The “Moment” is Now: Targeting Customers at the Right Time
Marketing is having a bit of a “moment”. Today we live our lives on a multichannel, nonlinear journey that can be broken down into multiple instances of consumer intent.
To truly understand the audience’s interests and motivations, marketers are required to understand “where” customers are
As part of this journey, we’re constantly looking for the products we need to complete every moment, from purchasing our first car, to buying a cup of coffee.
Understandably for marketers, these moments are crucial. They represent the times when a consumer is intent on making a purchase decision, and are the ideal opportunity to deliver a relevant call to action.
To take advantage of these opportunities, marketers must first understand who their customers are by tapping into multiple data sources, from demographic and psychographic, to contextual and search.
But to truly understand the audience’s interests and motivations, marketers are required to understand “where” customers are. Nothing is more powerful than location for connecting with a consumer at exactly the right time.
Location: The real world’s search
Today we live and breathe mobile – almost 60 per cent of people in the UK now own a smartphone, according to Ofcom.
This explosion is of course playing a significant role in driving the growth in location data. For example, think about the last time you checked into a bar on Facebook, tagged the restaurant you visited with your friends on Instagram, ordered an Uber, or even booked an Airbnb close to a festival you’re attending.
Location data is holding increased value as a currency for consumers and brands alike, especially with smartphones being the one device that travels everywhere with us.
The fact that mobile devices are our constant companion makes them the most versatile communication channel of all. Marketers can mine real-time insights based on a consumer’s location from a user’s mobile. If search is the greatest measure of consumer intent online, then location has to be the ultimate measure of intent in the real world.
Use data to ensure you choose the moments that matter
So just how sophisticated has location targeting become? Thanks to advances in geo-targeting and geo-fencing, marketers are now able to track a consumer right down to the building he or she is in and serve ads when it’s most relevant within their journey. xAd’s Blueprints technology, for example, allows it to draw borders around specific location and then match that back to signals from mobile devices, in real-time.
A great example of this in action is from men’s health charity, Movember, which used xAd’s location-based technology to drive awareness, website visits and sign-ups among the office and commuter audience for its annual campaign. By proximity targeting people in commuter hubs, including rail and tube stations, the charity drove the highest level of engagement across the month.
This technology is helping xAd to build up a huge real-world database – 100m locations and counting. Allowing marketers to reach specific and relevant individuals.
Knowing a consumer’s visitation history can tell us a lot about “who” they are, and is far more effective at identifying the crucial moments in the purchase journey.
Indeed, just because a consumer has searched for the new Mercedes car model on their smartphone doesn’t mean they are in the market for one – however, if they were to visit a Mercedes showroom it would indicate their intent to purchase a new car.
xAd’s recent partnership with Rubicon Project, which now brings its real-time programmatic insights and multi-channel capabilities to the mix, means that location is even more powerful a tool for marketers than ever before.
The best is yet to come
Location as a marketing tool has the potential to marry advertising with hyper-targeting across multiple media types. Looking at Out of Home (OOH), as a particularly exciting example; Rubicon Project has announced key OOH partnerships with the likes of Bitposter, Captivate and Adspace to make this cocktail of technology, data, location and OOH advertising an exciting proposition.
Mobile and location have the potential to extend OOH campaigns, particularly as billboards become increasingly digitised.
The industry has just started to wake up to the potential of location, and this trend is expected to continue; the 2016 Global Mobile Survey, by ExchangeWire Research in association with Rubicon Project, found that 75 per cent of brand buyers and over a quarter of agencies predicted that between 81-100 per cent of their mobile buys would be location-enabled in 2016.
With technology constantly evolving, it won’t be long before the marketing world can use this incredible tool to realise the full potential of marketing moments.
Steve Wing is VP, mobile and marketplace – international at Rubicon Project and Imran Khan is head of programmatic and partnerships at xAd.
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