Location-based marketing allows marketers to use a customer’s location data and behaviors to gain more accurate insight into the customer’s offline behaviors, to persistently improve each customer’s mobile app experience.
These insights can be leveraged to maximize a brand’s mobile marketing impact by improving ad targeting to receive greater engagement, allowing for more personalized ad messaging, delivering more relevant offers and recommendations, and driving customers away from the competition, through the customer’s location data.
There are different types of location-based marketing techniques, like:
- Geofencing
- Geotargeting
- Beaconing
- Mobile targeting
- Geo-conquesting
Location-based marketing can foster more meaningful engagements across all touchpoints in the customer lifecycle, so your brand can create magical moments through personalized mobile marketing.
Consumer Targeting by Location
With location-based mobile marketing, your marketing team has access to a customer’s location data, including previous locations and current locations. This data is pulled from the customer’s mobile phone, using AI and machine learning for swift data collection, then is consolidated into powerful insights.
These insights can be used to deliver the most relevant offers, recommendations and messages, through rich news feeds, in-app messages and push notifications, for each individual customer profile.
Location-based marketing supports brands in identifying the right engagements to deliver at the right time for each customer. It gives your brand a clearer perspective as to the customers’ specific needs and desires, and the messaging or promotions that will drive the most desirable behaviors.
Event Marketing by Location
Location-based marketing can prove highly rewarding in event marketing. If your brand is promoting a flash sale or a ‘free donut day’, you can market to people nearby and deliver relevant promotions, based on their proximity to your event.
Encourage passersby to attend your event by delivering engagements that make them aware of the in-store event or today-only offers. If a customer does attend your event, their mobile device will collect this data, and your marketing team can use it to promote future events or recommend similar products based on the offer they redeemed.
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Store-Specific Promotions by Location
Let’s say your grocery store brand has five physical store locations in Florida, but each one is running a different promotion with in-store signage displaying the offer.
Your brand can advertise the promotion through your mobile app to extend your ad reach, using each customer’s location data to determine which grocery store location the customer is closest to, and deliver a store-specific promotional engagement that encourages them to visit your store.
Improved Customer Service by Location
Your brand can elevate its customer service quality, both in-store and through your mobile app, by deriving insights from your customer’s location data.
Mobile order & pay features have helped commerce brands to transform their customer service quality – and location data plays a major role in that transformation. When a customer orders food for pick-up through your mobile app, your brand should know when the customer is on the way to your restaurant and how long it’ll take them to arrive, in order to provide the best possible in-store experience.
Our customizable mobile app solutions feature mobile order & pay for customers to order food and plan a pick-up time that works best for them. This way, your in-store team can ensure that the customer’s food is fresh and available for pick-up as soon as they arrive at your store.
By tracking the customer’s location, your brand can eliminate the guessing game of your customer’s arrival.
Deliver Hyper-Relevant Messaging by Location
Innovation and personalization are paramount in marketing. Your customers want to feel that you know them, you know where they shop, when they shop, and what they shop for – and that requires some innovative solutions.
Location data presents a powerful opportunity for your brand to know where your customer is currently located and where they were previously located. Upsell customers while they’re currently in your store, request feedback about their recent visit, and deliver targeted offers at relevant locations.
Location data can be used to segment audiences and build rich customer profiles to deliver relevant recommendations for products or services available in nearby stores or recently-visited stores.
The Role of Mobile in Location-Based Marketing
Mobile marketing and location-based marketing go hand-in-hand. The evolution of modern marketing is mobile. Mobile phones have made location-based data and insights more accurate than ever before, as people almost always carry their mobile devices with them.
Rewind to the days when immobile desktop computers were the most frequently-used devices and portable mobile phones weren’t quite every customer’s reality yet. Location-based marketing could only go as far as your desktop computer could travel.
When customers were away from their computers, marketers had no way of gaining insight into each customer’s in-store, or offline, behaviors and locations. Marketers didn’t have the tools to determine which grocery store location a customer was visiting, unless they added that information to their user profile.
Nowadays, 85% of Americans own a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011 (source).
In a decade, smartphone ownership has more than doubled. A whopping 85% of your American commerce customers have the ability to download your company’s mobile app and share their location data, so you can improve their customer experience.
Geofencing
Geofencing is a form of location-based marketing that uses virtual perimeters around a certain location to determine whether a customer is in close proximity to a target location.
The ‘geofence’ is the virtual perimeter that surrounds the target location. Your marketing team can create a customized geofence, or it can be dynamically generated through automation, based on a certain distance from the center of the location.
By geofencing an area, your brand can deliver personalized engagements to any person who enters the boundary and is sharing their location data.
