In a world where “location” is the new cookie.

Source: MyVenturePad

Are you a ride-hailing company that wants to identify its repeat customers or a hyperlocal company that wants to reach the right segment of customers or even a hospitality chain that wants to price it’s offering according to supply-demand gaps? You must’ve heard of the term geomarketing!

Geomarketing has become such a buzzword today. But, what does it actually mean? How can you do it? Moreover, do you even should? In this article, we will address all these questions.

Geomarketing 101

If your brand targets people falling in the age group 18–25, what if you knew “where” to launch your online and offline campaigns?

What if you could promote new products by shooting notifications “whenever” potential customers are crossing by your store?

What if you could identify areas “where” your underserved markets are located?

Geomarketing, or location-based marketing allows you to promote your brand/services/products to your target audience through quality content at the most relevant times.

This is done by making use of your customer’s location, your internal sales territories and blending it with several external factors that have a location component. In a nutshell, it helps you answer:

“How do I get my offerings in front of the right people at the right time?”

With more than 60% of mobile apps requiring your location, this has become relatively easy and cost-effective.

Source: Carto

Geomarketing in Action!

One of the ways you can do geomarketing is through geotargeting — segmenting and targeting your high-value customers.

Segmentation:

An important piece of any marketing plan includes defining the target customer. One way this segmentation can be done is on the basis of their location and demography.

Alternatively, behavior segmentation can also be done on the basis of where customers go and what all do they do!

This New York Times article depicts how these location and movement patterns can be used to create persons and sketch people’s journey, behavior, habits, and psychological traits.

“Where your customers are and how they move can tell you a lot about who they are.”

For instance, if you’re a ride-hailing company and if a customer takes your ride often between 8 am- 11 am and 5 pm- 8 pm on weekdays, you can deduce that they are probably office goers!

Similarly, you can cluster customers and fine-tune the content according to their preferences and interests to increase your conversions.

Urban Outfitters launched a campaign to sell party dresses to females who had recently visited bars and nightclubs. The tourism industry relies heavily on such clustering to schedule bookings, pricing etc.

Targeting:

Companies today track the location and movement traces using GPS on mobile devices. There are lots of social media offering check-ins for various locations.

So, when your customers search “salons near me”, you can use their location info to offer promotions and entice them.

Companies also use location settings to provide a customized experience to visitors on their websites and blogs by changing the language or adding a lot of local contexts.

Airbnb has cracked this code using its location relevance model. Toyota’s “Let’s go places” campaign directed geotargeted Snapchat ads to users.

Some companies use the location and movement patterns of their prospect consumers to set up ads on billboards. For example, near their residences or offices.

This is considering outdoor advertisement is the only traditional ad format growing at 2.7% in 2017, as compared to TV and print (which are shrinking).

Geofencing:

Source: Shutterstock

Another popular way to target users is through creating a virtual perimeter within a certain radius of your store or your business via location data, called geofencing.

This kind of cross-pollinated campaigns allows retailers to increase the footfall in their stores using online campaigns and vice-versa.

Redbull implemented a geomaketing tool called beacon to send discounts and recommendations to people shopping in certain aisles through push notifications on their phones.

AT&T has done this using its ShopAlert’s program. Burger King offered you a burger for 1cent if you were in proximity to a McDonald’s.

This way of reaching out to your customers at such granular levels and nudging them is very effective, especially when they are in a dilemma about what to buy.

Should you be even doing Geomarketing?

According to Carto, only 68% of retailers know when customers are browsing their physical stores whereas 90% of them can determine the browsing traffic on their websites.

While you can infer consumer preferences using their history on sales and searches, geomarketing puts the location context in your segmentation and marketing efforts.

Visualizing your data on maps can help you analyze how your targeting and sales are correlated — making it easier to measure and calculate RoI.

A study by Forrester revealed that geomarketing helped increase conversion rates by 60% and improve the RoI of campaigns by 68%.

The best part?

All of this is can be used by almost all businesses and digital technologies has made it very cost-effective to implement — helping you save time, effort and money so that you can focus on things that matter to you!

Source: Unsplash

The Bottom Line!

Apart from the benefits and the fascinating avenues that geomarketing offers, why should you invest in it?

Mobile marketing has become an effectual way to reach target masses. About half of the total internet traffic comes from mobile apps.

More than 50% of Google searches involve location in some way or the other — most of the times to find something.

What’s more compelling is that Google’s research claims 61% of smartphone users prefer to purchase from sites that are customized as per their location.

This BIA/ Kelsey report predicts that location-based advertising on mobile devices will skyrocket with ad spend exceeding $38.7 billion by 2022!

But there’s a catch!

According to Saif Khan, president of Location Based Marketing Association, the challenge is to position yourself and deliver relevant content in a way which attracts customers once you know their location.

Success depends on creating a system that ingests the location component across channels, devices, and different scenarios to create personalized and valuable content.

It’s about how different data and parameters such as location, time of the day, traffic, weather, past behavior, shopping history etc. come together as a whole and respond in real-time!

Where does Locale.ai fit in?

A recent survey by Retail Drive demonstrated that more than 60% of retailers have difficulty boosting sales and offering using their internal and socio-economic demographic data.

To make your geomarketing campaigns successful, your geospatial infrastructure needs to be maintained.

GPS data needs to be corrected for errors and outliers, maps need to be constantly updated, and intelligent models need to be constantly customized to predict user behavior and demand.

At Locale.ai, we use a system of hexagonal grids which showcases your data at very granular levels to help you understand your demand-supply gaps.

After working in the geospatial industry for 4 years, our team has developed the expertise to deal with the nuances of spatial data at scale — so that you make location-based insights a part of your business decisions!