The Relevance of Relevance
Imagine hearing Mozart on your way to war, or Metallica half way through a spa retreat. Regardless of how beautiful, brilliant or engaging you find the music in isolation, the way it jars with your situation is likely to recast it as at-best-irrelevant, if not an active pain in the hole.
Now, marketing content is not art, but it is like art in that it is entirely subjective. And therefore, it isn’t hugely helpful to talk about ‘engaging content’. Of course, some content is definitely ‘better’ than other content – better crafted, better conceived, better aligned with a brand’s identity. But fundamentally, how engaging content is boils down to context – its relevance to an individual at a particular time and place.
This isn’t a point of pedantry – customer engagement is really important and really powerful. According to new research from Super Office, highly engaged customers buy 90% more frequently, spend 60% more per purchase, and have 3x the annual value. And so, understanding how to make more of them seems worth pursuing.
Consumers are more interested in offers relevant to their contextual goal than they are about price
The problem most brands find is that engagement – i.e. attention – is in increasingly short supply and increasingly difficult to leverage as exponentially more content is produced and exponentially more competitors seek to steal their market share. Indeed, 50 percent of customers say they will take their business elsewhere if a business doesn't anticipate their needs – and that problem is only exacerbated by the ease with which consumers can now switch online.
For a while, the answer seemed simple: pump out as much content as possible and surely some of it will stick; problem is, the same argument could be made of monkeys and faeces and walls. It’s a 20th century solution for a uniquely 21st century problem. People are used to being bombarded with messages that are of no interest to them, the novelty of being online has worn off, and they really just want to be left alone if you have nothing useful to say.
No one is searching ‘blocked drains in Slough’ for the craic
Research at Boostify Labs has been reiterating what seems obvious – consumers are increasingly sick of irrelevant content, uninteresting messages and irrelevance - period. But what we’ve also been finding – perhaps more shockingly – is that consumers are actually more interested in relevance, in personalised content and info/offers directly related to their contextual goals than they are about price. Who’d have thunked it!
Think of SEO: what is it if not a battle for perceived relevance? That’s why Google can charge so much for its advertising, and why AdWords is so effective: it has built in relevance. No one is searching ‘blocked drains in Slough’ for the craic. Consumers don’t need more messages, more content or more products to choose from – they need relevance, preferably sorted for them to choose from at ease.
Customer Experience has to trump our personal anxieties about appearing to have done our job. Our job is to provide results
Forbes estimates that roughly $16 billion is lost annually on marketers simply using the wrong channels or poor strategy. And that’s on top of effectively targeted content which is irrelevant: I’ve bought a new bag, but still am bombarded with ads from other bag companies; I’ve already subscribed to pay-walled news, but they continue to seduce me with introductory discounts. And that’s on top of all the classic problems of weak positioning, unpersuasive copy and all the rest.
So we need to do two things: invest as much energy as we can in finding ways to deliver the most relevant content possible, and be willing to avoid serving content if we think it might be perceived as irrelevant. This second part can be scary, but the fact is Customer Experience has to trump our personal anxieties about appearing to have done our job. Our job is to provide results.
