Strategic (Geo) Marketing for the Smart-Phone Era
If you are the CMO or COO of a consumer-oriented company then the chances are that you have focused a lot of your marketing efforts on getting your SEO and SEM strategy just right. You know you need “Googlejuice” (as Jeff Jarvis calls it) so you have optimised your website accordingly for maximum ROI.
Then along came social networking. You bought facebook ads and launched a corporate facebook page hoping that you could unleash a viral brand awareness campaign to build your ’fan’ base. This was going to be the future of marketing, after all. But it hasn’t quite caught on like you hoped. In fact you are probably still trying to work out how on earth to use social media like twitter and facebook for commercial advantage.
Well the internet stops for no man (or woman) and we are already rushing towards the new next big thing – Geo-marketing. People may not care about your brand enough to hang out with you on facebook in their spare time but if you got them at the right time and, crucially, in the right place then your brand and product offering might well be incredibly compelling – right then and there at that precise moment. This is the future promised by advocates of geo-targeted advertising and location services.
The idea rests on a simple fact: your snazzy new smartphone knows where you are since it has 3G connectivity and GPS. This means that advertising and such things as time/location specific special offers can be delivered to consumers when they are most likely to be relevant and interesting to them.
If you combine this geo-targeting with the often publically available information we post up about ourselves on the likes of facebook and twitter then you have the very real prospect of being able to specifically target very niche interest products at exactly the right type of consumer, at the right time and in the right place.
The jury is still out on how this emerging technology will develop and whether or not there will be a consumer backlash on privacy grounds. But, assuming that such geo-targeted advertising could deliver real value to consumers where and when they most needed it, then this could be a multi-billion dollar industry very soon.
