Marketers have always struggled to target the right customers at the right time in the right place. One of the biggest challenges has been reaching out to customers and making them buy from diverse geo-political locations. Marketers have always been haunted by their client complaints of a product not doing well in a particular location.
In fact, QSRs long fought to have a presence within the 3-mile radius of their stores, often limited to reaching prospects in their cars with billboards and local radio. With technology, media channels have proliferated dramatically but the ability to target a message to a very specific geographic region has lagged behind other advancements.
Facebook comes to the rescue of your business
This week, Facebook (FB, Financial), has launched the best product for the local businessmen- hyper-local advertising which aims at targeting ads within a specific distance of the conventional location based retailers. Advertisers can now set their message to intended target radius as near as a single mile from the point of business, this means it would appear only on the mobile devices of consumers within that specific geography and not as unnecessary popups to irrelevant customers that gave rise to rejection and dejection many a times earlier.
Facebook says that their geo-targeting feature will go live in a few weeks, with many micromarketing applications sure to follow. As features advance to real-time notifications, users with location tracking could enjoy the benefits of such advertising since they can actually get what they want rather than going in circles in search of their quest. This could dramatically change the relationship between retailers and consumers. The advertisement popups will no longer be an irritating post to be deleted or ignored, but will entice consumer interest towards the business. Let us have a deeper look at how this will set a positive ambience between consumers and retailers.
Search time reduction
It is not possible for human eyes to look round the corner, even if the corner is just a quarter block away. But Facebook’s geo-targeting app can make it possible to look round the corner. For example, a burrito craver can get the information sitting at his home when he can just walk into his local burrito outlet; place an order and get it right away without any waiting time. Efficient notification of supply (either because of a temporarily overstaffed store or a surplus of merchandise) to a potential buyer, who may be able to quickly access that surplus, presents a win-win proposition. This improves the relation between the consumer and the retailer considerably.
Opportunistic sales
A customer is searching for a particular item in the departmental store and you are a small retailer located in the same mall having the item- your smart popup on the Facebook page of the customer’s smartphone can get the item moved from your shelf into the customer’s shopping kitty.
Smart retailers will use highly targeted messages to highlight their best-selling merchandise or to offer special discounts on items they have in excess on their inventory list to prospects already nearby with cash in hand. The Louis Vuitton (LVMUY, Financial) store could not only add $2,500 to its topline revenue from an iconic Alma bag in elegant Epi leather; they have usurped that revenue from Bloomingdale’s (M, Financial) handbag department- all without a coupon or a newspaper ad.
Time savings
Life has become so busy that now even smartphones come equipped with apps to create easy to-do lists. Every one carries a to-do list in some or the other format to keep a check on their buzzing life. Imagine receiving a message guaranteeing 30-minute oil change of your car while shopping grocery in the same strip mall. A local window washer notifying the neighborhood that their services will be available the very next day instead of the usual 4-week waiting time, resulting in another task finally ticked off the to-do list. This reduces the pressure of completing tasks in every day’s compelling lifecycle. Geo-Targeting helps you get more than one task done from the exhaustive to-do list simultaneously due to location based advertising.
Loyalty points or Loyalty bonus
Geo Targeting comes with a unique feature of loyalty points for its users. Just like customers shop at departmental stores and earn points for every dollar they spend and after accumulating a certain amount of points they encash them in different modes like shopping for the accumulated amount on gifts and goodies, geo-targeting will allow retailers to reward consumers for shopping at a specific time or location, thus balancing supply and demand for the retailer, resulting in another win-win scenario. Quick service restaurants have long suffered from fixed costs of overhead and staff, despite demand bursts at mealtimes. Geo-targeting will offer incentives for consumers who have the flexibility to shop at low traffic times like the happy hours, resulting in better revenue spread for retailers.
Feeling at home while you are away
Allowing a smartphone to recognize the current location, geo-targeting will facilitate notifications in any other city in the U.S. and eventually in the entire world. Any city could be easy to navigate. No longer will a person have to search for the right place while they are out with family and friends in the unknown. The store will walk up to them and handhold them to the doors- thus saving the customer of hassles in finding the right store in a city away from home. Instead of making futile rounds of the locality, they can follow the Facebook app and drive right into the store without wasting on gas.
The outcome of Facebook’s initiative
Till now, Facebook has been the protagonist for onliners, but with the geo-targeting app it will win over the hearts of the brick and mortar local retailers. Geo-targeting will now provide the platform to the local stores to reach out to meaningful customers and drive them closer to the buying decision.
On the flip side, like all other forms of advertising, the challenge of geo-targeted campaigns will be filtering meaningful messages from spam. Like many digital ads, there is high risk of clutter. With an already small screen, ads on a cell phone could quickly become a nuisance. Geo-targeting can only function if the consumer enables the location feature. Should advertisers not respect their audience, access can and will be denied.
However this new app will certainly steer the local retailers to Facebook and add to its revenue. Till now Facebook mostly earned from online retailers who advertised their product line to the Facebook users and gained orders online to be delivered home. But this new face of Facebook will earn value from local store based retailers, as well as aid in adding numbers to the revenue chart of Facebook and value to the brand created by Mark Zuckerberg.
