4 Effective Ways Of Using Location Data To Show Digital Ads To Store Visitors

Marketers are slowly realizing that the key to carrying out fruitful conversations with their favorite audience is by having a contextually relevant conversation with them. To achieve such relevance marketers invest in learning more about customers such as their demographics, location data, shopping behavior. In this article, let’s uncover how location data adds relevance.

Store visitors are very active on their mobile devices even when they’re inside the store. Such shoppers, in addition to looking for products at the store, are either browsing websites, chatting, playing music (hello earphones!) or playing games. Shop owners and brands will testify to this and also admit that it is a challenge to communicate with such potential shoppers let alone have relevant marketing done.

Brands who wish to make the most of every available opportunity are constantly looking for ways to connect with and engage customers and store visitors. For example, when customers visit your store and spend time on their phones, that’s your shot at meeting them half-way! How about taking all your in-store offers and discounts right in front of your store visitors, digitally?

Woman on her phone while shopping

 

Reach Them Half Way Digitally Based On Their Physical Location

Customers’ physical location indicate their real-world preferences. And knowing your customers’ preference in the physical (analog) world in addition to understanding their behavior online reveals a trove of information to you as a marketer or shop owner.

Location data tells a customer’s daily travel routines (like commutes), recurring shopping habits (such as grocery shopping or petrol pump visits), restaurant preferences, even purchasing behavior online and at stores. In the case of the store owner or marketer, they can use this to personalize their ads with products and services that shoppers might care about and also allocate their budget accordingly.

Location-based advertising (LBA) is used to attract new customers and re-connect with existing ones in the form of ads, text messages and push notifications to the shoppers’ mobile devices. According to eMarketer, marketers will spend $26.5 billion in mobile location-targeted advertising this year. To stay ahead of the curve, brands must be aware of the various methods of implementing LBA.

Proximity Marketing

The closer a customer is to your store, the higher is the potential to engage. Proximity marketing uses beacons to trigger alerts or ads and other such content to the smartphones of store visitors. The communication can be delivered within a few feet of a specific location.

An example would be to push notifications about a sale or seasonal offers to shoppers who have your brand’s mobile app installed. With BPRISE, you can also mark a location you wish to target and show display ads (both banner and video ads) on websites and apps that your shoppers are likely to visit. Greet potential customers nearby with catchy ads on their mobile screens and engage them.

Who can benefit: Retailers, Hypermarkets

Geoconquesting

In-market buyers or people who’re actively looking for products you sell or similar to yours at the store next door means “potential”. Geoconquesting uses push notifications and ads on mobile apps to attract app users when they are at specific “competitor” locations.

For example, Burger King runs a campaign offering “one cent whopper” to McDonald’s visitors who have the Burger King app open. With BPRISE, you can target similar store visitors with in-app ads as well as programmatic ads (aka display ads!). It can be used to attract potential customers nearby who’re most likely to buy a burger! (sic)

Who can benefit: QSRs, Restaurants

Geofencing

If they’ve installed your brand’s app, they’re already interested. Geofencing uses mobile apps to share location-based content and ads to its users in real-time when they’re at a predefined location.

For instance, when users who have permitted an app to use their location enter a geofenced area, they may receive a contextually relevant ad or push notification when using the app. With BPRISE, you can target malls, shops, entry and exit areas, specific store sections to grab the shoppers’ attention in app as well as on websites, Facebook and Instagram with contextually relevant banner and video ads.

Who can benefit: Shop-in-shop brands

Geotargeting

If they’ve once visited your store or website, they’re likely to do so again. Geotargeting serves ads and notifications (on your own app) to an audience who previously bought from a brand. This is also a time sensitive form of LBA.

For example, a retailer will want to target visitors in the past 90 days about an upcoming mega sale. A builder or an auto dealer will want to target people who visited their site or showroom a week or two weeks or three weeks ago respectively. Because it clearly indicates that such visitors are in the final stages of the buying cycle. A travel agent will want to look back at the last season’s customers and so on.

With BPRISE you can have display ads in the form of banners and videos placed on the websites and apps that your customers are likely to frequent. Serve ads down to specific geographies, pin codes and even down to the store-level. Diwali is just around the corner, what can you think of offering your customers??

Who can benefit: Brands, Real-estate, Auto-dealers, Tourism/Travel Agents, Airlines

Privacy & The Use Of Location Data In Advertising

At BPRISE, we ensure that the location data used whether collected via GPS or another signal is opted-in, which means that the user is opting in to share their location for advertising purposes. The data is aggregated and anonymized so that it cannot be used for individual tracking. We adhere to codes of conduct which maintain and protect consumer privacy.

