Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The cat is definitely out of the bag regarding location-based mobile targeting. This post from Marketing Land’s Greg Sterling encapsulates the trend well: Most mobile marketers are usinglocation-based targeting, and they’re using it as a proxy for audience segmentation.

Although I think this trend needs to go from “most mobile marketers” to “all mobile marketers” sooner rather than later, I won’t focus on that. Instead, I’d like to share some tips from the front line: caveats, insights and more gleaned from our client campaigns, ranging from midsize to Fortune 500 companies.

Whether you’re new to location-based mobile targeting or looking for a way to refine yours, you’ll want to pay attention. (And note that some of these tips may look familiar; they’re pretty tried-and-true digital tenets with surprising resonance in the mobile realm.)...

... Geo-precise targeting, which uses mobile’s ability to target users based on their specific locations, provides a much higher ROI for companies than standard geotargeting. In fact, mobile advertising campaigns using audience targeting performed 14 percent above industry standards, according to xAd’s Mobile Location Insights Q1 2014 report.

“By combining local consumer visitation behaviors and demographic cues, marketers can understand the full context of an audience – who they are, where they’ve been, and where they’re going,” according to xAd.

“In addition to signaling a user’s location at the exact moment advertisers are trying to reach them, location also acts as a real-world cookie, recording past visitation patterns.”

Here’s an infographic from Adweek that shows exactly how it works....

Think of what you did this past weekend. Did you watch a summer blockbuster? If you're anticipating crowds for new releases, chances are that you ordered movie tickets from your phone and visited the theater to actually watch the movie. 

Maybe you used Seamless or another service for meal delivery, but that was probably just a fraction of the meals you ate - you also went to a summer barbeque or local restaurant. That's pretty typical. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, over 90% of commerce activities still occur offline.

Yet, until now, we haven't been ability to directly tie physical visits and sales to mobile activity. Location unlocks insights into physical behavior as they occur. By knowing the places people go, marketers gain visibility into who their customers are, what they need, and how to influence their decisions.

In fact, location is becoming one of the fastest growing segments in media, especially in mobile. Researchers at BIA/Kelsey predicted that location-based mobile advertising will grow faster than overall mobile advertising, and will represent 43% of mobile ad budgets by 2019....