[Book Review] "The Context Marketing Revolution"

 

Source:  Amazon

"Starting on June 24, 2009, everything that once worked in marketing, stopped. What we do, how we do it, and who does it were transformed forever." (Emphasis in original)

So writes Mathew Sweezey in The Context Marketing Revolution:  How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020). According to Sweezey, June 24, 2009 was the day when ". . . private individuals - not brands, not businesses or traditional media outlets - became the largest producers of media in the world." (Emphasis in original)

Sweezey argues that the business environment has transformed from a limited media era - where media creation and distribution were limited to people and organizations with sufficient capital to participate - to an era of infinite media - where every human being on the planet with access to the internet can create and distribute media (that is, content).

Sweezey contends that as a result of the explosive proliferation of content and the emergence of the new media environment, consumers and business buyers have largely stopped listening to marketing messages. This means, Sweezey writes, that companies and their marketers must fundamentally change how they approach motivating buyers and driving growth. As he puts it, "It demands not just new marketing ideas but rather a whole new idea of marketing." (Emphasis added)

In The Context Marketing Revolution, Sweezey describes the "new idea of marketing" that will be necessary for success in the infinite media era. He calls the solution context marketing, which he describes as follows:

"Motivating consumers today has nothing to do with getting their attention and everything to do with understanding their context - that is, their current position in time and space and whatever their task may be in that moment. Today, helping people achieve their immediate goals is the only way to break through the noise and motivate consumers to act." (Emphasis in original)

What's In the Book

The Context Marketing Revolution is organized in three major parts.

Part One (Chapter 1-2) - In Chapter 1, Sweezey discusses the profound differences between how marketers motivated buyers in the limited media era and what will be needed to motivate them in the infinite media era. Chapter 2 explains how the changed media environment has given rise to a new kind of consumer and a new consumer decision making process.

Part Two (Chapters 3-8) - This part contains the core of the book. In Chapter 3, Sweezey introduces the context framework - a model for describing the level of context in interactions between brands/companies and customers/buyers. Sweezey's framework describes the level of context along five dimensions - available, permissioned, personal, authentic and purposeful. Following the introduction in Chapter 3, Sweezey devotes a separate chapter to each of the context framework components.

Part Three (Chapters 9-14) - In this part, Sweezey provides a road map for implementing context marketing. In Chapter 9, he describes how marketers can identify the critical attributes of the customer journeys that are relevant for their company, and in Chapter 10, he discusses how marketers can use triggers to keep buyers moving through their customer journey.

Chapter 11 covers the role of technology in context marketing, and Chapter 12 explains the benefits of adopting agile marketing techniques and practices. Sweezey concludes the book with a discussion of the organizational and performance measurement changes that are needed to enable successful context marketing.

My Take

The Context Marketing Revolution is an important book that should be on the reading list of most marketers. This is a "dense" book in the sense that Mathew Sweezey addresses numerous important issues and discusses the subtle nuances of those issues.

I am usually skeptical of claims by pundits that "everything" in marketing has changed, but Sweezey has built a compelling case for the proposition that many aspects of marketing have changed in fundamental ways.

Many of the ideas contained in The Context Marketing Revolution aren't new. For example, most marketers have long recognized the importance of permission-based marketing, personalization and authenticity.

Even the core idea of context marketing - which is to help buyers achieve their immediate goals at each moment during the customer journey - isn't completely new. For example, Google's idea of micro-moments of marketing - which I wrote about back in 2015 - is similar in some ways to context marketing. And marketers who have been creating content resources that are tailored for specific buyer personas and specific stages of the buying process can be described as practicing a rudimentary form of context marketing.

The most important point in The Context Marketing Revolution is Mathew Sweezey's argument that the role of marketing and the scope of marketing's responsibilities must the dramatically expanded in order to make context marketing a reality.

Sweezey contends that companies must deliver contextual experiences in order to break through the noise created in the era of infinite media. Contextual experiences will often encompass more than marketing communications, and Sweezey argues that marketers must be prepared to move beyond conventional notions of marketing communications in order to create and deliver compelling contextual experiences.

The Context Marketing Revolution provides an insightful and sometimes provocative view of what is needed to effectively motivate today's consumers and business buyers. It's a very worthwhile read for marketers.

Two Ways to Boost the Impact of Personalization in 2018

Delivering outstanding customer experiences has become a primary strategic objective for both B2B and B2C marketers. In the 2017 Digital Trends report by Econsultancy (in association with Adobe), surveyed marketing, digital, and ecommerce professionals selected optimizing the customer experience as their single most important opportunity for 2017, and they identified customer experience as the primary way they will differentiate their company from competitors over the next five years.

