Back in 1996, Bill Gates wrote that on the internet, content is king. His article is about content providers getting paid for their work. In this perspective he states that the definition of content on the internet is a very broad one. He’s talking about the internet as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products - a marketplace of content.

His catchy phrase has become very popular ever since.

Some years ago Seth Godin said content marketing is the only marketing left. Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers.

It’s a no-brainer that for content marketing, quality content is important. But in todays marketing it’s not just great content that matters. A marketeer wants to know how, when, where and to whom they should deliver the content. They call out that context is king, and sometimes refer to it as context marketing.

To me this kind of marketing is about evolving from mass marketing to more personalized, a more tailored one-to-one marketing. It’s about optimizing the human interactions by profiling and segmenting your customers, leads or prospects. It has little to do with context, it’s still regular content marketing but more tailored.

To be capable however to do a more one-to-one marketing, you’ll need to collect your customer interaction data and build customer profiles. To do so, attract interactions with quality content marketing and track and collect contextualized interaction data. It’s the context of the collected data that will prove to be indispensable for deriving real customer insights and building customer profiles relevant for one-to-one marketing.

And that is why in my opinion, context is indeed king.

Context: Context marketing is the new content marketing

Context marketing is about delivering the right message, to the right person, via the right medium, at the right place and at the right time.