Our duty as the marketing platform provider is to help marketers and brand owners embrace privacy standards which create a trusting environment for customers. When customers share their rich location data willingly you can drive contextually relevant and meaningful campaigns digitally to meet them half way at their real-world touchpoints.

 

 

The 101 on Programmatic Advertising

Here’s a go to guide for knowing all about the “new black” in the ad market. Programmatic ad spends grew from $5bn in 2012 to $39bn in 2016, at an average rate of 71% a year, according to Zenith’s programmatic marketing forecast. How did you not notice?

Let’s Start At The Very Beginning

Programmatic advertising is an automated mechanism that uses computer algorithms to purchase ad inventory. This modern, digitized media buying and selling does away with the traditional agency-network set-up, manual bidding and human optimization. It’s the idea and now, a wide-spread practice, that the processes involved in media marketing and negotiation such as inventory selection, data reporting, budget optimization, the back and forth of paperwork and testing of creative inventory; all of this is handled through an automated system.

This is achieved through a sophisticated and efficient assimilation of data, software and technology. Everything from behavioural and intent-based targeting, to real time bidding (RTB) and exchange-based buying of inventory can be credited to programmatic buying.

In English Please!

All you need to input is a range of creatives, your budget and targeting filters as an advertiser. Programmatic Advertising takes over from there. It makes scientific, data-backed decisions about which ad property to display, on whose website, at what price and when. Microwaved popcorn much?

You have two options:

“Direct Buying” takes place against a fixed payment in advance for a specific ad inventory. The objective here, is simply to exhaust a set budget by providing the requisite number of impressions on the selected ad property of a specific publisher.

“Real Time Bidding”, or RTB is an auction-based price system for buying and selling ad impressions across sites, on a real time basis. It literally takes milliseconds to launch ad campaigns, sitting at a desk, with a front row seat at the bid wars for inventories across multiple publishers’ sites.

We all know what DSP and SSP means by this point. But the truly powerful acronym of the bunch is a DMP, aka Data Management Platform. The information of what’s being sold and bought at what price, is stored here and is presented in a simple manner, displaying how consumers behave across the wider internet. So now, you can predict outcomes, understand audiences and break down media silos at the click of a mouse.

The Good News

With Programmatic Buying, you witness the actual price of ads move before your very eyes, minus mark-ups and agency fees. If you spot that a certain ad creative isn’t working on a segment or site, you have the power to immediately switch strategies then and there, in real time. No more waiting for your agency to respond with a monthly campaign report, while those ad impressions burn away; and no more feeling unsure about your return on investment. Have fun with highly personalised messages and refined funnelling processes. The transparency and quickness of it all helps hit the bull’s eye over and over again, across any device or channel. You save time, money, energy and nerves!

The Bad News

Woah Woah Woah. Don’t fire your media agency just yet though! There are a few downsides to programmatic advertising. Since your ads follow the user’s wild travels across the world wide web, you run the risk of displaying ads on questionable destinations. Behavioural and Contextual targeting can be tricky that way, so rein in visibility by blacklisting or whitelisting sites or categories.

But how is this hyper targeting possible in the first place? Programmatic ads rely on cookies to track activities across devices. So, the moment netizens observe computer hygiene and clinically cleanse their system of cookies, all that data is lost and it’s back to square one. Big dogs like Facebook and Google are immune to an extent, because they track movement across devices through login status, but the rest, as they say, is browser history! Isn’t that how the cookie crumbles?

Another devilish hazard is ad fraud. Domain spoofing experts and bots hike up costs and dupe advertisers with cunning flair. This raises obvious questions on the quality of inventory in programmatic buying. There is an entire article dedicated to that problem alone. Read it here to know how you can keep guard.

So Now What?

In advertising, knowing more about your audiences and being able to access and read data that uncovers insights are crucial. There is no doubt that leveraging technology to drive stronger results from highly relevant, targeted campaigns is a boon. Unanimous adoption of programmatic advertising across multi-channels is fast becoming a reality. Legal updates and private partnerships to curb the above challenges are in the pipeline as well.

As an ad-tech entrepreneur, I advise all brand owners and advertisers to hop on board the Programmatic band-wagon right away. The earlier and faster you join the game, the savvier you’ll be at bidding the best price for the right ad. Sold?