Location Based Marketing
Location based marketing is most suited to businesses where locality has some relevance either from a product or a customer segmentation perspective. Obviously for a retail business with specific store locations, it’s simpler to understand. Or you may have a product such as sunscreen, and you decide that the location aware relevance is anyone who is near a beach on a sunny day. The other question is where do your customers come from? If you have a specialty store that people travel large distances to visit, location based marketing may not be as relevant. However if you are a convenience-based business, location becomes a lot more relevant. Prominent mobile apps such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter all have location aware check-in as part of their functionality. There are also local start-ups such as Roamz & Quickerfeet. In the future, you will increasingly see more and more group buying sites adopting this approach. They’re already aggregating thousands of deals and starting to make them more location-relevant.
Because smartphones vary in their location accuracy, there’s no point doing location based targeting where your proximity is in metres. You need to cast a narrow enough net to get the distinct advantage of that specific location, without being so narrow that you don’t get a high enough volume of people.
It is a challenge to reach a huge audience, especially using only one application. Snakk Media is about to roll out a tool that aggregates different applications, providing location aware ads and promotions, which can be used either independently of the app or within each platform.
Creating a Location Based Campaign
To create and run a location based campaign, businesses can either approach a specialist mobile aggregator like Snakk Media or engage with self-service platforms like Facebook, Google and Foursquare. It is worthwhile researching the different platforms and finding out what tools are the most beneficial. Location based marketing can also be conducted through search, where users have allowed a search provider such as Google to access their location information. You can also combine this with the phone’s other capabilities. If you are searching for a restaurant, for example, not only will it show restaurants in close proximity, but will also provide a phone number to that you can click and call directly from your handset. When location based marketing is combined with other native features of the device, it becomes very immediate: a direct response tool for finding the solution to a personal request and taking action to solve it.