Most marketers now recognize that personalization is a critical ingredient in the recipe for great customer experiences. In a 2017 survey of marketing and business leaders by Researchscape International (in association with Evergage), nearly all (96%) of the respondents agreed that personalization helps advance customer relationships, and 88% agreed that their prospects and customers expect a personalized experience.

In the Econsultancy study, survey respondents identified targeting and personalization as a top digital priority for 2017 (behind only content marketing and social media engagement), and half (51%) of the respondents said they would increase their spending on personalization this year.

But despite all the recent focus on personalization, it's clear that most companies have more work to do to maximize the benefits of personalized marketing. In the Researchscape survey, only 30% of respondents were very or extremely satisfied with the level of personalization in their marketing programs, and 46% gave themselves a grade of "C" or lower on their current personalization efforts.

Other research has shown that many buyers aren't particularly impressed with the personalization efforts they encounter:

• In a survey by Adobe, 71% of consumers said they like receiving personalized offers, but 20% reported that offers are not done well.
• In a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit, 70% of survey respondents said that many of the personalized messages they receive are annoying because the attempts at personalization are superficial.

So what can be done to improve the effectiveness of personalization? There are two important steps that companies can take to boost the impact of their personalization efforts in 2018.

Make It Valuable

To be effective in today's competitive environment, personalization must provide meaningful value to customers and prospects. Personalization that is superficial or superfluous - i.e. personalization that is merely "window-dressing" - simply won't cut it.

Recent research has confirmed that buyers want to get practical value from their interactions with companies and brands. For example, in a survey of consumers conducted earlier this year by the CMO Council and SAP Hybris, nearly half of the respondents defined value as something that saves them time (49%) or makes their lives easier (47%).

Value is equally important to B2B buyers. In a 2017 survey of B2B buyers, Aberdeen Group asked participants what factors they consider when choosing a vendor. Over two-thirds (68.2%) of the respondents said the vendor can help sharpen our competitive differentiation, and over half (55.7%) said the vendor can help me identify new possibilities and avenues for revenue.

Personalization can be a powerful way to enhance the value of interactions with customers and prospects, but it must be designed with that objective in mind. Therefore, marketers should evaluate any proposed personalization initiative by asking a basic question:  How will this application of personalization provide practical value to our customers and/or prospects?

Make It (Mostly) Invisible

Since the early days of personalized marketing, the most common way to personalize a marketing message has been to include specific facts about the recipient in the message, a practice that can be called explicit or overt personalization. 

It's as if marketers believe that the effectiveness of personalization is based on communicating to the customer or prospect what they know about him or her. There may have been some truth to this belief when any form of personalization was rare. Now, however, most types of overt personalization are largely ineffective (because they are so common), and they can be seen as "creepy" by customers or prospects.

Today, personalization is usually more effective when it's invisible. The best personalization doesn't feel like personalization - it just feels like a message or experience that's really relevant, appropriate, and valuable.

There are, of course, some situations where overt personalization is still effective. For example, online stores (such as Amazon) often provide personalized product recommendations that are introduced by a phrase like, "People who ordered [Product X] also purchased . . ." When the personalization algorithm works well, these recommendations can be useful to customers, and most buyers don't view such recommendations as intrusive or creepy.

Illustration courtesy of Michael Coghlan via Flickr CC.

How Media Consumption Statistics Can Mislead Marketers

Earlier this year, eMarketer published a new estimate of the amount of time US adults (ages 18+) spend with various types of media. Like many media analysts, eMarketer estimates that the amount of time spent with mobile media is growing more rapidly than all other forms of media consumption, while the consumption of print media continues to decline precipitously.

eMarketer also estimated the amount of advertising spending per hour of time spent with each type of media, and the table below contains some of the eMarketer estimates. As the table shows, eMarketer is projecting that this year, advertisers will spend 7 cents for every hour a US adult spends consuming mobile media, but more than 10 times that amount (83 cents) for every hour spent consuming print media (magazines and newspapers).

eMarketer isn't the only analyst to make this kind of consumption vs. spending comparison. In the 2013 edition of her widely-acclaimed annual presentation on Internet trends, Mary Meeker also compared the time spent consuming various types of media with advertising spending. The table below shows the data she presented, and her statistics also reveal significant disconnects between the time spent with print and mobile, and the amount of advertising spending devoted to those channels.

