Location-Based Marketing Platform – Your Ultimate Guide

Here’s everything you need to know about the essential features and benefits of having a solid location-based marketing platform. 

As a marketing agency, one of your goals is to help your clients find better and more cost-effective ways for getting new customers into their world. You’re likely utilizing location-based marketing as part of your offering, or maybe you’re looking to add it into the mix.

The success of any ad campaign depends on many variables, but when it comes to businesses looking to increase foot traffic into their physical stores, location is often the defining factor for the success of location-based marketing campaigns. 

When you use the right location-based marketing software, you can help your clients increase sales and engagement rates.

Here’s what you’re going to learn as you read through this guide:

• What location-based marketing is
• The importance of foot traffic data and attribution
• When to use location-based audiences for geofencing advertising campaigns
• How to create niche audiences for geo conquesting
• How to get started with a location-based marketing platform

Let’s get started.

What is location-based marketing?

Location-based marketing, also referred to as geotargeting, provides online advertisers with the ability to segment their target audience based on where customers have visited. Then, using that location information, ads (or content) can be delivered to those customers based on that information, making the ad or content more relevant to the customer.

For example, imagine a woman is looking for a hairdresser in a certain city. This woman might receive multiple offers (ads) from different hairdressers, but the one that’s located just around the corner from her work is the one more likely to secure this customer compared to those hairdressers that are further away.

Another example of geotargeting in action is when a cafe is able to send a notification to a nearby mobile device during their open hours… or right when the person is out and about for lunch, they could get a notification of the cafe’s lunchtime deal and find it hard to resist.

This is why location data is so important for businesses needing physical foot traffic to make sales.

The importance of foot traffic data and attribution

Foot traffic attribution ties ad exposure to real-world behavior, quantifying the impact of digital and out-of-home advertising on in-store visits. And according to eMarketer, “for the first time ever, US consumers will spend more time using their mobile devices than watching TV, with smartphone use dominating that time spent.”

With the rise of mobile device use, it makes sense to use location-based marketing to target users who are on their mobile phones vs. running pricey linear TV ads.

This is why it’s important to make sure that your clients are collecting actionable data about their audiences vs. only serving the current audiences they have inside their geofences. 

An effective way marketers can use location-based marketing is through foot traffic attribution. Showing true attribution from ad to sale can be one of the most frustrating aspects of modern-day marketing. 

But how do you get a true reflection of foot traffic data? When you implement a solid location-based marketing platform, you can run a geotargeting campaign and visualize the foot traffic and repeat visits while the campaign continues to run. 

Another way that getting the right foot traffic attribution can help is by analyzing your client’s competitors’ location data. You can help your clients gain a competitive edge by geo conquesting those customers. We’ll talk about that more later on in this guide.

When to use location-based audiences for geofencing advertising campaigns

Retail, restaurant, automotive and several other consumer categories benefit greatly from geofencing advertising campaigns. This is because the physical footprint of these locations can be matched with GPS lat/long data received from mobile devices.

Once that data is matched with points of interest, your marketing agency can then create audiences that visit those locations and use foot traffic analytics to learn more about the people visiting these locations.

Ideally, your clients will want to have at least 5 locations for the audiences and analytics to generate a meaningful scale. But that doesn’t mean a single location retailer couldn’t benefit from geotargeting. In this case, a single location retailer could use location-based marketing data to create campaigns that target their competitor’s visitors instead.

How to create niche audiences for geo conquesting

Before we dive into creating these niche audiences, let’s first understand what geo conquesting is. Simply put, it’s a technique that focuses on using location data to identify a competitors’ customers. With this data, you can then promote a competing and compelling offer to in-market audiences.

We do this by using mobile location data. We can use geo conquesting to leverage mobile device’s location data based on their past visit history to a competitor’s location.

Once this data is collected, you can now create niche location-based audiences to leverage geo conquesting campaigns.

How to get started with a location-based marketing platform

The fastest way to begin with a location-based marketing platform is to utilize tools already built into social media sites and Google. With these tools, you can choose where your client’s ads are served using location data such as where an audience lives, where they work, or what’s nearby.

Using geofencing and geo conquesting, you can serve ads to your clients’ audiences using location-based advertising campaigns that target things like state, city, zip code, or country. You can then further refine this down by understanding foot traffic analytics and mobile location data trends.

Getting started is as simple as jumping straight in, testing, tweaking, and refining so that you can optimize conversions.

Using specialized location-based marketing software for agencies will help you get there faster, too.

If you’re ready to launch a campaign and want expert support and advice, get in touch with us today.