Contextual Marketing – The Real Business in the Virtual World
What is contextual marketing?
With advent and increasing popularity of the internet online marketing has become the trend of the day. Contextual marketing is one such online marketing model wherein people are provided with targeted advertising. This is based on their recent browsing behavior or the terms they search for on the internet.
Why does this type of advertising works?
These benefits include of contextual advertising include:
• When ads are tied to the users’ interests, they can view only those ads which are of their use and interest.
• Using contextual marketing advertisers decrease the user annoyance as only things of their interest appear on their screens.
• This helps to increase click through as well as conversion rates.
• For example, Google’s AdSense program is a simple version of contextual marketing. Advertisements are displayed on the basis of the terms used for user searches.
Why is contextual marketing the real business?
Contextual advertising can open up growth opportunities even for companies that are not able to form ongoing digital relationships, which support the existence of a successful destination web site. These companies include the producers of consumer packaged goods, infrequent service providers and single-product companies. Many innovative companies of the world are adjusting their marketing strategies in order to take benefits of the ubiquitous internet.
In Japan, the wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo has recently signed up 10 million consumers- an amazing number for its recently launched i-mode service. Contextual marketing the real business is also been used by I-mode in Japan. It offers to its’ subscribers wireless access to ski-condition reports, hotel reservations systems, restaurant locaters, online auctions, and many other services. Although some of the information is available on the internet, but by using i-mode, users can tee up, to receive information of their interest, at a time when they want it. Thus I-mode has successfully used contextual marketing for promoting their product to a huge mass of people.
The above example clearly suggests that the internet will greatly expand the marketers’ opportunities for reaching their customers. Simultaneously, it will also destabilize the concepts of traditional marketing including the “four Ps” i.e. price, product, positioning, and promotion. Even with all the above changes there is one thing that will remain constant with the passing times and that is the marketing goal. It was, is and will remain the same: to deliver the correct product to the right user at the appropriate time.
