Context in Marketing Campaigns, Mediums and Measurements

Ask a veteran marketer how marketing has changed in the last decade and many comments will center on output. Certainly, the mechanism by which we send messages has evolved dramatically, but so too has the way audiences receive messages.

Today, marketing is not just communicating with a prospective buyer. It is communicating a distracted prospective buyer, who is bombarded by messages, and who has access to ample information on any given topic from a range of other sources.

This is why context in marketing is so important – and that’s the theme for this week’s Unscripted Marketing links [UML]. As it is every week, I offer insight around three articles or stories I’ve vetted and recommend for your perusal.

1) Context marketing campaigns

The context in which marketing messages are presented influences audience perception. That’s according to new YouGov survey (PDF results) as reported by Ayaz Nanji for MarketingProfs: Are Ads Adjacent to Offensive Content Viewed as Endorsing That Content?

“Some 30% of respondents say when they see a brand being advertised alongside offensive material, they believe the advertiser is somehow endorsing that material; 20% do not see it as an endorsement, 33% say the brand may or may not be endorsing the material, and 16% have no opinion.”

The inability to account for context is, I believe, one of the biggest knocks against advertising at scale, including remarketing. It’s not just offensive material either, but the tragedy we often find in news. As a voracious reader, I’m often astonished at how brands allow publishers to thrust a video ad for their product in the middle of news article covering a tragic event.

2) Context in mediums

A new study by eMarketer demonstrates just how distracted we are becoming: US Adults Now Spend 12 Hours 7 Minutes a Day Consuming Media. One-half of every day consuming media sounds like a lot, right?

There’s a caveat:

“If someone spends an hour watching TV (for example) and uses a smartphone to surf the web during the same hour, we count this as an hour of usage for each medium, and hence as 2 hours of total media time.”

Even as brands attempt to navigate offensive context, attention is fleeting. In other words, it’s not just how a message is received or where it’s received, but what else people are doing when it’s received.

3) Context in measurements

Good measurements include the flow of traffic, conversions, leads and sales. However, the challenge in B2B marketing is that the buyer’s journey isn’t linear. Marketing needs greater context than numbers moving up or down – an understanding of drivers behind those movements.

An overlooked area is this area is marketing efficiency, as a survey by Contently noted. In a piece titled Too Many Content Marketers Are Making This Metrics Mistake, writer Dillon Baker notes:

“According to a new Contently survey, 69 percent of senior marketers are not tracking metrics related to the speed and efficiency of content creation.”

Why does this matter?

“Every day a piece of content spends in production hurts your ROI. Because every hour a team wastes with an inefficient production process is an hour they could be doing something else to improve the business.”

Efficiency in marketing is going to become increasingly important. This will require building build systems and processes that keep things moving.

Many businesses are so consumed with perfection, it becomes a fixation that grinds productivity to a halt. More than likely, the biggest risk in marketing is that nobody notices at all.

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If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
Revenue Attribution and Proving Value in Marketing [UML]

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