The current scenario of B2B marketing and online sales has gone beyond the confines of enticement and persuasion. Contextual information, Gartner maintains, is a crucial enterprise trend of 2011 slated to be a $12 billion global market by 2012. The legendary marketing pundit Gary Vaynerchuk had once remarked, somewhat portentously “Context is the new Content.”
The tribe of car salesmen actually provides a stark peek into the world of contextually charged interactions. A successful car salesperson is one who is an avid observer of customer needs. He gauges a prospect’s financial limit by the car (vintage, sporty, economy or luxury) used for travel and introduces various models accordingly. Picking up minute verbal cues and body language hints from his interactions with a prospect, the salesman consolidates the available context to drive a sale.
Just like in Quantum Physics, where the attributes of subatomic particles can only be comprehended in a dynamic context, the world of B2B marketing content derives its engagement value from the user context. The objective of visitor engagement is easily accomplished by a B2B marketers through its contextually aligned content. The ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach in case of web content stunts the possibilities of meaningful and lasting customer engagements.
Customer context gains in importance like never before. The landing page optimization campaigns offer a good instance where context plays a critical role. There are indeed no intuitive reasons for the success of a well-crafted landing page except the fact that the audience was pre-selected and was connected to a site that was meant to be totally relevant to it at that moment.
The swift growth of location-specific services like Gowalla and Foursquare has increased the significance of an individual’s contextual information while using mobile apps. Customized searches on Google are already a reality and news portals are quick to align content delivery based upon visitor location.
The wonderland of a retail store provides one of the most interesting sites to observe the interplay of contextual forces upon buying intent and behavior. These supermarket chains are in fact one of the most controlled ecosystems on planet Earth with shrewd marketers keeping a keen eye on shopper responses and interactions. Disguising themselves as customers they follow visitors in stores recording their reactions and exploiting any available opportunity to recommend a product discreetly.
B2B web context conceptually indicates the situation, framework, environment or background surrounding a visitor’s interactions with a corporate website. It is rather the behavioral framework of a prospect that counts most while harnessing the value of any B2B marketing strategy. Today, prospects have become more knowledgeable and adopt non-linear routes during buying journeys. B2B context provides an individual focus in contrast to the mass-market approach often espoused by businesses.
B2B visitors are an upshot of their environment and never really subsist in vacuum. In addition to location, occupation, culture and history, the customer needs, preferences, experiences and behaviors equally define the online context. Contextualizing the content to each visitor’s situation- social graph, online profile and online interactions offers a straight path to rich customer experiences and positive business results.
B2B marketers can use context information of online visitors in a big way to influence their buying behavior. The key sources of consumer context information available to B2B marketers include a person’s personal/professional information, location, preferences, owned devices and social networking information. Strategic use of such context information improves the quality of consumer interactions and shortens buying cycles. The result of information-driven and qualitative website interactions can impact top and bottom lines of a company. The real success of a B2B website lies in adaptive capabilities to offer users with requisite information without them soliciting it explicitly. The omens are all very true, and context is the new god of B2B marketing.
By Guest Blogger: Dr. Sanjay Joshi
The tribe of car salesmen actually provides a stark peek into the world of contextually charged interactions. A successful car salesperson is one who is an avid observer of customer needs. He gauges a prospect’s financial limit by the car (vintage, sporty, economy or luxury) used for travel and introduces various models accordingly. Picking up minute verbal cues and body language hints from his interactions with a prospect, the salesman consolidates the available context to drive a sale.
Just like in Quantum Physics, where the attributes of subatomic particles can only be comprehended in a dynamic context, the world of B2B marketing content derives its engagement value from the user context. The objective of visitor engagement is easily accomplished by a B2B marketers through its contextually aligned content. The ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach in case of web content stunts the possibilities of meaningful and lasting customer engagements.
Customer context gains in importance like never before. The landing page optimization campaigns offer a good instance where context plays a critical role. There are indeed no intuitive reasons for the success of a well-crafted landing page except the fact that the audience was pre-selected and was connected to a site that was meant to be totally relevant to it at that moment.
The swift growth of location-specific services like Gowalla and Foursquare has increased the significance of an individual’s contextual information while using mobile apps. Customized searches on Google are already a reality and news portals are quick to align content delivery based upon visitor location.
The wonderland of a retail store provides one of the most interesting sites to observe the interplay of contextual forces upon buying intent and behavior. These supermarket chains are in fact one of the most controlled ecosystems on planet Earth with shrewd marketers keeping a keen eye on shopper responses and interactions. Disguising themselves as customers they follow visitors in stores recording their reactions and exploiting any available opportunity to recommend a product discreetly.
B2B web context conceptually indicates the situation, framework, environment or background surrounding a visitor’s interactions with a corporate website. It is rather the behavioral framework of a prospect that counts most while harnessing the value of any B2B marketing strategy. Today, prospects have become more knowledgeable and adopt non-linear routes during buying journeys. B2B context provides an individual focus in contrast to the mass-market approach often espoused by businesses.
B2B visitors are an upshot of their environment and never really subsist in vacuum. In addition to location, occupation, culture and history, the customer needs, preferences, experiences and behaviors equally define the online context. Contextualizing the content to each visitor’s situation- social graph, online profile and online interactions offers a straight path to rich customer experiences and positive business results.
B2B marketers can use context information of online visitors in a big way to influence their buying behavior. The key sources of consumer context information available to B2B marketers include a person’s personal/professional information, location, preferences, owned devices and social networking information. Strategic use of such context information improves the quality of consumer interactions and shortens buying cycles. The result of information-driven and qualitative website interactions can impact top and bottom lines of a company. The real success of a B2B website lies in adaptive capabilities to offer users with requisite information without them soliciting it explicitly. The omens are all very true, and context is the new god of B2B marketing.
By Guest Blogger: Dr. Sanjay Joshi
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