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by Zero-X

Location, Location, Location

Location Based Marketing

It wasn’t so long ago that businesses advertised on TV, radio, billboards, direct mail and the like… the so-called ‘traditional’ media. These mediums promised lots of impressions but were limited in the amount of targeting they offered. So, while a lot of people would see or hear your ad, it was hit or miss as to whether or not they were actually in the market for what you were selling. On top of that, the pricing models for these types of media made them fairly prohibitive for anyone other than large companies and organizations with dedicated advertising budgets.

With the advent of internet marketing, and of the Google Adwords model, businesses big and small found a new way to reach potential customers. Business owners could now reach out to people who they knew were not only interested in their particular product or service but were, in fact, searching for it at that very moment. This type of highly targeted advertising promised significantly higher ROI and made for a much lower cost to entry for those businesses that didn’t have money to spend on expensive advertising campaigns. The only real disadvantage was the fact that the user had to be in front of their computer to see your ad. Maybe not so bad for everyone, but it doesn’t necessarily do proximity-based businesses like the restaurant or coffee shop down the street too much good.

Enter the smartphone.

Almost 20% of all mobile phone users in the US are on smartphones today and that number is closer to 25% worldwide. Since March of this year, the US alone has seen a 36% increase in smartphone adoption (via Mashable) and that rate doesn’t show any signs of slowing. While the heavy-hitters dominating the smartphone landscape at the moment are Apple’s iPhone and Google’s wealth of Android based phones, there are a number of other handsets which offer users the standard smartphone functionality, including internet access and GPS. With so many mobile phones now equipped with these types of features, a new branch of applications, deemed ‘location-based services’, have emerged which allow users to broadcast their physical location at any given time. In turn, services such as Foursquare now allow businesses the ability to offer incentives to nearby users who ‘check-in’ at their location, providing an unprecedented opportunity to reach potential customers when they are close by and most likely to engage with your brand. In addition, these services provide businesses access to analytics dashboards containing a wealth of information such as who is coming to your business, when they are coming, what they had to say about it and where they went afterwards. And the best part… it’s all free.

Until recently, these location-based services were used primarily by the early adopter crowd (think Twitter, before it was as popular as it is today) and had yet to make their way into what might be considered mainstream culture. Just last week however, the social networking giant Facebook announced its entry into the location realm with the release of its ‘Places’ service, thrusting the concept of location-based social networking into the limelight and increasing the number of people with the ability to start checking-in to more than 150 million overnight.

A number of big brands are already engaging their customers through these services in new and interesting ways and the benefits of using location-based networking is only now becoming truly evident. As mobile phone usage continues to skyrocket and location services become more prevalent and advanced, savvy businesses will have opportunities to reach potential customers in ways that have never before been possible. While a fully ‘integrated’ marketing approach used to entail both offline and online initiatives, there is now a third element that should be considered when formulating your marketing plan… location. There is no doubt that location-based marketing will soon be as mainstream as having a website, but the companies who get involved early will benefit the most as they gain the valuable experience that other organizations will have to make up for later. What’s your business doing to engage customers?

A map that shows nearly real-time Facebook places check-ins.

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