Context is for Kings

With context, there’s a larger picture.

I was recently talking to someone about the very crucial role of context in marketing and when he threw “content is king” in my face, I threw something equally interesting back at him. A phrase I had first heard on Star Trek: Discovery. “Context is for Kings”. Actually, this conversation never happened in real life. It only ever happened in my head, I just needed that scenario to provide a bit of context.

Why is context so important?

Well, the simple explanation is that humans are more likely to react or respond to the context of a thing than the thing itself. For example, if you walk into a room full of your friends and one of them starts to narrate an incident in which they were almost swindled, you are more likely to relate with that story if you have ever been almost swindled than if you have never been in that situation. The fact that you can relate to that experience makes their story a lot more relevant to you.

But why is this newsletter important then?

The major reason why I wrote this is that I strongly believe in the value of context in marketing. Marketing, on its own, can accomplish any number of growth objectives, and according to HubSpot, Content Marketing brings in three times as many leads as traditional marketing. Yet, context marketing does a whole lot more. Marketers who are ambitious to do the most understand how important context is for their communications objectives.

How do we bring context into marketing?

For marketing to be contextually relevant to people, it has to consider personal information. Unlike with content marketing where you are simply interested in whether or not the target audience is male or female, B2B or B2C, with context marketing a lot more is at play.

To establish the context in your marketing, you have to consider things like the form of content that your target audience prefers, their preferred channels for consuming content, their industry, the time they generally go online to consume content and simple things like their pain points, and whether or not they use a competitor’s product. These things help you form a more compelling, personalized message that speaks to the particular need of your TA and makes it easier for them to connect with your content generally.

Context makes marketing more human, more personal, and more likely to win over customers. Where there is context, it is easier to establish how a solution or product benefits a potential user. With context, it is easier to show the potential user the ways in which the product solves their immediate pain points in fewer words.

So, content is definitely king. But context is for kings.