Content is King, but Context is Queen

Content Marketing. As Bill Gates once said, content is king. And while no one debates the truth behind content’s powerful role in business, there’s another piece to add to the puzzle.

Queen Context.

She’s the yin to King Content Marketing’s yang, and without her, we hit a wall. Because content needs to focus solely on the intended audience, you may find less-than-stellar results without pre-determining the right context.

Who do you speak to with your content marketing?

Who does your content marketing provide real and tangible value for?

Given the answer to those two questions, what kind of content packs the most powerful punch?

Therein lays the power of context.

Context in content marketing serves as the demarcation line that separates the powerful messages from those that fall flat. Without the right focus in your tone, language choices, and overall message, you risk seeing your content marketing falling into the wrong hands.

What constitutes the “wrong hands?” Content without context means that the reader shrugs his or her shoulders, and stops reading without anything but a yawn of indifference.

And apathy is the pits in the content marketing world. But does lack of context actually produce nonchalance? Yes, because a lack of audience focus creates white-washed, re-hashed material.

In fact, it’s borderline insulting to the audience.

Here are just a few ways to put a little more targeting into your message, so that you know your particular audience will receive it and react to it.

• Hook with a headline that provides real world scenarios to which your target market can relate. Give them something that could actually happen, an actionable headline that reads something such as… “I Stood on Top of Mount Kilimanjaro, and I Couldn’t Believe My Luck.”

• Deliver more than one kind of media, so that readers won’t feel as if the content is the same because it looks the same. In other words, don’t send 10 videos in a row. Shake things up with a white paper or an infographic.

• Offer a new angle or opinion on an existing topic. Imagine for a moment that you’re a teacher. The last thing you want is to read 80 papers on one subject. So when you offer a new take on an older subject, you’ll find your audience reading in head-nodding agreement.

• Experience is the most useful tool in content marketing. Personal experience, that is. Tell your personal story, and show why you’re writing about the given subject. This will provide oodles of context that it takes to make readers connect with your content.

So now comes the big question: how do you create the right context? Since marrying content and context is all about creating the best atmosphere for your audience, here are 3 factors to consider…

Timing counts.

Let’s say a segment of your list doesn’t buy a product offer. The kicker is that you thought that group would especially benefit from it. While that’s probably too, the timing may have been off.

Imagine this group just bought a $1300 training session from you. And 1 week later, you offer a similar training session for $1200. In this way, the content has fallen in to the wrong hands.

The solution: get your marketing done in advance if you can, but space out its delivery appropriately. After all, your customers can only take so much at once.

Assess the current situation.

It’s always a good plan to know what’s happening with your customers. Not necessarily in the sense of weddings, babies, and what they had for breakfast, but what’s happening in their marketplace.

If there have been mass layoffs, now’s probably not the time to offer your balloon animal service. On the flipside, if sales are good for your market, it wouldn’t be a good idea to offer an introductory coaching course.

When you know the current situation, you can react to it with the perfect, in-context content marketing.

Know your market beforehand. Ask questions.

Market research enables you to react at a moment’s notice when something goes awry. But it also prevents meltdowns from happening in the first place. This rule especially applies in for content/context.

When you know your market well, you’ll establish an atmosphere that resonates with them; you’ll know what kind of content to send; and you’ll know exactly when to send it.

For content with the right context, check out our Copywriting Services!

 

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