‘Location, location, location’; a phrase coined in the 20th Century in the real-estate sector, but one that’s never been more relevant to advertising. Nearly three quarters of people (73%) now allow apps to access their location, providing exact insight into consumer behaviour on mobile, and a competitive advantage for brands if used intelligently.

Location data is already being used successfully in some industries by established players, trying to fight off disruptors that are masters at using new technology to seize market share. And yet, according to recent research by Forrester, 94% of advertisers still have difficulty working with location data because they don’t know how best to use it.

If marketers want to be able to use data to raise awareness of their products or services, then there are some guidelines to follow to engage rather than enrage potential customers with badly targeted or irrelevant advertising.

Take advantage of calendar events

Events specific to locales offer particularly good opportunities to boost CTRs and conversions. Any brand can use a timely event to promote a product or keep the company top of mind in particular regions.

Location data is being used well in the taxi industry - where more established companies are having to work smart with data to take on agile competitors. Ahead of the 2017 Pride in London, for example, a well-known British taxi company recognised that potential customers would be looking for transport in the area, providing a great opportunity for the brand.

Using location data to discover who was at the event, they targeted people on Twitter with creative ads that incorporated the Pride branding and specific keywords such as ‘LGBT’ and ‘Pride Parade’ with a relevant discount. This resulted in higher engagement, volume of impressions and app installations, as well as delivering the lowest cost per impression, ultimately helping them compete with the likes of Uber.

When used in conjunction with popular calendar events, like in the example above, location data can deliver excellent results. Marketers should focus on producing well-targeted and personalised ads, using contextually relevant creatives tailored for individual platforms. The more relevant and targeted the better.

Play the long game

Location technology is constantly advancing and has already moved beyond just targeting people at a particular moment in time. It is now possible for marketers to measure and react to longer-term patterns of behaviour to inform longer term marketing strategies.

For example, brands can see if someone has been to a number of shopping centres or restaurants in the past few weeks or see which journeys they make regularly using historical location data, to build up patterns of behaviour in order to optimise targeting.

Further, a fast food retailer, for example, might use live location data to discover when a customer who is engaging with the brand on social media is walking near a restaurant, and deliver a tailored money-off voucher for that day only to drive them to purchase. Building a longer-term profile helps inform wider marketing strategies and enables you to target more effectively.

Use data responsibly

A recent study has shown that over three quarters of people (77%) will only share their location if they are confident that their personal information is being stored securely, and a further 34% of us will remove an app if we receive poorly targeted ads.

Being clear about how your data is sourced and validated and then ensuring you can blend it with sources from second and third parties will improve the targeting of identified audience segments.

There is no doubt that location data can be extremely valuable to marketers, but if they do not treat it with respect, brand apps and consumers will be turned off.

Brands understand that the consumer relationship with their mobile device is intimate, and getting mobile advertising wrong can both irritate and disengage potential customers. There seems to be some reluctance to adopt newer technology until it has been tested and any potential issues are ironed out, which is understandable. Yet brands that are adopting location targeting, and are doing it well, are already reaping excellent rewards.

Keep these three tips top-of-mind and trial using location-based marketing – it will surely pay off.

- by Amit Dar

Charming today’s entitled consumers will be the key challenge for marketers next year.

To make inroads, they need to create truly tailor-made experiences and mobile-first engagement and leverage the value of owned channels.

Mega Trend - Artificial Intelligence

2018 will see artificial intelligence (AI) advance from cutting edge technology to status quo. Built into audience engagement platforms, AI will bring new levels of relevance into automatically delivered content, help marketers to recognise the most engaging channel and present a contextually relevant message to match a consumer’s real-time situation.

AI will be used to rollout prediction-based shopping recommendations, location-specific offers, and AI-powered chat conversations – to site a but a few usages.

Currently, 13% of organisations have already adopted AI (Spiceworks) and the number is even higher in large organisations with over 1,000 employees, where 30 % are already on board with AI and 25% plan to join in 2018.

1.      “Hyper” personalisation

With permission from data-savvy consumers, brands are mining rich data footprints from online user behaviour and leveraging it into new and exciting ways to further adapt to specific user needs.

And, as new biometric technologies and access becomes the norm, spearheaded by facial recognition on the latest Apple iPhone, consumers can expect brands to rush to create tailor-made, customised brand experiences in 2018.

2.      Live and kicking

Video streaming accounts for 75% of online traffic (KPCB) and live videos offer the maximum value for marketers right now. The numbers are clear: consumers spend 300% more time watching live video over pre-recorded content (Facebook), and 82% of consumers prefer branded live video over other social media formats (LiveStream). Just be sure to trigger mobile alerts (see 4.) when a live event is about to happen.

