Location based marketing has evolved in last couple of
years. The primary reason is now most of the digital marketing is becoming
synonymous to mobile marketing. The web
traffic on mobile phones is going to overtake that of desktop computers
sometime this year. The use of social media is now dominated on mobile phones.
Various location based apps are primarily applicable only for mobile phones
such as Foursquare.
Location based marketing is already been applied in many
businesses especially few grocery stores such as SafeWay, Macys, Duane Reade
have iBeacons. The primary ways location based marketing helps include:
Mobile Coupons: Mobile
Coupons still continue to be one of the most popular uses for location-based
marketing. Instead of clipping coupons from the newspaper, customers often have
coupons targeted to them based on what store they enter or even where they are
in the store. According to eMarketer, in 2014, approximately one in four mobile
users were predicted to use a mobile coupon, and that number is growing each
year.
Direction to
promotions and discounts: Similar to offering coupons, location-based
marketing helps in highlighting a current promotion or discount. For example,
when a customer using the Donky app walks into the produce department, he or
she might receive a message advertising a sale on oranges. Knowing about the
promotion, often that customer might stroll over to the oranges and pick some
up which he or she might not have done before. Thus, it helps to personalize
the customer's experience, resulting in boost of sales for the store due to the
targeted ads that location-based marketing provided.
Increased store app
downloads and engagement: A grocery store may be one step ahead of many of
its competitors if it has its own app. For example, Wegmans' mobile app uses a
tool that is similar to but not exactly the same as location-based marketing.
The app has a built-in shopping list function that helps customers find the
items they need by organizing them by the aisle of the store that the products
are located on. If customers have good reason to download and use a store’s
app, the more likely they are to download and engage with a brand.
The last aspect is especially of importance. Mobile location advertising technology firm
xAd last week introduced Blueprints as a solution aimed at giving media buyers an
assurance that their messages resulted in a store visit or sale. Blueprint is a
new technology that automates the creation of the most accurate place data for
location-based mobile marketing. According to xAd, Blueprint’s technology
derives place data based on physical boundaries of business locations as
opposed to the traditional navigational system data that captures the area
around a street address. This is particularly important considering businesses
are actually set back from the street.
Marketers relying on attribution models based on actual
store visits that is usually based on proximity data from navigational systems
can lead to misdirected or under-allocated spend because those data sources
aren’t specific enough. Update: Google clarified to Marketing Land that it has
a large operations team that draws the geometry of stores based on Google Earth
and Street View data and that the company surveys stores and does Wi-Fi scans
to accurately collect data on where store visits come from.
With Blueprints, xAd says it already has perimeters marked
for more than 12 million business locations in the US. Blueprints uses a visual
mapping algorithm that automates 70 percent of the place creation and updates
to keep up with the over 130,000 new address listings and changes processed by
the U.S. Postal Service each day. Blueprints also automatically processed
in-store polygons for roughly 4,000 malls worldwide, including 1,900 in the US
and 200 in the UK.
XAd claims more than 10 billion ad requests come through its
platform daily. It includes companies such as Denny’s, Outback Steakhouse and
Toyota Scion among its customers that use the platform to deliver
location-based messaging to consumers. I am sure this new innovation of Blueprint
would certainly be one of the major thrusts in the location based marketing
this year.
References:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/04/prweb12638835.htmhttp://www.streetinsider.com/Press+Releases/xAd+shares+the+future+of+location+marketing+with+the+release+of+Blueprints%E2%84%A2/10440683.html
http://www.streetinsider.com/Press+Releases/xAd+shares+the+future+of+location+marketing+with+the+release+of+Blueprints%E2%84%A2/10440683.html
