If you read enough marketing publications, you’d think it was all about tactics and analytics. Deploy a campaign through your channel(s) of choice, track performance, and refine based on the results. Sounds simple, right? The trouble, my fellow marketers, is the lack of context.

Context refers to the demographic and psychographic state of your potential customer. Physically, where are your potential customers when they receive and view your content and offer? What are they doing? What’s on their mind?

Answering these questions might seem like it requires enlisting the aid of Nostradamus or Edgar Cayce, but that’s not necessarily true.

RFM and AIDA are both lauded tools for determining a potential customer’s place in the buying cycle. Position in the buying cycle can shed some light into the context of the buyer. Other information like geolocation, marital status, income level, etc. can also help you create content that is contextually relevant to your potential customer.

Think about a newsletter that discusses the concerns of new parents. By understanding the context of their daily lives, it becomes easier to create content and offers that are relevant to those new parents. Hubspot has a great post about this topic. Check it out here.

The point is that tactics and analytics can only take you so far. If you remove, or neglect, the human element of marketing, you won’t see the performance you need. Context is that human element.

By understand the context in which your marketing is received and consumed, you’ll be better equipped to create engaging marketing that generates new customers and drives customer loyalty. Which is, at the end of the day, marketing’s ultimate objective.

I’ll leave you with a simple breakdown:

• Tactics – the tools that get you where you want to go.
• Analytics – the tools that tell you how far you’ve gone, and how long till you get there.
• Context – the frame of reference that guides offer and content creation.

Do you factor customer context into your marketing strategy? If so, have you seen success?

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