The Maturing of Location-based Marketing — reflection as we enter the teen years
The last few years has seen a number of bumps, hiccups and even disappointments as marketers have sought to explore and define a mobile strategy that includes what has come to be referred to as proximity, or Location-based marketing. Early pioneers in the space laid the foundation before best practices and established vendor solutions made a path to success more clear. Only recently has the true value of location and the opportunity it presents come into focus.
Location has always been a powerful component of any marketing strategy. From the high trafficked freeway billboard to a retailer’s position within a mall, marketers have always leveraged the power of the ‘right message at the right time’. While those fundamentals haven’t changed, the digital age has transformed how scaleable and data-driven location-based marketing can be. While this new era of technology-fueled location marketing has existed in a few forms for a number of years, it is the age of high smartphone penetration that has come to fundamentally change how we look at location-based marketing.
In it’s infancy, the proximity promise required a multi-step and often clunky user experience from the customer. QR codes and RFID taps drove users to mobile un-optimized websites where early adopting brands delivered coupons and contest entries. That is, if users could navigate their way through these awkward sites.
With geofences and later, beacons, came a reduction in friction for the end user. Through operating system level support for these technologies, brands and developers could ‘wake’ and adapt sleeping apps without asking the user to tap or scan anything. Specifically, iOS and more recently Android have taken care of the background scanning required to detect these type of location signals, significantly reducing battery demands and enhancing the accuracy of positioning a user’s device in a given area.
Geofencing, which blends signals from wifi, GPS and cell triangulation emerged as a scalable and cost-effective solution to determine the relative location of an end user. Accurate enough to understand when a user is ‘nearby’ a location, or at a larger location like a stadium or a mall. Where this tech often falls short is more precise location detection such as which store within that mallor more specifically determining a user’s position within that store. Filling this precision gap are beacons which have proven to be an even more precision, OS backed solution to accurately determining user location.
Early in their history, the dominant use cases that circled these technologies focused on the pushes and pings of location-triggered coupons, ads and messages. For the most part, those whose location-based content strategy was driven by these types of uses ended up seeing little to no results. As one may have expected, the “push me a coupon” strategy garnered little traction.
The Maturing Proximity age
As we enter the teen-years of location-based marketing on mobile, we are starting to see a more refined and nuanced approach to leveraging location. App publishers are starting to look beyond the location push, and are finding value in the following four location strategies that reflect the state of this market today.
Localized Experiences
One of the most powerful approaches to location-based marketing and content is the adaptive user interfaces that are reflective of a user’s location and don’t even require the use of a push notification. Local Experiences are launched either by an end user engaging with some sort of in-app ‘near me’ button that presents localized content, or, simply by an adaptive in-app UI that presents itself when a user is in a given location. Often referred to as ‘in-store mode’ or in the case of professional sports, ‘in stadium’ mode’, this approach leverages location-based inputs to present a customer experience crafted for the fan who’s at the game, vs. the fan at home. The pushless approach to location-based marketing and engagement involves starting to create the expectation for users that your app is reflective of the world around them. At Rover, we’ve seen particular success in helping sports teams and retail focused brands craft these on-site experiences that blend high-value end user utility with smarter and more relevant location-based marketing.
Retargeting
Another growing and powerful aspect of location-based marketing that doesn’t involved a push and ping strategy is the leveraging of location data to inform better content. Just as online clicks drive relevant re-targeting, beacon and location data is increasingly informing smarter content. While much has been written about how a user’s presence in a location can lead to retargeting based on the products or locations they were ‘seen’ in front of, what is perhaps less discussed, and arguably more powerful is a user’s lack of presence. Rover has seen significant success in leveraging data centered around users that haven’t been seen in venue for a period of time. This lack of presence can inform less dilutionary acquisition strategies and in general is a must when looking at the full spectrum of location data available to marketers.
Attribution
As marketers continue to expect more and cleaner data from their marketing efforts, fraudulent bot-driven impressions and spray and pray eyeball metrics are on the decline. Accurate location data is helping marketers better understand the effectiveness of their advertising strategies in areas where they don’t have access to point of sale data. Clean location data gives us a very clear picture of how a particular marketing campaign drove customers in-store.
Smarter Push Segmentation
Achieving success with location-marketing isn’t just about using location as a trigger for messages. Sending content when someone enters a beacon region or geofence is how most marketers have looked at location use cases, but arguably the more powerful use of location is to leverage location data to create smarter mobile segments. In the retail context this nuance is best exemplified as the difference between sending a user a message when they approach your store, versus sending a user a message when they have not been seen in store for more than 30 days or sending your most frequent visitors different content. This data allows us to create relevant campaigns based on a user’s behaviours such as lack of presence in a given location, and in this case, allow for a more relevant acquisition-based approach to content strategy.
The years ahead hold a good deal of promise for location-based marketing as we move beyond the hype cycle and the more short sighted view that location is simply about location-driven push. Real value and success leveraging location will focus the creation of contextually relevant user experiences that deliver value for end-users while helping marketers reach their audiences with the right message at the right time.
See more on working with location at Rover.io
