From the Zidy archive. Original publication date retained; business-category wording is updated where needed. Product details, offers and linked resources may have changed.
Many agencies and companies run campaigns to reach audiences in unique ways. Location-based marketing (LBM) is one of them. It targets customers’ areas in order to be more competitive. This opens up the gates for geotargeting and localization, where the most adapted businesses thrive.
What is Location-Based Marketing?
Also called Geomarketing, Location-based Marketing is a business discipline where a company uses a person’s geographic location to deliver targeted messages. While most of this data is collected from Facebook and Google Maps, physical businesses can also take advantage of this marketing method.
Benefits of Adopting Location-Based Marketing?
Previously, people who worked for marketing agencies needed to heavily rely on demographic information and charts such as gender, age, and education to target ads. Nowadays, the combination of demographics and location-based messages allows more effective than ever, making marketing very useful.
Location-based marketing has other benefits which make it more effective. Since their workplace involves smaller areas or zones, it increases its precision when gathering new data and infographics.
The power this precision level provides to businesses is very important, mostly for local campaigns. The more targeted a message is, the more likely it will work. The high conversion rates of location-based marketing is one of its strong points, but it can be pricey.
A good illustration of this is Facebook paid Ads. The cost can significantly vary depending on the target: some communities are hard to find. A pop-up for anyone that uses Facebook is easier to spread than marketing for teachers who like softball, for example.
Of course, no matter how targeted it is, location-based marketing always needs to be tested first in order to see if it fits a business model. The likelihood of it working is always higher when it comes to brands with a physical presence.
Main Components of Location-Based Marketing
Location-based marketing’s structure is composed of three components: geofencing, geotargeting, and geo-conquesting.
Geofencing
This refers to targeting an area or location that the audience visits in order to serve them content and ads created in real time. This can be achieved through two approaches: polygons and radii. A radius is created in a circle around a point of interest and assumes that if a phone is there, it’s visiting the location.
Although it sounds efficient, this method can present some issues: it can sometimes pick up passersby instead of actual location visitors. Polygons draw shapes that conform to a building’s footprint instead, giving a more precise approach since the physical structure of the building is outlined.
Geotargeting
Creating audiences based on the matching of historical visits to real-world locations and points of interest is called geotargeting. Marketers create these audiences and deliver ads and other content based on the most relevant location for their campaign.
The most common example is audiences seen at coffee shops, where they’re identified as coffee drinkers. People that are seen at autosports and powersports businesses are targeted as car shoppers, and so on.
Geoconquesting
When marketers create audiences from visitors of competitive locations with the purpose of converting them to their own, it's known as geo-conquesting. The biggest benefit of this brand marketing strategy is understanding the customers and their real-world interests.
This way differs from typical targeting and marketing based on online data and infographics and cookie-based marketing. Instead of creating new audiences that can be attracted, as well as “likes and views”, is used to have a higher degree of confidence in its relevance.
This happens because it targets customers that have already visited the locations: they have already eaten at that restaurant, attended that event, or been to that store.
Geoconquesting can also show to marketers the recency and frequency of their audience, which can empower them to improve and maintain customer loyalty. Also, a marketer can track campaigns with the attributed increase or decrease in foot traffic to make more informed decisions based on analysis.
The Importance of Privacy
Just like in any other practice, ensuring the privacy of customers should be the top priority for any company and business brand. Location-based marketing can only collect opted-in location data. They can aggregate and make it anonymous later, so it cannot be directly tied to an individual.
Besides its importance in keeping people’s data private, location-based marketing is a more effective tool when targeting certain groups with similar behaviors and characteristics. Focusing on singular people isn’t profitable at all.
In addition, limited federal and state legislations cover what data can and cannot be collected, and how it is used. The marketing industry also self-regulates through organizations such as the Network Advertising Initiative and the Digital Advertising Alliance.
These organizations play a crucial role for customers by providing information and education to the industry about what is allowed and what is not.
How can Review Managers Improve LBM?
Location-based marketing is extremely helpful for companies with a local and physical presence, but certain tools can help to improve it online.
Since marketers recompile data of groups, behaviors, and more, tools like Zidy are really handy in making this task automatic, quick, and effective. Zidy can help to grow and manage your network through their contact management tool.
This tool provides a powerful search of customers, their contact, email, and much more. All of them can be filtered into big groups which you can tag based on their behaviors and preferences for good location-based marketing. You can check Zidy’s featured video on the homepage to learn more about its characteristics.
Is Location-Based Marketing Always the Correct Option?
While it is a great fit for most shops, retailers, and businesses that people visit, these techniques are not suitable for some brands or certain products. This includes those that can be found easily anywhere, such as soda, milk, toothpaste, or any other similar product.
Limitations are also set by regulatory organizations that have certain standards for their audiences. These include the avoidance of using health care as a point of interest, and against the discrimination of certain audiences.
Conclusion
Location-based marketing is a useful resource that can help many companies and business brands to grow their brand awareness, especially for physical presence. Through many methods of geolocalization and technology devices, marketers compile data that is very effective in users’ preferences.
If you have a physical business, you should know that you have a big advantage over competitors who are solely based online. A place where people can see and visit makes it easier to find in Google business searches, as well as in any other navigation apps.
Originally published by Zidy. View original article.