As advertisers and publishers wise up to audience targeting techniques, Motti Kushnir, Chief Marketing Officer at location based services specialists, Telmap, looks at the benefits of making adverts personal.
As AudienceScience highlighted in their recent findings, audience targeting clearly works – and it works well. So much so that it is already establishing itself as the basis for effective marketing campaigns.
In today’s always connected, 24 hour digital lives, consumers are constantly bombarded with a never-ending stream of adverts. Consumers have become adept at tuning these out, filtering and ignoring the majority of online adverts simply because they are not relevant.
The dream has always been to provide adverts which consumers engage with and want to click on.
The evolution of mobile technologies, the growth of new platforms combined with our need to interact and consume information locally, while on-the-go, makes it clear that the proliferation of mobile location-based advertising is just around the corner.
Transporting a rich advertising experience into the increasingly connected mobile experience, that today’s consumers seek and enjoy, represents a crucial transition for both advertisers and marketers.
Location-based advertising can also help monetizing free services. More and more operators are exploring location-based advertising as a potential business model, to make location-based services sustainable over time.
Users today expect to get location-based services for free, and advertising revenues are crucial for sustainable growth. In order to lure in both big brands and long tail advertisers it is necessary that the advertising business model, as well as the services themselves are well thought out and easy to implement.
Location-based services already have a major part in enriching the digital lives of mobile consumers. Giant industry players such as Google and Nokia have identified the potential and popularity of mobile location-based services and are therefore providing navigation experiences to mobile users for free.
As operators and service providers scramble to adapt their paid-for business models to this heightened competition, Telmap, a global leader in mobile location solutions, believes that location-based advertising will be part of the answer in supplementing traditional revenue streams.
Mobile devices today mirror our lives and play a crucial role in our life journeys. Advertising campaigns that incorporate location-based information can provide advertisers with a better ROI through razor-sharp targeting. Campaigns can be highly targeted to specific mobile users, when they are in specific locations.
For example providing Burger King ads and coupons to users for their local outlet as they search for food/dining related information or navigate in the area of a Burger King branch using Telmap’s solutions.
Location-based information integrated into an advertising campaign can also mean intelligent campaign management as campaigns can be flexible and adapt to changes on-the-fly.
Campaigns can also be tiered and offer different experiences to different users.
A location-based advertising pilot that Telmap has held with an operator, serving advertisements for Telmap’s mobile location companion users, has shown some encouraging results:
1. 25% of participants visited new / unfamiliar businesses during the pilot, following an ad
2. The closer the advertised venue to the user’s real time location and route, the higher the conversion was. People are much more responsive to offers that are in high proximity to their original route.
3. Conversion rate when the location of the advertised venue was 100 meters from the user was 34.7%. As the distance grew to 800 meters, conversion rate dropped to 13.2%
4. Despite the sharp drop in conversion rates, 13.2% conversion rate is still an extremely high conversion rate in today’s digital advertising world.
5. Conversion rates also varied by category of advertised businesses, with parking, flower shops, bars, pharmacies, cinemas, and ice-cream places leading the conversion rate charts.
Adding to the equation social media giants Twitter and Facebook who have recently been active in adding location features to their services only highlights the potential of location information. Full integration between location information and social communities can further increase the effectiveness of location-based advertising, weaving in word-of-mouth and viral effects, as well as recommendations from friends, all powered by the context of real-time location.
As mobile services become better connected and deeply embedded into our lives, Telmap predicts that location-based advertising is going to boom, and be perceived as useful, helpful information rather than just another ad.
By Motti Kushnir
Chief Marketing Officer
Telmap
www.telmap.com
