One of the Hubspot certifications that Gigantic holds is Contextual Marketing. In this article, in addition to discussing the learning in the course of this certification, I explain what Contextual Marketing is and how it can help your company grow on the web and convert more by improving your visitor's experience.
What is Contextual Marketing?
When a visitor arrives at your website, or landing page, he goes through all the standard pages that have been built and these are no different to the visitor, whether that is a first visit or a consumer of your products. When using a tablet, a computer or even a cell phone to access the pages he is faced with the same content that is almost always comprehensive and often vague. Wouldn't it be amazing to be able to specify the content according to who visits your site? And for the visitor or consumer to reach their goals wouldn't it be better to be able to provide differentiated content? Contextual Marketing does just that.
Contextual marketing is personalized marketing based on the context in which your site visitor accesses your site and focused on the topic they are looking for when accessing it. Personalization of e-mails, text on your landing pages, or text on websites are all ways to use Contextual Marketing. In practice it is when you modify a text giving it a personal touch, taking into consideration your visitor and how he was categorized by you. With Contextual Marketing it is paramount to categorize users by groups based on their similarities.
Think that Context Marketing improves your user's experience because through it you can provide more targeted content. In this case the content presented to each user that visits your website or landing page is different even if they are on the same page at the same time. By applying Contextual Marketing your website or landing page becomes a valuable tool in the customer journey traced by your company. It can be part of the stage of attracting new visitors, engaging visitors to become consumers or even turning your consumers into brand advocates.
Using Contextual Marketing makes your company differentiate itself from others and stand out by bringing visitors exactly what they need. For conversion Contextual Marketing is even more important. According to a Digital Trends survey shown in the course, consumers prefer to do business with companies that bring them the most relevant content.
Giving more emphasis to the importance of targeted content was also shown in the course another research, this time done by Hubspot, which showed that the conversion on pages that use Contextual Marketing was 20% higher than the page that did not use it. This way the visitor does not waste time searching and exploring your site or landing page, his decision is made in a faster and more direct way.
How can Contextual Marketing help me to have an exemplary conversion?
Already understood what is Contextual Marketing is important to pay attention to the fundamentals of it so that it becomes easier to be applied. According to the course the best practices are: start small, help your visitors, optimize the content for search engines and your visitors, don't confuse your visitors, be sure that your visitors will have access to all the content that is important.
I will explain a little about each of them so that, after applying them, you can measure them and realize their effectiveness and value to your business. First I will address the practice of starting small. It is best that when using Contextual Marketing only one area of your site or landing page is chosen, and that not all items in this area are modified.
Contextual Marketing is an advanced marketing tactic and has many ways of being used making it easy to get lost or confused when using it. So gradually add new content to replace the chosen default content and test to see if it is working. This way you can minimize errors and modify the application while slowly measuring the results.
The second foundation that I will highlight here is that of always seeking to help the visitor. This practice must be evaluated according to your company's goals and have its focus on this evaluation. Visitors to your website will have no problem providing information if they receive some benefit. Showing the visitor a relevant and targeted offer is more effective than having a welcome phrase on your site. Moreover, having targeted content makes your visitor progress through the customer journey and thus converts faster.
The next foundation to address here is optimizing content for search engines and your visitors. To address this foundation it is important to keep the focus on the first time your visitor accesses your website or landing page. You are not supposed to neglect the visitor on his first access just because you do not have enough data about him.
This is the moment when he enters your customer journey so your website must have a well-structured default content so that he has as much value as your second or third time visitor or even your consumer. Before you start using Contextual Marketing you need to have content that informs, educates and guides. Search engines should also not be neglected. They do not take into account the variation in your content to index your pages. That is why it is important that the default content is optimized and helps indexing.
The penultimate ground is not to confuse your visitors. Today most consumers receive e-mails with their names, it is a common practice in the marketplace. But many companies do not use Contextual Marketing in all contacts with their customers, most limit themselves to names in e-mails.
Ideally, Contextual Marketing should be used in everything. This does not mean that you should put your visitors name on your website, this can confuse them or scare them away by not knowing how your site got the information. Causing distrust in your visitor is the last thing you want to do as it directly affects conversions, beware. Always do tests and check if that practice has been used before and gives results. There are many cases in the market.
Last but not least we have the foundation that you make sure your visitors are going to access all the content that is important. Visit all the pages of your website or your landing page after you are done building them, this review is to make sure that all content makes sense to your visitor even if they are not on a home page or even a conversion page. Visitors to your website should be able to explore all the content and through some of it be able to walk their customer journey or even convert directly.
The bottom line is that using Contextual Marketing is only beneficial and that by following these best practices and using Contextual Marketing correctly on your website or landing page you are more likely to convert. To recap what has been said I will list some of the core teachings of the course.
Never use names on web pages or landing pages, review all content, structure your default content well, and keep an eye on the fundamentals: start small, help your visitors, optimize content for search engines and your visitors, don't confuse your visitors, make sure your visitors get to all the content that is important. So, by using Contextual Marketing, create a better experience for your visitor, grow your business and convert more!
For more tips on how to improve the experience of your website or landing page access the article already posted on the blog "Create positive experiences to convert more". Good conversions!