So, what's the point of these comparisons? The argument made by some is that advertising and marketing spending should reflect media consumption patterns. If you buy into this argument, then the above data would indicate that companies are over-investing in print advertising and under-investing in mobile advertising.

Understanding media consumption patterns is obviously important for effective marketing, but marketers shouldn't rely too much on high-level media consumption data for three reasons.

First, broad consumption patterns usually aren't specific enough to provide effective guidance for an individual company. As an enterprise marketer, what you really need to know is how the prospective buyers in your target market consume media. For example, Mary Meeker's data says that US adults spend only 6% of their total media consumption time on print media, but prospective buyers in your target market may spend considerably more of their time with print.

Second, the consumption data discussed above is restrictive. It only compares advertising spending to media consumption time. Numerous research studies have shown that spending on digital marketing has grown explosively over the past several years. Therefore, if the above data included all marketing spending, the comparisons would look substantially different.

Finally, the time people spend with a particular type of media isn't necessarily indicative of how effective that channel will be as a marketing tool. For example, many younger B2B buyers may spend a considerable amount of time using mobile devices for a variety of reasons, but that may not be the primary way they access business-related information. The fallacy is to assume that personal communications preferences and marketing communications preferences are identical.

The 2012 Channel Preferences Survey by ExactTarget found that personal communications habits are not a good indicator for marketers who are looking for the best way to communicate with potential buyers. As the authors of the survey report wrote, "The lesson here for marketers is that just because consumers embrace a channel for personal communications doesn't mean that they want to receive direct marketing messages from your brand via that channel." To improve the effectiveness of your marketing, you need to understand how your prospective buyers prefer to receive marketing messages.

The bottom line? Media consumption patterns are interesting, and they can be somewhat useful. But you need to know more to make sound marketing decisions.

Great Marketing Content Always Requires Trade-Offs

In a landmark article for the Harvard Business Review, Michael E. Porter wrote that the essence of business strategy is choosing to perform business activities differently - or to perform different activities - than competitors. Porter also argued that a powerful strategy always involves trade-offs. If you design and arrange your activities to excel a delivering a specific value proposition, you will be less able to effectively and efficiently deliver other types of value. Therefore, strategy is about deciding both what to do and what not to do.

A variation of Porter's principle applies to content marketing. To be highly effective, each content resource you develop must be designed to address the concerns and interests of a specific target audience. And when a content resource is truly designed for a specific target audience, that resource will inevitably be less appealing to other audiences, some of which may be important to your company. It can be tempting to design content resources that will appeal to multiple audiences, but this is usually a mistake. The title of a recent blog post by Joe Pulizzi makes the point clearly:  "If Your Content Marketing is for Everybody, It's for Nobody."

Whenever I talk with prospective clients about starting a content marketing program, one of the first questions they ask is:  "Why can't we create one content resource, say a white paper or an e-book, that tells the whole story? It could include a description of the problems we can solve and the benefits our solution can provide, and we could include a couple of customer success stories to demonstrate that we can deliver what we promise."

At this point in the conversation, the image of a Swiss army knife always flashes in my mind. As you probably know, a Swiss army knife is a tool that's about the size of a large pocket knife. In addition to regular knife blades, it has several other attachments, such as a bottle opener, a can opener, a screwdriver, and a file. So, a Swill army knife is a real multi-tasking tool and a handy thing to have on a camping trip or a hike.

Some B2B marketers believe they can create one content resource that will appeal to all of their target audiences and fill all (or most) of their content needs. In essence, they want to create the content marketing equivalent of a Swill army knife. Unfortunately, however, the Swiss army knife approach to content marketing doesn't work well. Here are two of the primary reasons.

Diluted Relevance - When you create a content resource that's designed for multiple audiences, it will inevitably include information that's not very relevant or interesting to some of those audiences. Suppose, for example, that you offer a technology product that must be sold to plant managers, IT directors, and CFO's. Each of these buyer types will have distinct concerns and priorities. If you create one content resource for all of these buyer types, you are essentially asking each potential buyer to wade through material that doesn't particularly interest him or her in order to find the information that addresses his or her primary concerns.

Excessive Length - Even if the relevance problem didn't exist, when you try to "cover all the bases" in one content resource, you are likely to end up with a very long resource. The problem with long content resources is that most potential buyers now have short attention spans. They usually prefer to consume content in small doses, especially when they are in the early stages of the buying process. Most early-stage buyers simply won't be willing to invest the time it takes to read a 50-page white paper or e-book.

