Download Welcome to the era of context marketing

Welcome to the
era of context
marketing
Stop marketing better—
start marketing differently
DEMAND MORE PERSONALIZATION
White paper // Welcome to the era of context marketing
Contents
The importance of context�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 2
The next era of marketing��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 2
The challenge of siloed systems��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 4
Context marketing requirements������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 4
Summary: The path to context marketing������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 5
About Sitecore�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 6
Published 11/15. © 2001-2015 Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand and product names are
the property of their respective owners. This document may not, in whole or in part, be photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form without prior
consent, in writing, from Sitecore. Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Sitecore.
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White paper // Welcome to the era of context marketing
By Michael Seifert, Sitecore CEO
Adapted from an October 2015 blog post of the
same title
Research in the area of customer experience1 should give
marketers everywhere a wake-up call. Marketers must truly
become customer centric and move beyond a “one size fits
all” approach to deliver relevant experiences that engage
each individual.
This isn’t as much a call to “do things better” but rather one
to “do things differently.” Marketers must transform the sum
of all interactions between a consumer and their brand—
across digital and physical environments—into experiences
that meet customer expectations and are meaningful and
memorable enough to warrant further engagement.
At Sitecore, we’ve been stressing the importance of owning
and managing the customer experience since 2009.
The importance of context
But how do you create a “meaningful experience” when
different customers or prospects define “meaning” in as many
ways as there are individuals? The answer lies in “context.”
The importance of context is validated in both psychology
and advertising research. Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of
Ogilvy Group UK, said in his presentation to Newsworks’
Shift 2015 conference,2 “Context affects our decisions to a
far greater degree than we realize.” What this means for the
marketer was best illustrated when he said:
“I would argue, having spent 25 years in advertising,
that most brands in a sense don’t really have a target
audience; they have a target context. I think actually
who you sell to is probably less important—certainly
in demographic terms—than the moments at which
people are prepared to do something.”
— Rory Sutherland
The only way you can effectively manage a positive customer
experience is to do so in context of that customer’s previous
interactions with your brand, and to deliver that experience
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Don’t they know I’m their
customer?
The downside of blind retargeting
I enjoy the experience of buying a new product
much more than actually receiving it. The
timespan between desire and fulfillment
reminds me of when I was a kid and could not
wait to open my Christmas presents. Over the
past decade, psychology research has shown
that experiences bring people more happiness
than do possessions.
This summer, I bought myself a new compact
camera so that my vacation photos would
be higher quality than a mobile phone can
deliver. In the months following my purchase,
the vendor was still retargeting me online
with ads to buy a new camera. After a week
of this, I began to get slightly annoyed. I was
expecting the vendor to interact with me in a
way that recognized I was now a customer. I
was expecting reciprocation.
just at the time when the customer needs it. Referring to my
camera experience (see "Don't they know I'm their customer"
sidebar above), for example, it would have been a much better
experience for me to receive ads from the vendor for lenses,
or filters, or camera bags and straps—but not for a camera
that I’ve already purchased.
The next era of marketing
We call this context marketing, and I believe it’s the next
evolutionary era of marketing. Allow me to offer a definition:
Context marketing is the ability to deliver the right content
or experience to the right person, in the right place, and at
the right time based on the sum total of that person’s past
brand interactions and current needs.
“The Ultimate Marketing Machine,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2014.
Newsworks Shift 2015 videos.
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White paper // Welcome to the era of context marketing
Delving into this definition, “the sum total” could very well
provide a single view of the customer, a phrase already loaded
with meaning.
you’re marketing to, it’s a target context—the individual
customer’s place at that particular moment in his or her
overall journey with your brand.
To many people, a “single view” means knowing the name,
age, gender, household income, hobbies, and more about
a customer. But to a marketer, the “single view of the
customer” must encompass every interaction across both
digital and physical environments—creating a virtual tsunami
of customer data. After all, it’s not simply a target audience
To be relevant, marketers need to capture every interaction
between each individual customer and their brand. Think of
this as a virtual timeline or customer journey for every person;
one that records each and every interaction they engage in
with that brand.
