Four Ways That Location-Based Marketing Will Help Your Mobile Strategy

18 Jul Four Ways That Location-Based Marketing Will Help Your Mobile Strategy

By Carl Sandquist

It’s no secret that the vast majority of consumers are carrying mobile devices in some form. It’s also not a stretch to recognize that marketers have long clued-in to this fact, having adopted both aggressive and sometimes subtle mobile-marketing strategies to capitalize on this emerging cornucopia of opportunity.

However, there’s still one fundamental property, inherent to these smart little devices, that most digital marketers have not yet been able to harness for their sheer potential. The obvious nature of a mobile device is that it doesn’t simply stay at home — it rides along with the consumer every step of the journey toward becoming a future customer. So the question is not “Why should you harness location-based data in your mobile-marketing strategy?” If anything, the real question is:

If you have the means to access and utilize this information, then why on earth wouldn’t you?

Offers Sent While Consumers Shop
On the more local side of harnessing this powerful ability, allow me to set the stage. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re shopping for the perfect pair of jeans from your favorite jean store, and something interesting happens right as you make your way inside through a particular store entrance. Your smartphone receives a notification: a storewide offer for 10 percent off. Then, immediately after snagging the perfect jeans, you start making your way toward the kids’ section. Suddenly, another notification pops up — this time with a discount on kids’ T-shirts.

What I’ve just described here is the beauty of deploying indoor beacons within retail stores. Acting in concert with the store’s app, the shopper’s position on the floor is communicated to the app via strategically placed beacons. Therefore, the smartphone’s proximity to certain designated areas within the store can easily be determined. The combination of app and beacons is extremely powerful, which is why we’ll be seeing more than a million of them showing up in stores within the next four years.

Larger Area, Smarter Analytics
One particular drawback to using beacons and Wi-Fi-triangulation devices, however, is that they require extremely insightful analytics capabilities to drive sales. Otherwise, such a method would do little more than annoy customers with invasive notifications for products they were never interested in from the start, which is a major factor that Adobe Analytics takes into consideration.

Another issue is that selling a product from within the store is only half the battle. If we’re going to take advantage of all that which is mobile in a smartphone, then GPS is the next step. GPS will offer your strategy not only the means to pinpoint locations down to about 10 meters, but also several additional pros: View Full Article >>

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