What do you need to know about Location based marketing?

Let’s start right from the basics — what is location based marketing?

They may include information about the deals of the day from a near-by business or include a purchasing incentive, such as a buy one, get one offer or a discount coupon code. The objective is to capture the user’s attention and turn him into a customer.

Location-based marketing relies heavily on the internet access and GPS services of smartphones. Every smartphone owner is a potential customer for location-based marketing. The technology behind location based marketing relies on geofencing, a software feature that uses triggers to send alerts when a device enters a pre-determined geographic area.

One of the predominant reasons why location-based marketing is a popular choice among marketers and consumers is because irrelevant ads are completely eliminated. Location-based marketing has been proven to be more effective in enhancing marketing strategies and an increase in ROI.

Location intelligence equips businesses with crucial contextual insight to the audience information that they have collected. These contextual insights can be drawn from a wide array of sources that bring about depth and diversity to the processes, ranging from smartphones to wearables to IoT devices to WiFi routers to beacons to telephone network providers.

For instance, location allows businesses to map consumer behaviours and habits — such as stores that they may frequent, what places interest them, what time they commute — to boost conversions. This enables to fine-tune marketing strategies by tying together the right time, right place and right channel to target the consumer which also allows marketers to personalise their communication.

Retailers are gradually adopting location-based marketing tools and with the rise of m-Commerce now, a huge surge is expected in their acceptance.

Let’s start by understanding what tools and technology are used for location-based marketing —

Geo-targeting is defined as the practice of delivering content to a consumer based on his/her geographic location. This can either be done on the city or zip code level via IP address or device ID, or on a more granular level via GPS signals, geo-fencing, and more.

Geo-targeting enables businesses to send tailored messages to their target customers in a specific geographic area. It is important to consider people from different locations have different interests and needs. Online and offline retailers or supermarket outlets in various locations are already leveraging this technology for better customer targeting. Small brick and mortar retailers can capitalise on this by using it to understand the local demographics better.

Geofencing is defined as the practice of using global positioning (GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) to define a geographic boundary. Once this virtual barrier has been established, it allows businesses to set up triggers that send a text message, email alert, or app notification to a consumer’s mobile device when he/she enters (or exits) the given geographic area.

With this technology, offline retailers can establish a virtual perimeter around their stores. This is so that whenever a customer enters the set perimeter, this triggers a message on their mobile devices about the day’s offer and other relevant information about that retailer. For example, a customer may walk into his regular coffee shop, he may receive a message on his smartphone of a special offer for a snack on that particular day, and due to being informed of that offer, he may opt to buy avail that offer, although he may have not intended to do so, initially.

The latest entry to location-based marketing is —

Beacons are Bluetooth low energy devices that retailers can install in their stores to target customers with high accuracy, in specific micro-locations: aisle by aisle, store entrance and exit.

Beacons was introduced by Apple in 2013, with the release of iBeacon and was followed up with and Android version in the form of Eddystone by Google in 2015 and other mobile platforms.

Beacons work in tandem with specific apps installed on a customer’s phone, tab or a smartwatch, and trigger specific messages or actions as they walk by a micro-location in the store where the beacon is. For instance, walking by a particular product aisle will trigger a push notification about any offer on that product, or as the customer walks out of the store, payment is automatically made by a pre-selected payment channel — these are some of the incredible actions that are made available using beacons.

These advanced technologies are certainly taking mobile marketing to a whole new level. These tools are allowing store owners to provide customers a highly personalised shopping experience.

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