Context Aware Content Marketing – Somethin's Got A Hold On Me

Posted by Robert Rose on Jan 11, 2012

So, I’m the guest speaker at a Webinar hosted by the folks over at Hippo today.  When they asked me to speak – they wanted me to put some thought into how “context” was going to play a role in changing the process of content marketing.  Okay –  Context Aware Content Marketing.  That’s cool. I got it.

Now for some strange reason – As I wrote this post – I felt the need to put on some music. And what hit me was Etta James’s Something’s Got A Hold Of Me. 

I have no idea what this has to do with marketing (other than… well it’s Etta – and it’s just an awesome song) – but I’m not one to ignore my gut – so there ya go.  So if you want the same context I had while I wrote this – turn on Etta there on the left – and then read the rest of the post as it plays.

I’ve put a bit of thought into it – and as I look out to the future of how context is going to change what we’re doing from a content marketing perspective – I see 4 evolutionary steps over the next three to five years (see image).

 

Step one is Channel Aware
(” …sometimes I get a good feeling”)

This is where we found ourselves last year as we started scrambling to manage Web content for all these different channels – mobile, social, landing pages, global web sites etc… It’s simply a realization that it’s not about just dumping our content into these different channels.  Publishing the entirety of our Web content onto a mobile site is easier – but it isn’t terribly productive.  We’ve got to change our content marketing processes to reflect an awareness of the context of how and (more importantly) why our audiences are consuming our content through different channels.   When the CEO asks us to put the whole Web site into a Mobile app – we have to say “no”.  It just doesn’t make any sense.     The feedback loop here is mostly manual.  Our Google Analytics, reports in content management systems and manually creating CSS for the design of our content is all done as we’ve done it for years – iteratively as a process.

Step two is Attribute Aware
(“…something’s got a hold on me…”)

This is where the feedback loop becomes slightly more automated – and is a step I think a good many marketers will start to take this year. Look at many of the CMS vendors out there – and look at their move to “managing the experience” and you can tell it’s one they are certainly hoping you take.   This is where we start to use attributes that we can glean from our audiences to optimize the content for context.   Think here how we might automatically detect what KIND of mobile device you’re using.  Or, how we can start looking at explicit attributes like your title, your name or your preferences and optimize the content dynamically to be more relevant based on that information.  The technology is already here to deliver this (and has been for years).  But this is something (much to the contrary of what you read) is something that most marketers just aren’t doing in practice.   Maybe now it’ll start to take hold… Etta’s startin’ to get to me…

Step three is Real Time Aware
(“…somethin’s got a hold and it won’t let go”)

The technology will need to catch up a bit here to make this easier for the average marketing team – but this is where we can start to optimize content using interaction happening in real-time.  For example we want to optimize our visitor’s content experience based on choices they make in real time – watching clicks and optimizing content based on that behavior (maybe watching the speed of the connection to offer abstracts or a slimmed down version of the site).

Step four is Contextual Integration
(…“I don’t know what it is but it sure feels good”)

Out a few years (my guess is by 2015) we’ll start truly integrating content as a service – and interfaces themselves will adapt to the context automatically.   This is where I might pull in multiple data sources in real-time to help optimize content for a particular audience.  For example, if we’re a product company selling software to businesses – and a visitor hits our site – we might be able to match attributes (device, location, company, time of day) with real-time awareness (what the visitor clicks on in the site) and pull in third-party data (information about the visitor’s company) to help contextualize their experience.

As Soon As We Get A Hold On Who….

These steps are evolutionary… and certainly I may be overestimating or underestimating how fast we’ll get there…   But this much I know – applying context to our content marketing strategy starts with WHO.  We’ve got to understand who we’re talking to – and then what, where when and (again maybe most importantly) why they want our content through different channels and in different contexts.

I’ll update with a link to the webinar after it’s archived… Until then… Etta and I are out..

La La la la….