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Proximity Marketing - What Is This?

By Sam Hallahan


Gone are the days where a company's best approach for advertising was expensive prime time television slots. With mobile marketing revolutionising the world of advertising, companies need to look to means that are more effective. Location Based Advertising or LBA is a new form of advertising that uses location-tracking technology via mobile networks in order to target consumers' mobile devices with location specific advertising. So is location-based advertising the future of proximity marketing?

The inception of Location Based Advertising itself immediately highlights a key aspect of our modern lives. Marketers want to reach customers around the clock, wherever they are, to tackle the fast-paced nature of our day-to-day living. Marketers want to target customers on the go when they are a convenient distance from a store or redeemable location for offers and they can now do this in two main ways. First marketers can utilise "pull" advertising where customers will actively seek information on their nearest available restaurant for example. Using location-tracking technology, their mobile device can bring up a list and a map of their nearest available restaurants and even refine the list based on time and culinary preferences.

This example highlights only the pull side of LBA however. Push advertising via LBA can be just as effective and still allows users to opt out of the alerts if they no longer wish to receive them. The push approach has been used recently by movie theatres via "geo-fencing" a proximity based virtual field that automatically sends alerts to devices within the specified domain once a user agrees to receiving the alerts. Movie theatres would send alerts allowing the user to opt in to receiving free movie samples when they passed the movie theatre. Highlighted here is the ability for LBA to engage customers as they are on the go and in a convenient vicinity to where they can redeem the specified offer.

A major part of LBA is its opt-in/out feature. Customers have the ability to agree to receiving alerts and how they receive them before they are delivered. This way, not only can customers control a level of security in their mobile use, but marketers can also learn a lot about customer behaviour through real-time market research. How a customer chooses to receive the advertisement, and what interests they specify to receive them about, plays a huge part in marketers understanding their audience. Through this research, marketers can then go on to focussing on what works and what doesn't and from there, make informed decisions about how best to engage their specific target audiences most effectively and with optimal customer satisfaction.

It is possible to see how LBA is not only targeting the principles of convenience and relevance, but also of customer security and satisfaction. All these elements combine the most effective of company to customer ethics and are implemented to ensure lasting customer loyalty making Location Based Advertising, the future of proximity marketing.




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