Contextual marketing is defined as to communicate with consumers based on contextual information analysis with the support of mobile internet and contextual technology forces. The purpose is to stimulate consumers’ context-aware and guide the consumption behavior. More and more companies have realized the advantage of contextual marketing and brought it into the business model innovation. It has promoted the practical exploration of contextual marketing, and the related theoretical study is still in an initial stage. It is a rapidly growing research area in recent years. This paper reviews the related foreign literature on contextual marketing, and analyzes the conceptual connotation of contextual marketing from the perspectives of environmental response, contextual analysis and customer experience. Meanwhile, the essential characteristics of contextual marketing are summarized, including situation dependency, mobility and personalization, intelligent adaptation and connection. The theoretical construction of contextual marketing operation research focuses on the contextual technology forces that influence the operation of contextual marketing, including mobile devices, big data, sensors, social media and positioning system. Based on that, the contextual marketing operation mode includes multi-level marketing objects of content, context and meaning, and pays attention to the synchronous collaborative allocation of contextual marketing stimuli online and offline. Compared with the traditional marketing mode, contextual marketing has advantages in terms of operation space-time dimension, marketing function and value creation, and is also different from the general internet marketing. Current research on the value of contextual marketing to consumers mainly includes two aspects: one is the contextual sensory cognition research in the internet environment; the other is the value creation of contextual interactive communication, including the form of it, the supportive technology model and the value creation mechanism of contextual interactive communication on consumers’ contextual perceived value and communication performance. The value of contextual marketing to enterprises can be summarized into two aspects: one is identifying consumers, consumer requirements in context, and potential market segments based on contextual analysis; the other is reposition products and services based on contextual adjacency moves, promoting continuous innovation of products and services in new contextual dimensions. Contextual marketing has broad research prospects in age of mobile interconnection, so the future research directions that deserve attention include three aspects: the first one is the market segmentation method based on context and its effect evaluation; the second one is the contextual marketing mix model’s situational design in different industries, and its influence mechanisms on consumers’ psychology and behavior; the last one is the contextual intelligent sensory cognition mechanism and its impact on consumers’ behavior in the mobile internet environment.