Context is King
- Tuesday, February 18th, 2014
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Marketers who geo-target consumers without adding context into the equation are missing a trick, argues James Brayshaw, vice president, enterprise data management, location and GIS, EMEA at Pitney Bowes.
This past September, Comscore released some astounding statistics on mobile shopping habits in the UK. More than a third of mobile users (39 per cent) are now shopping on their mobiles, making for a market that is some 7m people strong. This is a sharp increase from the previous year, with mobile purchases growing a whopping 46 per cent. Today, clothing and accessories are the most popular goods being bought on mobile devices, while the hospitality and travel sectors are growing fastest.
Not surprisingly, the adoption of mobile shopping has spurred tremendous interest in the opportunities presented by a SoLoMo (social-local-mobile)-focused world. This is evident in the fact that, according to StreetFight Insights 2013, as of 2013, 45bn apps have been downloaded from the AppStore, of which 33 per cent re location-aware.
Businesses are realising that geo-location analysis has become a way to more accurately target shoppers, but as yet, most marketing campaigns focus only on a person’s location and miss the opportunity to deliver more relevant messages and offers. Marketers are failing to take advantage of the wealth of additional information available once you know a location.
It doesn’t matter if a consumer is a vegetarian – if the person walks past a mobile-savvy restaurant, they may get offered a discount for a burger. Marketers know their customers’ locations, but aren’t combining additional context with that location information to maximise the opportunit. Mobile marketing must leverage contextual relevance to evolve from a push to a pull methodology. Rather than using a customer’s location as the only foundation for marketing campaigns, businesses should also focus on contextual aspects of location and social data.
Combining context with geography
By enriching customer profiles with data from social networks and then using geographic contextual data – from the weather to holidays to road conditions and anything in between – companies will be able build personalised marketing campaigns that are specific to a consumer’s needs and environment at that specific moment in time.
If a retailer has enough of this contextual data about a consumer and their location, individualised marketing truly becomes possible. There is a trend in the market to capture a mobile user’s location history in order to add location context to regularly visited areas. Consumers are very predictable, as are their location and mobility patterns.
A marketer now has the ability to target mobile consumers based on their location-based profile. A mobile user can be reverse-geocoded to detect if they are in an airport or a hotel. This information, while useful immediately, can have more value when analysed over a longer period of time. For example, this person may repeat the same pattern multiple times during the year and therefore be considered a ‘traveller’. This may mean they are receptive to travel-related goods such as insurance or car hire.
Location data can also be combined with loyalty data. For example, if a shopper is loyal to one business and the retailer has information about his address and shopping habits, those data points can be cross-referenced with residence and regional weather data.
With accurate reverse geocoding, the retailer would be able to pinpoint this customer’s location and send promotions on barbecue packs in time for the Thursday he usually shops, if sunny weather is forecast for the weekend.
Conversely, if the forecast is for a rainy weekend, the company could send promotional offers on DVDs instead.
Brands could also cross geocoded data with the timing of events. By leveraging social network data, it could be possible to see that a consumer is a fan of football and further customise these promotions by offering items that would be relevant for a football event party. These kinds of highly relevant offers can result in “pull” marketing rather than “push” marketing, and as consumers begin to receive messages that meet their needs, rather than interrupt their mobile experience, they will start to seek out mobile offers.
When it comes to the services sector, restaurants could fill tables and hotels could fill rooms for that evening by creating more targeted promotions with contextual data. Eateries could enhance the accuracy of marketing by integrating social network data, too. For example, social media sites like Twitter or Instagram often host geo-tagged pictures and comments about specific kinds of foods. Bringing that data together and accurately analysing it could build a more complete picture of a customer’s profile, such as their likes and dislikes. When that information is coupled with location, then that mobile-savvy restaurant could offer vegetarians a salad, rather than a burger. Meanwhile, hotels could work with airlines to cross-reference data about travellers and their destinations.
Pulling with relevance
Some of these developments may seem futuristic, but a number of companies are already deploying geographic and contextual strategies in many different ways. Google, for example, builds customer profiles with social and location data. That’s the basis for Google Now. The virtual assistant doesn’t just answer a consumer’s questions, it predicts what he or she will be searching for down the road by making use of the available data.
In Britain, McDonald’s UK built a “restaurant finder” app that leverages real-time, geo-location and mapping technology to show the restaurant’s “night owl” audience where they can grab food at different hours of the evening. The campaign was a success, increasing night time sales by 4 per cent.
These proof points are just the beginning of more intelligent mobile marketing campaigns that pull instead of push. Rather than displaying irrelevant ads to consumers, Google and McDonald’s created have helpful content that soft sells the service and the products, respectively. This is important, given the highly competitive market across the digital landscape, which means that irrelevance is one of the biggest risks companies face, especially as competitors begin to make use of customer data to optimise marketing.
Customer experience has already become a focal point for most companies, and applying dynamic, contextual geographic data to products, services and outreach can revolutionise that experience. Geo-data is getting more attention as SoLoMo becomes a reality and the next step is for businesses to find a platform that can consolidate, centralise and manage all these disparate sources of inbound data – from local context to social networks and shopping behaviour.
Geographic contextual data provides phenomenal potential for companies to create marketing that meets consumer demands in a very targeted and personal way. Rather than pushing mass advertising to local consumers, these contextually intelligent campaigns will pull consumers to businesses by being highly relevant – and helpful – to their unique, real-time situations.
The potential is limited only by the imagination of marketing teams, and of course, the data governance strategies and management platforms that companies have in place.
James Brayshaw is vice president, enterprise data management, location and GIS, EMEA at Pitney Bowes