Context marketing glossary
Ten terms to know if you’re in or support a digital
marketing team
Content management (CM): A content platform built
from the ground up to support a seamlessly integrated
set of marketing systems.
Content management system (CMS): A software
platform that allows users to seamlessly create, edit,
review, and publish digital content. The cornerstone for
experience management platforms. Also referred to as
a web content management (WCM) system.
Content marketing: A strategic marketing approach
focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant,
and consistent content to attract and retain a clearlydefined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable
customer action.1
Context: The interrelated conditions in which
something exists or occurs.2
Context marketing: The ability to deliver the right
content or experience to the right person, in the
right place, and at the right time based on the sum
total of that person’s past brand interactions and
current needs.
Contextual intelligence: Real-time insights via a
single database that help a brand know its customers
in complex detail to conduct highly personalized
interactions—online and even offline—down to the
individual level.
Customer experience (CX): The result of an
interaction between a brand and a customer during the
journey of their relationship and its touchpoints.
Experience management platform: A software
solution that provides an optimized, multichannel sales
and marketing experience to consumers at the many
stages of their brand interactions.
Omnichannel automation: Marketing technology that
enables marketers to orchestrate engagements over
time, over multiple channels, providing a seamless,
contextual experience for the customer whether they
are on a mobile device, a social platform, reading email,
in a store, interacting with an app, or reading a printed
catalog. Omnichannel automation allows a brand to
coordinate its interactions with customers so that
it’s reaching out right at the best moment—when the
individual consumer wants it.
Personalization: The process of providing a suitable
experience and related content for the needs of a
particular person more effectively and efficiently across
multiple touchpoints and channels.
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2
“What is Content Marketing,” Content Marketing Institute.
“Context,” Merriam-Webster.com.
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White paper // Welcome to the era of context marketing
The challenge of siloed systems
The reality, though, is that most marketers don’t have a
platform to solve the context marketing problem. It is the rule,
not the exception, for the average marketing department to
use more than 12 different digital marketing tools, and some
are using more than 31.3 Each of these tools holds its own silo
of customer information, and each tool collects data only
from the channel on which it operates—email, for example,
or a mobile app, or a social channel. The task to connect all of
this marketing technology, and to further enrich it with your
brand’s customer data seamlessly, is almost inconceivable;
not even a band of skilled data scientists can do so in a
meaningful manner.
It’s a given that in order to reap the true
benefits of context marketing, we must be able
to act on data quickly and efficiently. You will
need to know every customer and have the ability
to shape experiences in real time and at scale
regardless of what channel the customer is on.
In pursuit of the unattainable “seamless database of rich
customer information,” almost every CMO I have met
has built at least one of their own customer databases,
consolidating data from their company’s multiple digital
marketing and other customer systems. This database is then
used to gain some insight into the ROI of campaigns, typically
by attribution analysis and, in turn, partial understanding of
how to invest marketing budgets. But any insight that this
custom database can impart is after the fact; the data is stale,
can’t be easily segmented, and is too complex for meaningful
analysis by anyone who isn’t a data scientist.
Likewise, customer data from homegrown databases cannot
be used to deliver real-time contextual experiences. Nor
is this data very useful outside the marketing department.
For example, the head of sales can’t readily use the data
to understand how various interactions between sales and
customers affect short- and long-term buying behaviors. Nor
can the heads of strategic planning, finance, or service and
support take advantage of it.
Context marketing requirements
It’s a given that in order to reap the true benefits of context
marketing, we must be able to act on data quickly and
efficiently. You will need to know every customer and have
the ability to shape experiences in real time and at scale
regardless of what channel the customer is on. This requires
three key technologies:
1. Contextual intelligence—enabled by a big data
experience repository that holds the totality of
interactions for every customer and (anonymous)
prospect and makes that data available in real time, at
scale, to any application as well as providing analytical
insight into its meaning.
An experience repository provides a true single view
of the customer, providing marketers with contextual
intelligence about customer interactions that span
a multitude of online and offline touchpoints. This
enables marketers to contextualize their interactions
with customers, allowing them to focus on the art and
craft of marketing, and less on its tedium.
