Context

What makes up the context

• The channel: a search result is read by someone looking for an answer; a social post interrupts someone looking for something else; an email arrives from a sender the reader already knows.
• The device and the moment: a phone on the bus in the morning, a laptop at the office at noon, a tablet on the sofa in the evening. Attention and patience differ with each.
• What came before: the search that brought the person, the ad they clicked, whether they have bought from you already. See search intent and lifecycle stages.
• The world around: the season, the weather, the news, a holiday or a payday.

Example

A heating and air-conditioning installer runs the same ad all year: “Air conditioners from €590 with installation”. In July the ad has a clickthrough rate of 3.1% and brings enquiries at €12 each. In October the same ad, shown to the same audience, gets 0.6% and €55 per enquiry. Nothing in the ad changed; the context did.

In October the installer switches to heating with the same units: “Heat your home with your air conditioner, from about €0.15 an hour”. Clickthrough rises to 2.4% and an enquiry costs €16 again. The landing page changes with the ad, so a person who clicked on heating does not arrive at a page about cooling.

Why it matters for a business

A message that worked can stop working without being changed, and the usual reaction is to blame the budget or the platform. A change of context explains it more often. Writing for the context means a few well-aimed versions of a message rather than one text everywhere: one for people searching, one for people scrolling, one for existing customers, each leading to a page that continues the same thought.

Context also sets the limits of personalisation. An email that knows what someone bought is helpful; an ad that follows them around with the product they have just bought is not. The line is whether the reader would expect you to know what you know.

What to ask

• Do our messages exist in versions for search, for social media and for existing customers, or is it one text everywhere?
• Do our results change with the season, the day of the week or the hour, and do our messages change with them?
• Does the page someone lands on continue the message of the ad they clicked?
• Which of our messages would a customer find intrusive rather than helpful?

The same message sounds different in a search engine, on social media and in an email. Fitting it to the context is part of our digital marketing work.