recommendations can be based upon the real-time occasion, allowing marketers to act in the context of a moment and provide customers access to products, services and content at the time it matters most.
For any product or service, whether it’s an operator’s mobile TV offering, the latest fitness tracker app, or the Burberry brand, you’ll have individuals in certain times and places where products, services, apps and ads are more or less relevant. By identifying relevancy spikes and targeting in real-time, opportunities to add real value to consumers’ everyday lives can be monetized.
At this year’s Gartner Wireless Summit, Nick Jones, one of the firm’s key analysts, discussed “the third age of mobility.” The first generation was basic presence, followed by where we are today with location, identity, bar codes and the start of contextual advertising. The third generation – delivering what a customer needs at that particular moment – is the customer-centric approach that contextual marketing delivers.
Through this new era of contextual marketing, marketers are able to leverage the mobile device as a unique channel to proactively act in the context of a moment and provide customers access to products, services and content at the precise time they are most likely to realize its value. As the market continues to rapidly change and non-traditional entrants capture both market and wallet share, now’s the time for operators to leverage these new marketing opportunities to increase revenues and deliver a personally relevant experience that builds long-term customer retention.
Lara Albert is Senior Director, Global Marketing at Globys (www.Globys.com), which provides contextual marketing solutions for the worldwide telecommunications market. Globys, a spinoff of VeriSign Inc, has headquarters in Seattle, and can be found on the Web at http://www.globys.com.