Furthermore, an experience repository allows the
brand as a whole to gain increasing knowledge on the
connection between customer experience, lifetime
customer value, and company revenue. A brand will
easily be able to answer, with pinpoint accuracy,
critical questions such as:
■■
■■
■■
“What is the downstream revenue impact of
customers who call support about defective
products?”
“How much time on average passes between
camera purchases and when is the customer
ready to be upsold with accessories or even a new
camera?”
“When the term of a car lease is complete, how
likely is it that this individual customer will buy out
the lease or return the car and lease a new one?”
“Too Many Tools? New Data on the Complexity of Marketing Technology” by Jami Oetting,
Hubspot Agency blog post.
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White paper // Welcome to the era of context marketing
2. Content management—a content platform built from
the ground up to support a seamlessly integrated set
of marketing systems. When content management
is integrated with the contextual data repository, it’s
possible to get the right content and experience to the
right person, in the right place, and at the right time
based on the sum total of that person’s past behaviors
and current needs. In my camera experience (see
“Don’t they know I’m their customer?” on p. 2), for
example, a how-to guide on when to use which lenses
and why would have been more welcome than more
camera content.
Another requirement for content management
systems to deliver context marketing lies in the way
content is presented and personalized to customers
to create engaging real-time online experiences across
every channel of interaction: mobile, web, social,
email, in-store, apps, and more. This system must
be able to store all types of content, in components
rather than pages, and separate content from its
presentation and channel. Only then can the content,
when called upon, be assembled in the best way
for the customer’s profile, their past interactions,
and their current context such as device and geolocation—all on the fly. That’s marketing in context.
3. Omnichannel automation—once you have
contextual intelligence and content management,
the last requirement is orchestrating the customer
experience over time. Think of this as your marketing
automation but delivered across all channels and
interactions (not just email), and supplying you with
contextual intelligence insights to make the right
(automated) decisions.
Omnichannel automation can especially leverage
machine learning, a scientific discipline that lets
computers learn from data. It promises to take context
marketing to new heights. This is bound to put an
end to, for instance, manual lead scoring (and the
guessing involved in such), instead sifting through
the experience repository to automatically determine
the most relevant indicators that a prospect should
become an MQL, for example, or be ripe for receiving
a certain offer.
Summary: The path to
context marketing
Knowing every customer in context of their interactions
with your brand (contextual intelligence), aligning the
totality of your content for personalized delivery based
on your customer’s context (content management), and
automating the experience in real time across channels (with
omnichannel automation) are the three key capabilities that
define and enable context marketing. If you can’t do all three
in real time, context marketing cannot be truly achieved.
Sitecore provides enterprise-class technology that makes
context marketing readily attainable for marketers who are
looking for a better way to own and manage the experience
they deliver customers. In doing so, we offer an alternative
approach to silos of digital marketing and homegrown
databases, allowing marketers to get the complete picture
that context marketing enables.
Context marketing empowers marketers to know every
customer, shape every experience, in real time, and at scale.
As we evolve as a company and continue to deliver on our
vision, “context” is the prevailing concept. It keeps all of us at
Sitecore focused on a single goal: to allow marketers to “own
the experience” to win loyal customers—the ultimate goal of
every company and brand.
Michael Seifert is Sitecore’s CEO. A programmer from the age
of 11, he started his first IT company at age 15. He completed
his Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Human
Computer Interaction (Copenhagen University) and went
on to pursue advanced technical work with several Silicon
Valley entrepreneurial companies in the US. In 2001, along
with four fellow technologists, Michael founded Sitecore and
introduced a product with functionality and appeal that was
completely disruptive in the market and which has evolved to
be a market leader today.
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White paper // Welcome to the era of context marketing
About Sitecore
Sitecore is the global leader in experience management
software that enables context marketing. The Sitecore®
Experience Platform™ manages content, supplies contextual
intelligence, and automates communications, at scale. It
empowers marketers to deliver content in context of how
customers have engaged with their brand, across every
channel, in real time. More than 4,600 customers—including
American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, easyJet, and
L’Oréal—trust Sitecore for context marketing to deliver the
personalized interactions that delight audiences, build loyalty,
and drive revenue.
Visit us at sitecore.net
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