Location Based Marketing is evolving

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.fooddive.com/news/the-growth-of-location-based-super-marketing/359011/

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/04/prweb12638835.htm
http://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

Facebook can help you buy anything (except friends)

Facebook just announced that it is acquiring a personalized shopping search engine called TheFind, which has over 15 million current users.

TheFind touts its search engine as the only way to search everything available for sale on the internet, and can match even very vague terms like "white sweater" with a vast array of relevant options.

TheFind also has localization features, meaning that it can return relevant results within a specified geographic area in case the user prefers to buy in-person. Since TheFind aggregates prices across the universe of online and brick and mortar vendors, the user doesn't need to traverse multiple websites (or physical locations) to find the best deal.

Facebook plans on shutting down the search engine capabilities, but rest assured that they have some clever plans for monetizing this technology. Most likely, this will involve better contextualization of posts and messages that Facebook users generate to make advertisements even more hyper-targeted than they already are.

Perhaps in anticipation of this acquisition, Facebook recently launched an ad sales team with the express purpose of promoting specific items that advertisers are trying to push. There's no doubt that TheFind strengthens Facebook's ability to pitch this service to advertisers, as well as charge a significant premium versus

Although Facebook ads may now potentially become even more creepy than they already are, this acquisition should be a win-win-win. It's win for consumers, who should receive more relevant and better offers; win for advertisers, who can better match ads with the right consumers; and a HUGE win for Facebook, which should be able to further mark up its ad inventory.

Sources:
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-buys-shopping-search-engine-thefind-2015-3

http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/13/to-boost-commerce-in-ads-facebook-buys-and-shuts-down-shopping-site-thefind/#lKyTXd:9NJM

Location-based Mobile Marketing Trends

Use of smart phones to shop and access information about different products and services is no longer a trend but a part of most of our lives. According to a survey conducted across a sample, one of the trends that clearly emerged was increasing number of smartphone users are keeping their mobile phones near to them nearly for the whole day. The day starts and ends for most of us with checking email, meetings etc. on our mobile phones.

According to Pew report, more than three quarters of smartphone users use location based services. Consumers are found to be very receptive to location based tracking which is widely adopted, irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, education and income. Location-targeted campaign spending is dramatically growing as studies show that location-targeted campaign spending at the local level would account for $5.8B in mobile ad spending by 2016, up from $664M in 2012 while the whole location-targeted campaign market (national and local) would grow from $1.6B in 2012 to $9.9B in 2016.

Social Media is also increasingly adding the information with most of the posts, say photos or a simple textual post, with the location information from where it is being sent. This wealth of information is being especially used by retail giants to mine and provide a customized local ad or promotion specific to a person. This trend is also growing and expected to grow even further.

But, often the location based marketing has faced many challenges – the two key ones related to privacy and security of data. This has been perhaps one of the key reasons many people including teenagers do not select location tracking on their mobile phones. But the trend has changed dramatically especially in last two to three years with more people ready to share their location. This has been primarily possible due to the related practices evolving especially asking for consent to share the location information of the customer before actually sharing it. Equally important is the continuous enhancements in securing this customer data as it contains personal information based on the customer behavior.  Accurate Customer Behavior Information is something virtually every business entity today especially retail giants would like to acquire, mine and subsequently use to their advantages especially for targeted marketing.

The diagram below encapsulates the discussed trend of location based services being used on mobile phones.

 

 

References / Sources:

http://www.biakelsey.com/Company/Press-Releases/130122-New-BIA-Kelsey-Report-Emphasizes-Localization-Opportunity-for-National-Mobile-Ad-Campaigns.asp

http://www.pewinternet.org

http://www.onlinemarketing-trends.com/2011/09/ther-state-of-location-based-mobile.html

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtdQ3CrrsuM1yMU-Z0-k-rxtjvQpCA62_iobulbTkz7jbS43hdSz1WPHqunVeiDK7v8-ispmXCjn-yT2Ipvw6cy9-2SIiBF01xipuqNmX6q6JBr15qYQFB_ARTxf57lpf7-jcfrw/s1600/232108.PNG

 

 

 

Location-Based Mobile Marketing is Where It's at for Consumers

The ability for mobile devices to track and report a person’s location in real time with a reliable degree of accuracy has come into its own. The tendency of consumers to use that feature is increasing in popularity, as well.

“74% of adult smartphone owners ages 18 and older say they use their phone to get directions or other information based on their current location,” according to the Pew Institute

Use of a geolocation feature is more than a nice-to-have option on a smartphone or tablet — its use has become a routine part of a consumer’s daily life and representing a significant market share of the U.S. buying population as U.S. smartphone penetration at 74% and rising.

Geo-Location Tied To Consumer Behavior

What’s especially interesting to marketers is that, aside from seeking directions to specific place, geolocation-enabled activities are most often directly related to consumer-related behavior. Whether it’s looking for a good place to grab a drink or researching a specific product in a retail store, customers have come to rely on their mobile devices as vital sources of information upon which they make an increasing number of decisions about how to spend their time and money.

Trend reports also show an interesting tipping point, consumers are now more likely to “check out” information that’s related to their current location rather than share or “check in” with their current status.

Checking Out Info, Rather Than Checking In

 There is a decrease in activity for check-in services such as Foursquare and Facebook and an increase in consumers’ preference for marketers to nudge or push relevant, personalized content to their devices in real time. Alert-based ads and product information fit this appetite for content well and provide genuine value to consumers.

In fact, a whopping 72% of consumers say they will respond to calls-to-action in marketing messages they receive within sight of the retailer. With only 23% of retail marketers using some type of geotargeted data in their mobile marketing, there is a huge opportunity to give customers what they want when they want it.

Data-driven geolocation notifications represent a major evolution point from in-store displays that encouraged users to text to opt-in to sweeps or promotions or email promos delivered based on a promotional calendar.

Incentives With Alerts

Some of the most popular mobile geolocation-centered campaigns involve couponing, but not all. Special gifts, alerts to flash sales and early access are also popular incentives that tend to have the pleasant side effect of driving customer loyalty. Many of the most effective incentive-based campaign include some type of alert.

For those marketers that are ahead of the location-based marketing curve (as many fast food marketers are), there’s a new, more hard-hitting strategy known as geo-conquesting. This is a form of geo-fencing where marketers target competitors’ locations with their own aggressive offers. This is another reason for marketers to plan and implement a solid location-based mobile marketing strategy — if they don’t, they risk losing market share to mobile-savvy competitors.

Source: www.marketingland.com by Lynn Baus