Mobile location marketing offers significant potential to augment consumer understanding and deliver more relevant advertising but brands need to be careful to be on the right side of the line between convenient and creepy.
In a WARC Best Practice paper, How to understand mobile location marketing and engage opt-in consumers, Ian James of SBDS explains how location marketing has rapidly advanced beyond early geo-targeting applications.
Today’s marketers “are using the power of data to determine where a consumer is at that particular moment, but also to build behaviour traits around where they have been and where they tend to spend significant amounts of time.
“In essence, they are creating custom-built, rich audience segments that provide more value than the standard demographic.”
But that’s only possible if consumers are prepared to share that data. And research from Verve suggests that while many remain concerned about privacy a growing number understand the trade-off of relevant and targeted advertising and their expectations have risen accordingly.
“This shift in consumer behaviour suggests that advertisers must rethink mobile advertising as a means to deliver contextual value to consumers based on their present demands,” James says.
And one of the most obvious areas in which to do this is by bridging the online and offline gap. But that involves more than just establishing a consumer’s whereabouts and targeting them with discount codes, offers, and coupons.
Marketers can match that location data with other data-points such as CRM, email and social to build a much more holistic overview of their audiences.
As exciting as the possibilities are, the data powering campaigns has to be of highest quality. “If it’s not, you run the risk of antagonising users by sending poorly targeted creative,” James warns.
So marketers have to educate themselves on the sources of data, understanding the limitations of what they’re buying from the ad exchange pool and the more reliable data that comes from SDK technology.
Talk of data inevitably leads on to the “paramount importance” of GDPR compliance: the consumer must be appropriately notified with regards to how their data will be used and whether it will be disclosed.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of location marketing is how mobile location insight can add another level of engagement to campaigns created for other media channels.
For example, the combined power of out of home and mobile location can be used to create a targeted broadcast medium, says James. “Essentially mobile can be used to enhance OOH’s impact with digital targeting.”
Sourced from WARC
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This article first appeared in www.warc.com
Guest Author: Barrett Wissman, Chairman of IMG Artists and Principal in Two Pillar Management.
