How to Provide Connected Experiences in Context

With the explosion of devices and screens available to consumers, people now have unparalleled access to any content they want, including from their favorite brands. This raises the bar and creates an urgency for brands to deliver contextually relevant experiences — regardless of the device, screen, or touchpoint through which a person interacts with a brand during the customer journey. Customer expectations are high — in fact, the bar is continuously being set higher and higher by some of the world’s most successful best-in-class experiences. When people are interacting with the Ubers of the world, they learn to expect seamless movements between all touchpoints and throughout whatever parts of the customer journeys they’re experiencing at those very moments and to be able to pick up at any time wherever they may have left off.

As a marketer, your goal is to remove extraneous things that customers don’t need (or want) to see, leaving them with the kinds of fine-tuned experiences they deserve — even demand! Brands must capitalize on whatever knowledge they can gain about customers and provide contextually relevant content at every point in the customers’ journeys. Doing so creates a high level of value for the customer.

What Is Customer Context?
Context means being relevant at a basic level. When someone visits a brand, a whole set of signals come along with that person. Ideally, a brand is savvy enough to understand digital body language — the set of criteria that helps you to ascertain what the customer is really looking for. You’re trying to discover what that one thing is that the customer would assign the most value to if you could provide it for him.

Context can be very simple things such as customers’ environments. Are customers engaging with your brand on certain browsers? Are they visiting on mobile or on web? You can determine things like the customer’s location, language, time of day of the interaction, and more. And, the more you can learn about a customer’s context, the better opportunity you have to hone in on the thing that’s most valuable to provide that customer with in that very moment.

It’s Important to Gather Customer Data.
Data is a vital element for determining customer context. Data allows you to better know your customer and what his or her specific needs are so that you can provide a connected experience. Acquiring data is imperative to getting the context of your customers right. However, right out of the gate — even if you’re limited on data — you must look for some basic level of insight in the data you have.

You must be able to segment your customers and create some kind of relevant grouping that allows you to make some determinations about each customer’s context. At a basic level, most people expect to be able to interact with brands on the devices that they own. You need to be able to at least accommodate those, and ideally, begin gathering data across those devices so you can optimize experiences.

Make Predictions About Your Customers’ Needs.
Once you begin to gather customer data, you have to be able to also correlate and aggregate data from multiple sources. Centralization is important. You must be able to pull all of the data into one place and then draw conclusions. Machine learning comes into play here. You need machine learning to understand some of the trends in your data and to predict what the next best thing is that you should serve to that customer.

Deliver Contextually Relevant Content.
After you’ve made some predictions based on your data, you’re ready to deliver a relevant, connected experience to the customer. This is where the rubber meets the road, as you construct contextually relevant content for a customer based on the context you’ve been able to determine from your data. Regardless of the interaction touchpoints, you want to give him or her content that’s been personalized. It’s about delivering the user the right brand content at the right time and in the right place.

As we’ve seen, delivering a connected experience in context involves gathering customer data through interactions with your brand and analyzing that data to make predictions about your customers’ needs and desires. Finally, you want to utilize those predictions to deliver contextually relevant content to your customers that meets them wherever they are.

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/provide-connected-experiences-context/