Mobile technology has made the location a vital part of our lives, and since marketers have noticed this, many new products have emerged to take advantage of this fact.
If you’re unfamiliar with this, location-based marketing (LBM) is marketing that targets people based on where they are.
For example, if you own a retail store, you might use LBM to send customers offers and deals when they’re near your store.
This marketing strategy can be highly effective with the right planning and execution.
But if you’re new to the idea, here’s a basic overview of integrating LBM into your marketing plan.
Set Up The Right Data And Target Audience
To successfully integrate LBM into your marketing plan, you’ll need to do two things: set up the right data and target audience.
- Set Up The Right Data
The first step, setting up the right data, includes deciding what kind of information you’ll need to make your targeting decisions.
This highly depends on your business and the strategies you want to pursue.
For example, do you want to focus on retail customers or restaurant patrons? What about age? How about gender?
You’ll also need to decide how closely you want to tie your location data to individual customers. The closer the connection, the more effective the strategy will be.
If you want to target entire Singapore with your marketing campaigns, you might want to consider keeping things fairly loose to achieve the best results.
Another important decision is which geolocation technologies to use.
There are several different tools you can choose from, so you need to consider how precise you need the location data to be and which features you need to have to make the most of this new marketing approach.
Once you have the data, you can start to craft an audience segment based on your findings.
With mobile technology, data collection is often easy, but finding the right audience is more difficult.
You can use multiple tools to help you find the exact people you want to reach.
For example, you can use the Google Analytics Customer Behavior tool to find your best customers and then create personas.
This will help you understand what attracts them and encourages them to engage with your brand.
- Target The Right Audience
The second step, targeting the right audience, includes deciding who you want to reach with your marketing.
As discussed above, the closer the connection, the more effective the strategy will be.
Setting up a database of leads and then mining this database to find the right people to contact is the primary goal of any marketing department.
But since we’re now targeting location-based consumers, finding the right person is more challenging.
As a general rule of thumb, try to find a tool that ties all your data into one place so you can easily understand what is happening.
This ensures you can track the progress of your LBM strategy and make the right adjustments as needed.
Create The Right Content
Now that you have your data and target audience set up, the next step is to create content to attract these individuals to your brand.
This step is critical to the success of your strategy, so make sure you put in the time to do it right.
There are several different ways to go about creating content, so think outside of the box.
- What makes your product special?
- What do you offer that your competitors don’t?
- What would your customers say about your product if they could?
Once you have the answers to these questions, you can start to develop the content that will serve as the backbone of your campaign.
Make sure you develop content that will attract your target audience and still reflect the voice and style of your brand.
You can take several different approaches to attract customers to your store.
You can use traditional advertising, such as print or outdoor ads, but with digital marketing on the rise, other, more innovative strategies are emerging.
For example, you can use a tool like Shopify Plus to easily create online stores and take advantage of this platform’s many features.
You can also implement Google AdWords into your marketing plan to target specific keywords and phrases as you create content for your website.
Run A/B Testing
Once you have your content developed, it’s time to test. You’ll need to put it through a series of A/B tests to get the most out of your content.
This will help you identify what works and what needs to be changed.
For example, if you’re running an online store and want to see if changing the color of your product will increase sales, you can set up two different websites.
One will operate using your original strategy, and the other will use the new strategy.
Then, you can use tools like Google Analytics to track which version of the site performed the best.
The goal of the A/B test is to identify the least expensive and time-efficient model for reaching your target audience.
Suppose you’re looking for a free tool to run A/B tests.
In that case, Google Analytics has a built-in feature that will allow you to set up multiple scenarios and easily identify the winning strategy.
Measure The Results Of Your Plan
Once you have your content strategy in place and started to see initial results, it’s time for you to measure them.
This is often more difficult than it seems because we always compare ourselves to other benchmarks.
To accurately measure your results, you need to set up a control group so you can accurately compare your data to a baseline.
A control group is an additional group of customers you compare yourself to.
For example, suppose you are running an online store and comparing the results of your marketing efforts to another online store that is not using marketing strategies.
In that case, you will need to set up a control group to compare the results accurately.
The first step is to look at the overall performance of your control group.
If you cannot set up a control group, you might want to compare yourself to a hypothetical average store.
Create A Summary Of The Strategy
Setting up a Google Sheet with a summary of the strategy will make it easy to go back and refer to this information in the future.
You can use several Google Sheets to organize your data, and if you want to create a hub for all your marketing information, you can use a single Google Sheet as the basis for all your campaigns.
Make Adjustments
Based on your findings from the above steps, you can start to make adjustments to your strategy.
If you followed the above steps and set up a Google Sheet with a summary of your strategy, it will be an easy step to return to and make changes as needed.
Remember: this is only a guide, and there are many different ways to reach your target audience using location-based marketing effectively.
The above steps simply provide a starting point for your planning phase.
