This session was so amazing. It demanded its own blog. Here’s our recap:

The New Era of Contextual Marketing

Mathew Sweezey, Author, Principal of Marketing Insights, Salesforce @msweezey

New technology killed the former king, and in today’s age we have seen this play out in our sale and marketing roles. The former king of revenue generation for any business is now only 20% of their former glory. In our modern world of limitless information, easy access, and instant feedback 80% of the buying cycle will be in the hands of marketers by 2020. Learning how to deal with the shifts from the 10/90 sales and marketing mix to the new 80/20 marketing and sales mix takes a new set of foundations, fresh approaches to selling, and deeper understanding of the new consumer.

In this session, we learned the new tenets of sales and marketing, the new roles we must fill and better practices for converting your department into the revenue machine of the future.

Takeaways:

When thinking about where we are going, we must think about where we came from. There were only 5 media channels in the golden era, now there are over 200+ media channels. Marketing was originally founded on the following concepts:

• Breaking though was about hype, sex and flash
• Be top of mind
• Minimize waste
• Sell the feeling
• Convert, sell and sell

In our modern environment, top of mind doesn’t even exist anymore, humans have offloaded memory to devices. Our media is not longer limited. By 2020, connected devices outnumber humans 7 to 1. When thinking of context, you need to think of it in terms of is it available, personal, authentic and purposeful. Good context does the following:

• Context builds on itself.
• Context is to the moment, and changes by the moment.
• Only the most contextual message will be engaged with.

Things to consider:

• If your message is not available, you have no shot.
• We looked at 1 million visitor sessions across hundreds of sites, the average pageviews per session – 1.7, which means we must provide the user exactly what they’re searching for the moment they are searching for it.

When we speak about context needing to be authentic, it means more than just being genuine, it means helping people have the experience they believe they should be having.

Our now infinite media environment requires us to think and act fast, our model of research is now in batch mode. We find, save and then decide if we’ll read later. Our content must address the question the user is having, not just the answer.

In order to keep up with the new media environment, we must do stage based marketing and be purposeful. Purposeful is helping people fulfill the desire/reason they are there in the first place. Purpose is the moment. Purpose can be found by interviews. Ask 9 people via phone these few questions and you’ll get it. What were you for? Did it meet your expectations? Have you seen better? As a communication professional, you have to communicate with people.

Key moments to consider:

• They land on your site – What was the purpose of the landing?
• The average micro journey lasts 70 seconds across 4 websites.

In conclusion: We live in a totally new media environment, everything we were taught is no longer true. We are competing against infinite media. We are in a limitless world. Context is to the moments, moments matter more than ever.

Some fun facts:

• 51% of the time a CEO’s picks up their mobile device is because they are bored.
• Social media is the modern day smoke break.

Click the link below to see Mathew’s presentation:

New Era of Context – Digital Summit