While people have talked about the possible potential of geofencing and mobile marketing, this is the first time the concept has been proven. And the results couldn’t be more positive.

Key findings showed that:

• triggered sales per transaction were larger than average transaction sales, and
• sales were up 2.5% over projected sales for the time period and up 4.9% over projected sales for Black Friday.

A post-campaign survey was also disseminated to the participants of the trial and they told us that:

• 37% of participants claimed the text messages influenced them to visit a brand,
• 39% indicated that the messages influenced their purchase decision,
• 68% indicated they will likely sign up for future location-based text campaigns,
• 78% somewhat or strongly agree that mobile campaigns have the ability to influence consumers’ decision to visit stores,
• 88% felt that the message frequency was just right, and
• 60%+ were not concerned with security, privacy, or communicating with a retailer via mobile.

In reference to my blog earlier this week, this pilot-program used Network-Based Geofencing. To read the press release with full results click here.

Mobile promotions and couponing are increasingly becoming standard practice. In a Mobile Commerce Daily article, Rimma Kats states: “Mobile coupons are disrupting the traditional print circular method of distribution as more marketers and retailers are incorporating them into their strategy to build loyalty, drive in-store traffic and possibly combat showrooming.”

Mark Walsh at Online Media Daily estimates that “by 2017, roughly three-quarters of promotions will be targeted toward mobile devices. That includes $9 out of every $10 spent on digital discounts, two-thirds of all digital couponing and almost all spending on online sweepstakes and contest spending.”

Last year we blogged about the benefits of mobile couponing to you and to your customers. To recap:

Advantages of Mobile Coupons for Customers:

• No scissors required. You can’t run with scissors, but you can run with your smartphone to redeem the coupon that just popped up!
• Less waste. Mobile coupons are digital, meaning less paper waste.
• Coupons will be fun. Before, coupons were reserved for household items, such as ketchup, cat food, and cleaning agents. Snooze. Now, coupons sent to you can have the variety of daily deal sites, with discounts on social outings and fun local events, all with seamless redemption.
• They will be targeted to YOU. Mobile coupons, like mobile advertising, will be tailored to you. For example, you can sync your phone to your loyalty membership program (club card) at your grocery store. Your purchase history can then be used to offer mobile coupons on products you may like, introducing you to new products. This is like the “Netflix Recommends” feature of mobile coupons, which has always lead to good discoveries for me.

Advantages of Mobile Coupons for Retailers:

• Secure. Mobile coupons can’t be duplicated.
• High redemption rates. Mobile coupons have redemption rates as high as 30%, vs paper coupon’s 2%.
• Excellent tracking. Instant access to who redeemed the coupons, where they were, and at what time.
• Instant insight into ad campaigns. Instantly see how successful a coupon campaign is and who it’s working with.
• Low Cost. Digital coupons are less expensive to distribute than paper.
• Enhanced data. Redemption data will be linked to purchase history and customer type, allowing for more precise research and future campaigns.

Mobile marketing allows a customer’s location to be a data point in determining which promotion to send and when. This allows for ads to be tailored to a customer’s real-time location, increasing open rates and redemption rates.

Mobile marketing, promotions, advertising and couponing isn’t going away anytime soon. Keep location at the center of your strategy to optimize both the ROI of your campaigns AND share of your customers wallets.

Why? Location-based advertising lifts response rates with relevancy. That’s why the mobile ad networks are boasting 5x lifts in CPMs when a lat/long turns a campaign into high click-through rates. Expect to pay hefty premiums for location-based ads over the next three years.

Should you pay to play in LBS?

You want relevance, you want to reduce spam and annoyance in your customer ranks, you want meaningful click-throughs and mobile purchasing and drive-to-action. All of which means you have to fatten up your mobile marketing budget. Mobile is innovative and effective and, as a result, expensive. The question is how can you cut through the hype and negotiate a good deal on mobile marketing, stand out from the noise and drive the growth of your business all at a high ROI?

Each week I meet with CMOs who share their mobile concerns and plans. Here are the three “Must-Do’s” I always hear:

Get high on smartphones and tablets. There are 1.2 billion smartphones in use worldwide today. It’s not a phone. It’s a computer, camera, browser, shopping assistant, communicator, game platform, wallet, tracker and more. Think beyond your app. While smartphones present a marketer’s dream and endless opportunities to reach out to customers via a device they voluntarily interact with daily, consider this: how is that smartphone or tablet integral to my customers’ lives? And how can I make my brand and products relevant in that relationship?