3.      Crystal clear data collection

Consumers are willing to share personal data for better experiences but brands need to keep it under wraps. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union comes into effect on May 2018 and further raises the bar on data safety (read also our guide to Marketing Data Privacy).

GDPR affects brands even beyond EU borders, and instead of dreading GDPR, brands can use it to strengthen customer relationships. With its built-in Accountability Principle, GDPR presents an opportunity to win customers’ trust – and outperform the competition – by creating transparent data collection policies. Data breaches like the recent Equifax hack (Sept 2017) are today’s Exxon Valdez-style PR-disasters.

4.      Mobile-first engagement

Convenience and frictionless customer experiences are a must for engaging consumers today and marketers are responding by leveraging mobile message integration to deliver convenience at every step of the consumer journey.

Delivered via Whatsapp, Line, Wechat, GroupMe, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and good old text messages, over 69% of digital media engagement occurs using mobile devices (ComScore), so it’s a no-brainer.

With that being the case, marketers need to design mobile-first journeys anchored by micro-moments in real-time. The main barrier? Earning opt-in for notifications and location sharing and using them wisely.

5.      Creating a niche

Shouting marketing messages from the rooftops is so 2008. In 2018, big brands are finding value in cornering niche audiences that may be small in size but high in engagement and loyalty.

Targeting these well-informed consumers with relevant content will be key in continuing these positive relationships.

6.      Paid social media

The days of boundless (and unpaid) audience engagement on social media are over. With Facebook clamping down on organic reach, marketers need to allocate budgets to pay for boosting posts or getting on Facebook's News Feed.

Creativity will also pay off in 2018 - whether it’s attracting audiences with live video events or finessing Ads in Facebook Messenger.

2018 is all about blending in with native ads, including search advertisements, sponsored listings, advertorials, recommended content, or seamlessly integrated display ads. Premium native ads not only play nicely with publishers’ websites, but they also deliver 400% higher click-through-rates (CTRs) on mobile devices than regular display ads (Polar). The key to it all? Delivering relevant, hyper-personalized experiences across all channels, powered by real-time consumer intelligence.

7.      Returning to owned media

With social media and mobile notifications updating consumers on new content, it’s becoming less important where content is published. If content is searchable, relevant, and useable – users will find it. 2018 may actually see brands extract more value from publishing on their owned properties such as brand websites, e-commerce platforms, blogs, and mobile apps than on third-party sites.

There are three reasons powering this shift:

First, content on owned property will by nature “live” where conversion (online shopping portals, etc.) is just a click away.

Second, owned properties support consumer-specific personalization, for instance dynamic websites adjusted according to purchase history or path-to-site.

And third, all that behaviour and preference data will belong to the owners, not a third-party app or social platform.

- by Christopher Baldwin

According to research by content marketing platform Shareaholic, search outpaced social in the percentage of overall traffic that it delivered in 2017. This reverses a trend of social dominance that began in 2014.

The analytic platform looked at externally referred traffic from over 400 million internet users and 250,000 mobile and desktop sites. A year ago site visitors were more likely to be referred from social networks, but search seems to have made a comeback in 2017.

Search drove 35% of site visits in 2017 compared to 26% from social. Shareaholic consider the changes to the Facebook news feed algorithims to be a major factor in the shift over the last 12 months.

Another important factor is that search engines are indexing more and more social content and including it within their rankings and results pages. This means that internet users are increasingly finding social content being aggregated by search engines, rather than only being accessible through searches on individual social media networks.

This has seen Google reclaim their place as the world’s foremost referrer of traffic.

Facebook drops

With regards to the social media networks themselves, the biggest change overall was Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s site’s share of visits dropped a pretty significant 12.7% in the second half of 2017. The site has had a bumpy year, with the anger over its potential role in the US election continues to simmer and the major changes made to what content it displays on its news feed.

Facebook users are also spending 5% less time on the site, although they are spending more time watching Facebook Live broadcasts and watching video. Because video and live streaming tend to link out to less other pages, this could be a big factor in the big drop in referrals.

Pinterest and Instagram are the biggest profiteers of Facebook’s drop. Instagram in particular has double its user base in the past two years, while Pinterest has seen a 1.5% percentage point increase in share of visits year on year. The sites success is built on the fact that its 200 million monthly active users have saved over a 100 billion Pins, all of which provide opportunities to drive traffic to an external source.

The thing that links Instagram and Pinterest is that the are both heavily focused on images, indicating that image sharing is an important element of distributing and driving traffic to content and product pages.

- by Colm Hebblethwaite