Current Location Based Marketing
Location Based Marketing is a term that’s out there for a long time and that is used for a wide variety of services. Placing your ad on the right billboard is indeed a form of Location Based Marketing (LBM). Nowadays however when people talk about LBM they usually refer to location based mobile banners which are based on the location of the phone itself and show ads that are relevant to the user because of his or her location. Not a lot of research is done in this field but advertisement companies claim that these location based banners have higher conversions then regular banners. Problems with this kind of LBM is that the location of the user is only known when he or she opens the app and thus these people can only be targeted when they actively use their phone.
Location Based Marketing 2.0
Rather than waiting for a user to use their phone, we at Plot Projects wanted to be able to notify people actively whenever they are near an interesting deal or event. Because there was no existing plug&play tool for this we created the Plot Plugin. This plugin can be integrated in apps of for instance retailers. After integration these retailers can easily create locations and notifications using the Plot CMS. The users of these apps will then be targeted actively whenever they walk by a store of this retailer. Because they only download apps of retailers and brands they like, they only receive location alerts which are relevant to them.
Conversion
Over the last few months we performed a few pilots, sending tens of thousands of location alerts from several apps. We collected all the data and witnessed an incredible overall conversion of 12%! If we compare this to regular conversions of mobile banners (which are around 0,01-1%) we can clearly state that this form of LBM is truly remarkable. As we performed several pilots in different sectors we were also able to see the differences in conversion. For instance we discovered that the willingness of people to go to a different hairdresser, even if they are passing by one and are confronted with a nice discount, was lower then average (but with over 6% still very attractive). On the other hand Location Alerts seem to be real traffic boosters for fast food chains as people seem to accept their deals very often when passing by one of their restaurants.