Go deep on relevance. You’ve probably realized that your mobile app and mobile-friendly website is no longer enough. Daily, as I speak with my company’s clients, they tell me about abysmal download and engagement rates for their apps. My first question to them – are you offering anything that a customer needs? Or are your just pitching your stuff on a smaller screen? Be relevant.

Go wide on location. Knowing the location of your message/offer/service is the #1 way to be relevant. Any mobile campaign you’re running without location should be stopped immediately. After you add location, you will double your ROI at a minimum. Location not only enables greater personalization but adds a layer of verification to help prevent fraud and reduce the unnecessary admin costs of many mobile marketing campaigns. And use geofences. Geofencing provides a unique opportunity for you to target your ads at nearby consumers. When a customer enters a set radius, you can push a discount on that customer’s favorite item through your mobile application. Combine the use of geofences with a targeted mobile advertising strategy and you will increase engagement, footfall and ultimately, wallet share.

So start putting on the LBS. Get high on smartphones and tablets, do deep on relevance, and go wide on location… and start fattening up your mobile marketing ROI.

Mobile Marketers and advertisers can now look to get some clarity with the release of the ‘Mobile Phone Creative Guidelines’. The document, the result of exhaustive cross-industry research by the IAM Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence and the Mobile Marketing Association, helps create commonality for mobile advertising on smartphones, feature phones, tablets, and eReaders.

“Balancing the requirements of both the marketer and the consumer experience, the guidelines address varying factors such as different data connections (WIFI, 3G, 4G, etc.), carrier plans, Z-Index range and even the impact of the reduced processing power inherent in mobile device for file load size and web display,” states the IAB in this press release. The guidelines present a one-stop reference for the optimum file sizes, rich media, and dimensions for mobile ads.

The mobile guidelines were developed with three goals in mind. These are:

1. Issue guidelines that empower creative shops to exercise the limits of their imagination, only tempering creativity as it relates to positive consumer experience; and
2. Further simplify the digital mobile supply chain by making these new guidelines easily accessible, adoptable and understandable.
3. Provide cross-platform consistency by aligning these guidelines with the existing Web Display Creative Guidelines where applicable.

For location-based advertisers, these guidelines coupled with mobile location data and the behavioral insights it reveals, means that they can truly deliver optimized campaigns based on actual consumer activity.

Download and review the Guidelines for yourself and let me know what you think they mean for location-based advertising.

Like many retailers, The North Face was having trouble luring shoppers into its stores. The company, which sells outdoor apparel and gear, used a location-based marketing campaign incorporating Geofences to send promotional text messages to customers who were in a defined radius of their stores.

Location-based services such as Geofencing take CRM, marketing, and loyalty programs to the next level to generate better insights, trigger push notifications or tailor SMS content.

“Retailers are not only faced with keeping buyers from going online to competitors to make their purchase, but also providing the additional incentive shoppers may need to make an immediate purchase at the store location,” writes Joe Francica of Directions Magazine.

Have you noticed any location-based marketing at your favorite stores? Let me know in the comments below.

The number one reason for innovation in mobile marketing is innovation in mobile devices. For starters, a smartphone is no longer primarily a phone. It’s a mobile browsing device with a phone capability. As LiveIntent’s Julia Rieger stated, “2013 will be the year when Smartphones finally take center stage in delivering news and information as their primary purpose and when people finally realize that referring to them as ‘phones’ is a misnomer.”

Smartphones are swarming the market. A Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 53% of mobile phone owners own smartphones, and 88% of those owners access their email on their phone daily.

It’s clear that smartphones are everywhere in the US, and they’re attached to our hips 24/7. Smartphones present a marketer’s dream: they provide endless opportunities to reach out to customers via a GPS-enabled device that they voluntarily interact with daily.

And it’s not just smartphones. The growth of the tablet market is undeniable. Tablets entered the consumer world in about 2009 and have become an item most households own. A study by Pew Research Center shows that one in four American adults owns a tablet computer. These impressive figures tell us that the demand for handheld tablets is on the rise.