The bottom line is that developing good marketing content always requires you to make trade-offs. When you develop a content resource for a specific target audience, it probably won't be appropriate of other audiences. For an effective content marketing program, you'll need distinct resources for most of your primary audiences.

Match Your Content to the Type of Demand You Need to Create

I've written frequently here about why it's important to develop marketing content resources for specific buyer personas and specific stages of the buying process. This kind of targeted content produces better marketing results because it enables you to increase what I call personal relevance and situational relevance.

There's also another factor you need to consider when developing marketing content. To make your content more effective, you must understand the type of demand you need to create. The demand type concept was developed by SiriusDecisions a few years ago, and it's basically designed to describe where your market is in the typical evolutionary cycle.

SiriusDecisions has identified three demand type categories.

New Concept
A new concept is a truly disruptive product or service. It usually solves a problem that most potential buyers don't know they have, or it may address a condition or set of circumstances that most potential buyers perceive to be an inevitable fact of business life, for which no solution exists.

New Paradigm
A new paradigm is a product or service that will solve a known problem or fill a known need in a new and novel way that differs significantly for other existing solutions.

Established Market
An established market represents a product or service that is accepted by the majority of prospect organizations as necessary and best-of-breed. With an established market product or service, most prospective buyers will understand the nature and ramifications of their need, and they will have a general understanding of what solutions are available.

Obviously, these different market environments require different approaches to content marketing. With a new concept, both marketing and sales must be highly evangelistic. Your first job is to show potential buyers that a given set of conditions constitutes a problem and that an effective solution to the problem exists. Therefore, your marketing content needs to contain a significant thought leadership component that is designed to create awareness of the problem and instill confidence that the problem can be solved.

With a new paradigm product or service, most potential buyers are aware of the problem they need to solve, and they may have already implemented one of the conventional solutions. Therefore, your marketing content must demonstrate why and how the new solution you offer is significantly better than the more conventional solutions. In this situation, your primary competition is the existing solution paradigm rather than other solution providers.

When your product or service competes in an established market, the key to success is differentiating your solution from those offered by your competitors. Since your solution is probably similar in general functionality to those of your competitors, your marketing content needs to emphasize other sources of differentiation, such as a lower total cost of ownership, easier and/or faster implementation, or more responsive customer support.

When you're using these demand types to guide your marketing efforts, it's important to remember that the type of demand you need to create will change as your market evolves. Therefore, to keep your marketing content effective and compelling, it needs to evolve in step with your market.

Stop Wasting Your Time on Superficial Personalization

For more than two decades, experts have urged marketers to use personalized messages to boost the effectiveness of marketing communications. Many marketers have heeded this advice, and they are now using various technology tools to create personalized marketing messages in a variety of media and formats, including web pages, e-mail messages, and printed materials such as direct mail documents.

The most common way to personalize a marketing message is to include specific facts about the recipient in the message. Some examples would include the recipient's name, her job title, company affiliation, the industry in which she works, or information about a recent purchase.

The reality is, this type of explicit personalization no longer has much impact with potential buyers, largely because so many marketers are using similar personalization tactics. Two recent research projects have confirmed that explicit personalization alone has become an anemic tool for improving the effectiveness of marketing communications.

Earlier this year, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) conducted two concurrent surveys sponsored by Lyris. One of the surveys was directed at consumers, and it asked survey participants about the effectiveness of various marketing channels and tactics, how they prefer to engage with brands, and what influences their purchase decisions. You can obtain an executive summary of the EIU survey report here.

The major findings from the EIU consumer survey regarding personalization include the following:

• More than 70% of survey respondents said that the volume of personalized messages they receive has increased over the past five years.
• Seventy percent of the respondents said that many of the personalized messages they receive are annoying because the attempts at personalization are superficial.
• Sixty-three percent of respondents said that personalization is now so common that they have grown numb to it.
• Only 22% of respondents said that personalized offers are more likely to meet their needs than mass market offers.

Research by the CEB Marketing Leadership Council also shows that explicit personalization has lost much of its impact. In July of this year, CEB surveyed 1,500 consumers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia regarding how, why, and what they buy, and about their attitudes regarding the tactics brands use to engage them. One of the survey questions asked participants how they felt about some of the more common forms of explicit personalization. The table below shows how the survey participants responded.

The lesson here is that explicit personalization alone is not sufficient to make marketing messages more effective. The real key to improving the effectiveness of your marketing messages is to use what you know about your potential buyers to craft messages that will be more relevant and useful to those buyers. Relevance and usefulness (what Jay Baer calls "Youtility"), not mere personalization, are the real drivers of better marketing results.

