With tremendous growth of mobile traffic across the world, organizations are in the path of integrating mobile as a marketing channel to meet the needs of constantly changing consumer behaviour. Mobile specific sites, device optimised applications, innovative user experiences are being pursued by many companies to increase customer footfall and loyalty. But fragmented device landscape, multiple operating systems, consumer identification, privacy and security features keep marketers at bay to effectively reach customers and engage.
The reality is that, such market challenges and technical complexities will never cease to exist. So it becomes imperative for organizations, in addition to existing efforts, to start exploring innovative and additional avenues to realize the potential of this goldmine.
That’s where location based marketing steps in…
Location based marketing is not new. Many successful campaigns and many more not so successful attempts have been already made. Numerous concepts have been demonstrated. But still not many are able to demonstrate their expertise in this sector. The reason being, many organizations assume that location based marketing is a separate arena and requires considerable extra resources – time, cost and talent - to employ. But, examining the digital channels of few top consumer packaged goods companies would show the other way that most of the information is already present and would require only few seasoning to be done to effectively use location in the active content.
For example, many brands provide online store information to enable consumers find and locate nearby stores through maps. But how many integrate their campaigns, product information, promotions, services, social channels to their stores? How many use already heavily invested CRM infrastructure to provide store location based updates and subscription to existing customers? A consolidated approach towards store information builds a continuous relationship with customers.
New mantra – Social and Location
In general, the attention span of mobile users is very short in nature and difficult to win a share of mobile screen time. On the go mobile users do not check the marketing messages unless it is of high value and targeted. But most of the users check social channels frequently and stay updated. Even though many brands interact through social media, it is imperative for marketers to provide location specific social offers and encourage users to check-in nearby brand stores. Considering that 90% of sales still take place through physical stores, such connects between online and offline worlds will build brand experience around purchasing process.
Real- time location data…
Next step in this evolution is to generate real time data. iBeacons for in-store real time location marketing and Wearables for intelligent marketing are technologies to watch closely. If they are supplemented by highly engaging consumer applications, augmented reality based experience, geo spatial intelligence updates then the true potential of location will unfold to yield long term relationships with customers.
By Pravin Kumar Shanmugam, Digital Consultant at Mindtree.
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