This webinar is now available on demand. Watch right here for free.
Trying to stay current with marketing strategies in a mobile-first world can make you feel like you’re running a marathon with no goal in sight. No wonder marketers are fatigued, especially in trying to nail the delivery of relevant and personalized experiences to users who are just as valuable to your competitors as they are to you.
Enter precise location targeting: the under-utilized secret weapon that pinpoints a user’s location and provides marketers with the necessary information to tailor experiences and communications to the current situation in real-time, real-place.
Mike Schneider, VP of Marketing at Skyhook — a first-party location network company — delivered a detailed explanation of location targeting, when interviewed by VentureBeat.
“What are the components of targeting?” Schneider began. “They’re message, person, place, and time. Or put another way, right person, right place, right time. Location is the place.”
He elaborated by saying location targeting allows marketers to put context to the user’s coordinates — allowing for powerful user interceptions such as geofencing, which triggers an event when a person arrives at an exact location.
“We have a word call ‘appticipation,’” Schneider explained. “Where you use data to provide the experience the user doesn’t know that they want yet. For instance, when you’re at home using a retail app, you want the experience geared towards either building a list to take to the store or buying something on spot. But when you’re in the store, you come for a specific purpose. So with location-targeting, you want to gear the experience towards helping users find the items that they came to find or get help.”
For example, at Home Depot, when a user arrives at the retail location, the app can tell them about a workshop going on. Or at Sephora, perhaps you learn about the opportunity for a makeover or try a product.
“We enable you to be able to automate that,” says Schneider. “You can have the user skip a few steps and that’s a reduction in friction, which gives you the opportunity to do more for the user.”
One exciting example Schneider provided was the CardStar app — an app that takes loyalty tags off keychains and puts them into your phone. In its first incarnation, users would have to open the app, and scroll through all their cards to find the right one. Thanks to geofencing, a 20-second inconvenience of scrolling is turned into a five-second experience that immediately serves up the right loyalty card.
Schneider also gave advice for start-up companies struggling to implement precise location targeting into their business strategy. He asked companies to question the accuracy of their location signals first, and then emphasized the importance of using the right strategy to get users to turn on their location service.
When a prompt for location services first appears in a new app, Schneider says, “Consumers are going to ask ‘What do they need that for?’ They don’t think it’s going to add value for them. So the challenge is how do you let them know you’re going to give them better content or offers or enhance the experience when you have location data. Whatever you’re going to do, tell them you’re going to do it, then ask for location services.”
Schneider compared the situation with the current state of location services to the early days of online shopping: Online retailers would offer 30 percent off brick-and-mortar prices just to get beyond users’ early apprehensions about giving up credit card information online. Of course, paying online is now completely commonplace. But with the nascent state of location-based marketing, businesses eager for consumers to provide the gift of location-based data must ensure they communicate first what’s in it for them.
For the webinar, Schneider will elaborate on the many benefits to precise location-targeting for marketers, how it’s being used to increase engagement, as well as the pitfalls that lead to poor performances. He’ll be joined by Skyhook CEO Jim Crowley and VentureBeat’s director of marketing technology Stewart Rogers in this discussion aimed at educating marketers on the new age of advertising.
Don’t miss out!
In this webinar, you’ll:
- Get new insight into the adtech ecosystem’s current migration in user targeting.
- Hear new strategies for planning relevant messaging to target your ideal customer.
- Learn how user intelligence and precision location targeting is the key to build a robust marketing strategy.
Speakers:
Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology, VentureBeat
Mike Schneider, VP of Marketing, Skyhook
This webinar is sponsored by Skyhook.