Mobile Acquisition on Location: 3 Brands Using Geo-Conquesting to Win New Customers
Ever since people started carrying around smartphones, marketers have been looking for ways to reach the right people at the right time in the right place. The problem is, while demographics help you get the right people, the right time and place are usually just guesswork. How do you know when someone is actually shopping for products and services like yours?
One way is to see that they’re shopping with your competitors. That’s where geo-fencing, specifically geo-conquesting, comes in.
Geo-fencing lets you bring real-time location targeting to your mobile marketing. It lets you target mobile device users in specific locations with ads that speak directly to where they are and what they’re doing. And it’s an especially powerful tactic when you put that fence around competing retail locations.
By targeting shoppers in your competitors’ retail locations, or ones who’ve been to them recently, you can send mobile ads that will convince them to come shop with you instead.
That’s what geo-conquesting is. It’s mobile behavioral targeting at its most responsive and aggressive, and it’s one of the best ways to use the channel to truly capture market share. Here’s how three leading brands are already doing it.
Hyundai
In a marketing program they called “Dealer Stealer,” Hyundai mapped Mazda, Toyota and Hyundai dealerships across Australia. They then segmented this map with geo-fencing lines that allowed them to group Mazda and Toyota dealerships to the nearest Hyundai dealer. When smartphone users in the target audience went into one of these competing dealerships, Hyundai mobile ads were delivered to their phones.
Not only did Hyundai target ads to people at competing dealerships, it also targeted people who had been to those dealerships in the recent past. This allowed Hyundai to reliably advertise to people who showed behavior indicating they were in the market for a car and actively shopping for products like Hyundai’s. The campaign saw 50 percent better click-through rates than the industry average.
Whole Foods Market
Whole Foods Market, in most places, does not have as many locations as its competitors. This means many grocery shoppers have to travel further, past several other supermarkets, to reach a Whole Foods.
To counter this, Whole Foods had to communicate to shoppers in these competing supermarkets that they could get better food and better deals if they went just a little bit further to the nearest Whole Foods.
Whole Foods was already using geo-fencing to reach shoppers in its own retail locations. Now it looked to build geo-fences around competing supermarkets. Ads targeted people in those locations with steep discounts to go the extra mile to the Whole Foods Market. With a 4.69 percent post-click conversion rate — compared to the national average of 1.43 percent — the campaign was a wild success.
Dunkin Donuts
Geo-conquesting is a particularly powerful tool for coffee shops, and there’s no better proof of that than Dunkin Donuts. America’s biggest coffee chain decided to target consumers who were loyal to other coffee shops or hopped between different breakfast shops day-to-day.
The campaign was designed to target breakfast consumers who had visited a competing location in the past 30 days. That audience saw banner ads in mobile apps and websites they visited on their phones that offered a code for $1 coffee and directions to the nearest Dunkin Donuts.
About a third of the customers who clicked through took further actions, and 3.6 percent redeemed the coupons.
Geo-conquesting is a very successful tactic for businesses like quick-service restaurants (coffee shops, pizza, etc.), supermarkets, clothing stores and fitness studios. Any location-based business where you’re competing for local consumers is a great opportunity for this kind of mobile behavioral targeting.
Winning on Your Competitor’s Turf
Geo-fencing lets brands bring true real-time location targeting to omnichannel marketing with an in-the-moment mobile component that no other form of marketing provides. With it, your ads can speak directly to where your target audience is at that moment and what they’re doing.
That’s why we call it “geo-conquesting:” It’s a chance to win highly contested consumer segments away from your competition. It’s an especially powerful tactic when you put that fence around competing retail locations and, by layering demographic data and modeling on top of geo-fencing, you can even screen out location employees and other people who are out of your target audience.
As long as we continue to make personal connected devices a part of our lives, the opportunities for targeted, personalized, omnichannel marketing will continue to multiply. The brands that use these new tools best will win their competitors’ customers, market share and ROI.
That’s how you use mobile marketing and geo-fencing to take the fight to your competition.
Andre Chandra is the Founder and CEO of Propelo Media.
The views and opinions expressed in Marketing Maestros are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.