What Contextual Marketing Does

Whether you are a mobile operator, a consumer brand, an app developer, or a handset manufacturer, contextual marketing can transform the way you reach and engage with today’s consumer.

The possibilities for contextual marketing are truly endless. With the right tools, marketers can reach any consumer, at any moment, in any context and provide them access to information relevant to their lives. It is the future of marketing. Contextual marketing presents a unique opportunity for the entire mobile ecosystem in reaching the mass market with products, plans, widgets, apps, ads and other mobile-targeted services. One-to-one marketing is not a new idea. It’s been a goal for marketers for many years. What’s new is the fact that relevant customer communications and offers can be targeted based on the “who”, plus the “when”, “where”, and “what”: Marketing in the Moment.

Offers

Operators themselves have thousands of products and services to offer their customers: data plans, messaging services, security packages, voice and data bundles, value added services, device upgrades, premium content, and more. Contextual marketing can help mobile operators to rapidly determine the best offer for each customer and the right context to deliver that offer. For you, that may mean a 30% discount offer communicated through a MMS six days before receiving your monthly bill. For your friend, it may mean a casual email on a weekday late in the evening one hour before he goes to sleep.

While on her morning commute, a 27 year old highly connected female head of household who has infrequently used her mobile browser in the past month receives an SMS offer for a one-month free trial of web surfing.
On pay day, a prepaid subscriber who is at high risk of churning, has an account balance of less than $5.00 and has not placed a call in the past 48 hours is presented a 10% bonus offer on all recharges during the next month if he recharges more than $35.00 today.

Contextual marketing helps operators more effectively market to existing customers by rapidly and automatically determining the best way to market specific products and services to individual customers in the right context.

Apps

Contextual marketing can also help app store providers make the right app recommendation to the right customer in the right context. We all know “there’s an app for that”, but how valuable is an app store if customers struggle to search for and discover what they need among 250,000 apps? Or worse, they aren’t even aware that an app they may need exists. This is where contextual marketing can help. App store providers can determine the contexts in which an application is used—who uses what, when and where they use it, and how they use it—and then make proactive recommendations based on the right customer and context.

On a Tuesday afternoon, a 34 year old tech executive who loves music and is visiting London from overseas is presented an app that highlights the local music scene, an app he didn’t even know existed.
While on her morning commute, a 27 year old highly connected female head of household who has infrequently used her mobile browser in the past month receives an SMS offer for a one-month free trial of web surfing.

Contextual marketing solves the problem of mobile app discovery by making recommendations that are most relevant to a customer in a particular context—either at the time an individual searches for content or proactively as they are living their everyday life.

Brand messages

Consumer brands also have an opportunity to leverage contextual marketing to better target their advertising through the mobile channel. By leveraging in-depth customer profiles, brands can target customers in new ways, connecting with them at the time of purchase, usage or consumption. They can also learn about the customers and contexts in which their advertising works best. A brand can target customers just prior to their commute in the morning or see whether it works better to target them just before they leave work in the afternoon. They can target customers that are highly mobile or those that are highly connected or those that are highly mobile and highly connected.

Shortly before leaving the office on Friday afternoon, a highly mobile young professional who frequently travels to the city on Friday evenings receives an offer from a local restaurant promoting a 2 for 1 entree special.
While at home on a Saturday morning, a 42 year old casual mobile female receives an offer from a local retailer to save $5 off a $30 purchase of their branded products.

Contextual marketing provides brands with a means to precisely target their advertising through the mobile channel by leveraging deep customer profiles and learnings of which customers and contexts work best for their brand messages.