Amelia Northrup-Simpson

Contextual marketing: back to the future

Posted by Amelia Northrup-Simpson, Oct 21, 2015 0 comments


Amelia Northrup-Simpson

Are you a contextual marketer? Probably.

Chances are, you’re doing some form of contextual marketing already. If you’re a marketer, you’ve made some effort to understand your patrons and match their needs to what you’re offering.

That’s all contextual marketing is: matching the customer’s circumstance to the business’s circumstance.

To determine a customer’s circumstance, you first want to look at their past behavior. Then you can determine how that might align with what your organization is offering.

The past determines the future

Think of it like this. You’ve seen the 1985 Robert Zemeckis’ classic “Back to the Future,” right? In it, Doc Brown warns Marty, “Anything you do could have serious repercussions on future events.” Throughout the movie, Marty carries around this 80’s-tastic (the leggings, you guys!) photo of him and his siblings, and sees them begin to disappear whenever he screws up the timeline.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arts marketers are in the business of creating future audiences. To do that, we have to be fairly good at predicting the future. We might predict that one event might be more popular than another or that new audiences might respond to certain discount offer. If our predictions are right, the future of our audience is bright and clear. If our predictions are wrong, we can see the future of our audience fading away, like that picture of the McFly kids.

While we can’t time travel (yet) in order to optimize our predictions, we have a lot of clues about them, in the form of data. In order to create your future audience, you’ve got to understand your current audience. 

First: transactional data

There are many data points that you may have on your patrons, like demographics, price sensitivity, or location. And, you may get data from a variety of sources, like surveys, Google Analytics, email response reports, and a CRM system.

Out of all the data you may have, the most important to understand is a patron’s buying history. As Broadway producer Ken Davenport recently wrote, “[Sales] is the best audience feedback tool there is.” This transactional data tells you in clear terms if you’re engaging them or not. It tells you what patrons actually did. That’s more useful than knowing what patrons say they want. And it’s more actionable than aggregated, anonymized data.

Before we can customize our campaign based on context, first we must understand who a patron is to our organization through their history. Is this their first time in your venue? Are they a major donor? Do they see every event you produce?

Then: segment and customize

Let’s zoom out, though. It is important to understand the way that individual patrons have engaged with you. In some cases, looking at data on an individual basis can be actionable.  There are many great examples of customized messaging, like when ticketing systems generate a specific donation ask based on that patron’s past history.

Ultimately though, you probably won’t be customizing a message to each individual patron; you’ll be talking to them in segments. You’ll need to make some “three little bears” decisions. By that, I mean that you want segments that are not too big and broad to prevent customized messaging, not too small to make a difference, but just right.

After taking into account their prior relationship with your organization, consider how you could deepen each segment’s engagement. Three factors matter here:

  • Where a patron is: Are they more likely to engage on their way to the museum, at the museum, or after they’ve visited?
  • What they’re doing: Are they walking around or seated? On their phone or not?
  • What are they likely to do: Is the right next step for this patron a small purchase like a drink, a large purchase like a subscription, or a non-purchase like a post-show event?

Need ideas? Google’s “4 New Moments Every Marketer Should Know” infographic is one of my new favorite ways to illustrate contextual marketing. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This illustrates well what a customer might want from an organization in a given moment. Remember, that’s what contextual marketing is all about—aligning the interests of both. Consider what your patrons want from you, what you know about them, and what you can offer them—and start building your future audience.

Want to know more? Attend my workshop, The Art of Contextual Marketing: Maximizing Relevancy in the Age of Personalization, at the NAMP conference Saturday, November 7 at 4:00. This is the last week to sign up for NAMPC online, so register now!

 

 

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