A mobile app or mobile-friendly website is no longer enough. Daily, as I speak with Locaid’s clients, they tell me about the number of customers downloading their apps. My first question to them – is anyone actually using the app on a regular basis and are you seeing the ROI you expecteced? If you’ve invested in an app I think you probably know the answer.

So how can you ensure the most bang for your mobile marketing buck?

By using Location. Location not only enables greater personalization but also adds a layer of verification to help prevent fraud and reduce the unnecessary admin costs of many mobile marketing campaigns.

The best location-based mobile marketing example is the use of Geofences to optimize app engagement. Geofencing provides a unique opportunity for merchants to target their advertisements at nearby consumers. When a customer enters a set radius, a company can push a discount on that customer’s favorite item through its mobile application.

Combine the use of geofences with a targeted mobile advertising strategy and you will increase engagement, footfall and ultimately, wallet share. Find out my 6 secrets for a successful geofence campaign in this Mobile Marketer article.

In 2013, mobile advertising will take center stage. Google will soon begin requiring that all AdWords clients buy mobile advertising space, even if they only want to reach desktop-computer users. In essence this means that mobile advertising will soon be mandatory.

Eoin Keenan in his blog on ’3 Mobile Marketing Technologies to watch in 2013′ adds that “A real opportunity is a one-off, temporary offers or create really local ads. Finally, it allows you to develop profiles of users based on their travel and location patterns – people that regularly pass your store can be targeted as a potential customer.”

The future of mobile marketing is now. Don’t act and you will be left behind.

Chief Location Officer wants to offer our congratulations to top female CLO Marissa Mayer for her appointment as Yahoo’s new President and CEO. This is a huge appointment for Mayer, and the pressure is now on to turn Yahoo’s reputation around after a shaky past 5 years for the company, complete with 5 corresponding CEOs. Talking heads are skeptical that one person can positively impact a large company that has been losing market share for some time, but Mayer brings unique traits to the table that are bound to strike change, including:

• Provides a fresh set of eyes on Yahoo’s design: Mayer was behind Google’s infamously clean homepage, believing that a clean interface helps from scaring people away. Perhaps she can apply this to Yahoo’s over-stimulating page layout.
• Fosters a creative work environment: Mayer held office hours in her Google office 3 times/week, leaving the door open for insight and creativity from other employees.
• Maintains an inspiring work ethic: Mayer believes that working around the clock is sometimes necessary. But, she establishes a work/life balance by identifying what matters most to her during the week, such as attending a favorite yoga class, and making sure it gets done to avoid burnout.
• Has experience in Location Services: Mayer’s last position at Google was Vice President of Local, Maps, and Location Services. Location is a hot topic in tech right now, so her location experience at Google positions her to help Yahoo excel in this closely-watched department.

How will Mayer’s experience in Google’s location services department translate to Yahoo’s location realm? In 2010, Yahoo staked their claim on the geo-location scene by launching its location-based deal aggregator Yahoo Deals and a fun search application named Sketch-a-Search. Yahoo also boasts a user-friendly Local News page.  Location services are becoming a more central department for all search engines, as Bing, Google, and Yahoo all compete for users via awe-inspiring map imagery and geo-technology. So how can Yahoo differentiate itself? Now that the sparkle has worn off from location sharing apps such as Foursquare and Google Latitude, there is a need for a revolutionary location app, and mobile couponing presents a huge opportunity. If Yahoo was the first to launch a user-friendly mobile coupon app, it could re-establish the company as an innovator in the industry and be the first large company to tap into this large market. Establishing itself in the leader in location-based services for consumers will shake the dust off Yahoo’s brand and shine new light on its potential.

CLO Take: Location services present a bevy of opportunities for companies looking to be a leader in their industry.  And we congratulate one of our own, rising to the top.  Best of luck on both deliveries (the baby and the business!)

It’s already proven that shoppers prefer stores with a mobile app, and that location-based mobile ads are the new hot-ticket for bringing in business.  LBA (Location-Based Advertising) has arrived.

Don’t believe me? A recent study by Berg Insight forecasts that location-based ads on mobile phones will drive 28% of all mobile marketing dollars by 2016.  That’s  a compound annual growth rate of 91%. Do the math: total dollars spent on LBA in 2011 were $192 million.  Which means by 2016 marketers will be spending over $4.9 billion.

A 2500% increase in five years?  Why are marketers hot on LBA?