This doesn't mean that you should stop personalizing marketing messages. It does mean that the personalization should be contextually appropriate (not just a gimmick) and that personalization shouldn't be the core component of your messaging strategy.

Three Questions Your Content Marketing Plan Must Answer

It's now abundantly clear that content marketing is a core marketing tactic for many companies. Research by the Content Marketing Institute suggests that nine out of ten B2B companies are using content marketing in some form.

Developing a content marketing program is a significant undertaking for any company. Not only does it require the creation of new content resources and the implementation of new marketing tactics, it also involves a fundamental shift in the philosophical approach to marketing.

When I'm talking with clients about implementing a content marketing program, one question that always comes up early in the conversation is: "How do I get started?" I always answer this question by saying that the first step is to develop a content marketing strategy and plan for the business. That answer usually leads to a second question:  "What should be included in a content strategy/plan?"

A complete content marketing plan will address numerous issues and contain significant detail, but at the most basic level, a content plan must answer three fundamental questions:

• What issues or topics will the content resources address, and how will the resources be made relevant for potential buyers?
• What digital and/or physical formats will be used for marketing content resources?
• When and how will content resources be published, distributed, or otherwise brought to the market, and how will they be promoted?

Like the proverbial three-legged stool, the answers to these three questions define the core elements of your content marketing strategy and plan. What makes these three questions particularly critical is that they apply both to the overall content marketing plan and to individual content resources. In other words, every time you contemplate the creation of a new content resource, you need to determine what issues it will address and how it will be tailored for a specific target audience, what format will be used for the resource, and how the resource will be published, distributed, and promoted.

Of these three questions, the first is by far the most important. One of the biggest content marketing mistakes that I see companies make is allowing format, rather than message, to drive the content development process. Marketers sometimes say, "We need a white paper [or an eBook or a Webinar]," rather than, "We need a content resource that communicates message X to audience Y." If you want to create an effective content marketing program, think messaging first, and then format and distribution.

I've published several posts here that discuss how to make content messaging more effective. In case you missed those posts, here are the links:

• Content Marketing Basics for 2013 - Compelling Value Propositions
• Content Marketing Basics for 2013 - Buyer Personas
• Content Marketing Basics for 2013 - The Content Audit
• Why Provocative Content Works Best for Acquiring Leads
• What It Takes to Make Marketing Content More Compelling

What It Takes to Make Marketing Content More Compelling

There's no longer any doubt that relevant marketing content is essential for B2B marketing success.  Business buyers are incredibly busy, and they're exposed to hundreds of marketing messages every day.  The only reliable way to cut through the clutter and create meaningful engagement with potential buyers is to provide marketing content that prospects will see as relevant and compelling.

The big question for marketers is, how do we create this kind of content?  We often hear or read that the answer is to customize marketing messages and materials for specific buyers.  But, what kinds of "customization" will actually increase marketing relevance and effectiveness?

There are two proven ways to make marketing content more relevant and compelling.  The first key is to make it easy for prospects to identify with your content.  To do this, you'll need content that's customized to fit the personal and professional characteristics of your potential buyers.  What jobs do your prospects hold?  What kinds of companies do they work for?  What size companies do they work for?  So, for example, if your target prospects are plant managers in small manufacturing companies, you'll need content that's tailored for that kind of buyer.

This kind of content customization increases what I call personal relevance, and it's proven to increase marketing effectiveness.  In research by MarketingSherpa, 82% of business buyers said that marketing content was more valuable when it was targeted to their industry.  Sixty-seven percent of buyers said that marketing content was more valuable when it was targeted to their job function, and 49% said the same for content that was targeted to companies of similar size.

The second way to increase relevance is to create and use marketing content that speaks to issues that have immediate importance to your prospects.  Most B2B buyers move through an identifiable set of buying stages as they make purchase decisions, and the issues that are most important to buyers will change as they move through the buying process.  If your marketing content provides a potential buyer information that's out of sync with his or her decision making process, it's far less likely to capture the buyer's full attention.

The solution is to use marketing messages and materials that are designed for each stage of the buying process.  This kind of content customization enhances what I call situational relevance, and it can provide powerful competitive advantage.  In a recent survey of B2B buyers by DemandGen Report, 93% of respondents said the solution provider they chose supplied ample marketing content to navigate through each phase of the buying process.

A few weeks ago, I published a white paper that describes these two ways to make your marketing content more relevant.  If you'd like a copy of this white paper, send an e-mail to ddodd(at)pointbalance(dot)com.