This location-based marketing strategy uses a customer’s Wi-Fi, GPS or cellular data to determine when they cross the virtual boundary. This data can be integrated with automation to deliver specific engagements in response to specific behaviors, such as the customer entering or exiting the geolocation.
Geotargeting
Geotargeting takes a similar approach to geofencing, by using a customer’s real-time location and proximity to a target location to deliver relevant messages or notifications.
Your brand can deliver meaningful messages based on the country the customer is in, or on a more granular level, based on the customer’s city, state, zip code or IP address. Delivering messages based on a customer’s geographical location can boost immediate in-store traffic and improve offer redemption rates.
Beaconing
Beaconing is a valuable part of a location-based marketing strategy. This method can significantly improve a customer’s in-store experience by providing highly-relevant content to customers based on their location inside the store.
Beacons are small hardware devices located around a store, to identify where exactly your customer is located in the store, with real-time tracking.
Beaconing uses Bluetooth connection, sending out signals to a customer’s mobile device to identify their location. This technique can be used to send automated, highly-personalized messages to a customer, as they enter or leave a specific area in your store.
Let’s say a customer just walked into your department store. The first beacon by the entrance can identify your customer and deliver an automated welcome message or promote a service or product special.
Your marketing team can choose whether your mobile app interacts with customers when they enter the beacon range, when they’ve stayed within the beacon range for a period of time, or when they leave the beacon range.
Mobile Targeting
Mobile targeting is how your marketing team optimizes a customer’s mobile app experience, based on their current location or previous locations. With Plexure’s advanced segmentation and targeting tools, your marketing team can segment your customers, based on key defining behaviors, including recent interests, transactions, offer redemptions, demographics, in-app actions and recent searches.
Mobile targeting tools take personalized marketing to the next level, by generating insights on who a brand’s most profitable customers are and which customer segments provide the highest value to the brand, to target customers with the perfect engagements at their most impressionable moments.
Geo-Conquesting
Brands can leverage geo-conquesting marketing campaigns to drive customers away from their competition. Geo-conquesting generally uses geofencing and GPS to identify when a customer is entering a competing brand’s boundaries.
When your customer enters your competition’s parking lot, this may trigger an automated message that offers the customer a competitive discount or offer, intending to drive the customer from the competition and toward your location.
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The Importance & Benefits of Location-Based Marketing
A reported 9 in 10 marketers say location-based marketing resulted in higher sales, growth in their customer base (86%) and higher customer engagement (84%) (source).
Location-based marketing is effective for increasing foot traffic immediately, displaying more relevant ads to viable customers, directing customers away from the competition and creating a better experience for your mobile app users.
Increase foot traffic immediately.
Commerce brands can run limited-time promotions, deliver offers that are only available today or in-store, or raise awareness about events or specials to drive immediate foot traffic.
As a customer passes by your store, your mobile app can deliver automated, personalized push notifications or in-app messages to encourage them to walk in your store and redeem your offer.
Location-based marketing can increase store visits and offer redemptions by engaging with customers when they’re physically passing by your store or browsing similar products or services at a competing, nearby store.
Display more relevant ads.
Not only can your marketing team use a customer’s current location (collected from GPS location, geofencing, beaconing or geo-conquesting) to display store-specific ads, but you can also use location data to determine when and where customers are most frequently engaging with your mobile app.
Maybe your customer is most likely to engage with your app during their work lunch break or their bus commute home. Through AI, machine learning, automation and location data, your brand can display relevant ads that align with your customer’s usual interests, during their most receptive moments.
Direct customers away from the competition.
Location-based marketing enables your brand to offer your customers a more competitive special or discount, while they’re visiting your competition. Use geofencing or geotargeting to determine when your customer enters your competition’s store, and deliver personalized offers for the types of products or services that your competition is offering.
If your customer is browsing through your competition’s store, he or she is likely in a buying mentality, toward the point-of-sale stage in their buying journey. By delivering a relevant offer that your competition isn’t offering, you can successfully deter your customer from your competition, and drive them toward your store or drive them to opt-in to your customer base during the most critical moment in their buying journey.
Improve your user experience – over and over again.
Harness the power of data, machine learning, AI, and location data to gain genuine insight into your customers’ behaviors, needs, and tendencies. Use location data to understand how your customers prefer to engage with you and your competition, where they’re located when they’re most likely to engage with your brand, and where they live to further refine your targeting strategies, content strategies, and engagement types.
Using location data to continue personalizing each customer’s mobile app experience can boost their satisfaction and drive more sales as you demonstrate a deep understanding of your customers’ interests and behaviors.
The Quality of Your Data Matters
As advanced technologies continue to increase the quality potential of data collection, data sources and data analysis for commerce companies, it’s not enough to simply collect data. The quality of your data matters.