What is LBA? Location-based advertising (LBA) is advertising that uses a consumer’s current location to enhance the ad experience.

How does LBA work?  A consumer opts in to the merchant’s advertisements via their mobile phone (usually via SMS text), thereby allowing location sharing.  The merchant then sets up a geo-fence around their business that automatically sends advertisements to the  mobile devices when the consumer enters the targeted area.

Who uses LBA?   LBA ads may be time-sensitive coupons, such as half off a lunch special for the remainder of the lunch hour, or they could be strictly informative, such as information about upcoming events at the store. Instead of a customer receiving advertisements via email or (dare I mention) snail mail that typically get lost in the pile (we all have one), merchants can now send ads specifically when customers are nearby. This allows for a more polished and relevant ad experience for the customer, making them more likely to stop by and take advantage of that discount. (See here for companies.)

Do customers want LBA?  Yes.  The Berg study proves that more people are opting in to location sharing with merchants. Previously, consumers were weary of sharing their location.  But with the onslaught of location-based discount programs such as Groupon, consumers are becoming more comfortable and even pleased with the enhanced experience of LBA.

Chief Location Officer take:  One day I will get a text from my Starbucks barista when I am a block away, informing me that my grande no-whip white chocolate mocha is in the making and will be ready when I arrive.  Real-time location data is the new kid on the block in mobile marketing budgets. Customers (including CLOs) are now more finicky than ever. We want stores to know who we are, what we like, and send tailored information and discounts when it’s convenient to us based on where we are.  CLOs take note: your customers’ shopping experiences will dramatically improve with location-based advertising.

The Where challenge isn’t finding the store (walk 2 blocks and you will bump into a Starbucks).  The Where challenge is location relevancy in a mobile society.  We welcome you, LBA

Cited:

Berg Insight. (9 May 2012). Location-based Advertising will account for 28.3% of mobile ad spend in 2016 [News story] Retrieved from www.gisuser.com/content/view/26728/2/

That’s right, the Boys Scouts have gone location, and it is taking the troops by storm.  You thought the location buzz at SXSW was at a fevered pitch?  Check into your local Boy Scout jamboree and “be prepared,” geolocation is the campfire rage.

Merit Badge

Perhaps too many scouts were bringing smartphones on their orienteering trips. Or too many scout leaders were checking into FourSquare during campouts.  Or perhaps the Boys Scouts is continuing its long tradition of preparing our youth for the future.  Whatever the reason, Chief Location Officer “likes” this merit badge.

What does the geocaching patch signify?  It means a scout has “acquired the skills necessary to safely take part in the world of geocaching.”  (Chief Location Officer didn’t realize geocaching was so dangerous.)  Of course, you still have to learn how to use a map and compass.  But doesn’t that patch look cool?  Like a Nintendo DS video game.  Location can be fun.

When I was in the scouts, earning a badge was no picnic.  The geocaching merit badge is no slouch either.  What do you need to learn to earn a geocaching badge?

• Precautions necessary to have a safe time while searching for geocaches
• Geocaching etiquette and how the principles of Leave No Trace apply
• Geocaching terms
• How GPS technology works
• Steps for finding and logging a cache
• How to use geocaching.com, the official online home of geocaching.

• Click here for the PDF of the final, official requirements.

Chief Location Officer applauds the Boy Scouts of America for recognizing that our youth are growing up in a world where mobile location plays an important role, whether it be in the woods, in school, in business or in our daily lives.

The merit badge includes one of the best taglines in the location industry: “Leadership with Direction.”

We could all use some of that.

Thanks to Bryan Wendell and John Churchill of the Boy Scouts of America and Simon Salt for the heads-up on this location badge.

I recently read that 90% of marketing managers plan to use mapping technology in the next year. That’s according to Google’s Enterprise Division and Vanson Borne. Nearly half of marketing professionals using the technology (46%) said that it improves productivity, and one in five (21%) are using it to combine different sets of data and spot patterns, agreeing that this would not have been possible without being able to visualize information.

Location-based marketing is rapidly becoming a popular strategy and I expect it will become the norm sooner than later. When you think about it, there is a location component to many marketing campaigns. Where are customers located? How do you reach them when they are close to your product or service? Can you devise timely promotions based on location?

If that many marketing managers are planing to use mapping, why aren’t you part of the 90%?