There are various marketing techniques for promoting business. Location-based marketing is one such approach that makes use of GPS data for promoting products and services. The user location details can be collected using different smartphone applications. But, for collecting these personal details, the smartphone user needs to provide permission. If the user didn’t provide permission to access GPS location, it won’t be possible to display advertisements. The mobile application will collect the current or previous location details and will start advertising your nearby stores, products, and services. This will be the most beneficial way for marketing because there will be more possibility for customers to choose their nearby service providers.
Location-based marketing is a direct marketing approach that can send offers and other interesting marketer information as offline or online messages. This marketing strategy is beneficial for both marketers and consumers. The marketers can boost their brand awareness and can attract customers to their local business. For customers, they will be notified about the latest offers and discounts from their nearby business. Other benefits of location-based marketing are:
- Target audience based on location
- Affordable and the targeted approach results in less wasted spend
- More impulse to sales conversion
- Develop good relationships with customers and prospects
- Improve Search engine results
- Attract new trusted customers
- Deliver relevant ads to customer smartphones.
- Easy Market Segmentation
- Provide a better and new user experience
Location-based marketing is suitable for smartphone users only and the users need to provide permission for sharing their smartphone location. These are the two major restrictions of this marketing strategy.
Location-based marketing can be mainly categorized as Geotargeting, Geofencing, Beaconing, mobile targeting, Geo-Conquesting, etc… Here, geotargeting is done based on the system IP address, geofencing, mobile targeting, and geo-conquesting uses GPS, Beaconing uses Bluetooth or WIFI connections, etc… Some examples and working of these location-based marketing strategies are mentioned below.
When considering Geotargeting, the most common example is the Google search results. If the user searches for certain keywords like “Supermarkets”, “Textiles”, “Software Company”, etc., Google will display your nearby supermarkets, textiles, or software companies respectively. Here, the location-based data is displayed by considering the system IP address.
The geofencing, mobile targeting, and geo-conquesting techniques are purely based on the GPS data. The Geofencing approach will create a border around a specific region and whenever a target user enters within this region, a notification will be delivered to the user’s smartphone. Geofencing is more precise and can be used for smaller regions or an entire city. Mobile targeting is displaying context-specific ads to target consumers, who are selected based on time, device, or location. The geo-conquesting method will divert target consumers who are in the proximity of a competitor region.
The beaconing method will establish a connection with predetermined applications using Bluetooth or WiFi connection. Beacons are suitable for interior purposes having poor reception.
