We live in an age where information is king, and marketing data is one of your most powerful tools to increase conversion rates and ROI. Over the years, the available data for marketing campaigns has grown exponentially. In virtually every media channel, we have the ability to target prospects with a dizzying myriad of selection criteria. We can now focus in on prospects like never before to make certain that we are reaching our targeted prospects across multiple channels. One of the more recent additions to the marketing dataset is geolocation data.

Geolocation uses the GPS built in to mobile devices, to accurately determine where the device, and the user of the device, are located. This data is accessed through various “apps” that the user has installed, and grants permission to use their location data. This data is made available to data scientists and marketers to provide actionable insights for brands and companies alike helping them better understand the prospect’s complete path to purchase.

Geo location marketing, also known as location based marketing has been around for over a decade and has proven to be an effective component of any marketing plan. Geo Location Marketing is designed to reach out to the “right audience” at the “right time” with the “right offers”.  The newest form of Geo Location Marketing is known as Geo Conquesting. Geo Conquesting specifically targets consumers visiting your competitors in an attempt to lure them away. The ideas is – the prospect is visiting a competitor to purchase a product or service that you have. By promoting your product to the consumer, you are not only increasing brand awareness, but also compelling a purchase.

A marketing partner can help you develop strong geo marketing strategies with objective information about campaign success. These analytics help you to become better equipped to penetrate your local market.

Geo-Fencing

A geofence is a way to engage consumers with offers while they are in a particular area. This type of geo location marketing is one of the first strategies to emerge and is common in most mobile marketing campaigns. The geofences are setup around points of interest and “push” notifications and ads to the prospect’s device while they are in the area.

For example, a store could create a simple geofence in an area surrounding its physical location. When users pass through, receiving a location-triggered alert or deal makes them considerably more likely to stop in and shop. This type of marketing relies on the prospect’s engagement while they are in the area.

The greatest limitation of geofence campaigns is that they can only attempt to convert while the user is in that area.

Using Smart Boundaries

Creating smart boundaries around Points Of Interest allows you to market to consumers frequenting those locations after they have left the location. They can also be used to identify patterns over time, so brands can send out marketing materials with the greatest likelihood of conversion.

These smart boundaries create a structure around the movement data to develop the most effective targeting by monitoring Points Of Interest and keeping visit counts. The smart boundaries focus your marketing efforts to a very precise audience based on their behavior allowing you to go beyond mere city or zip code data to target nearby households and instead focus campaigns on the prospect’s behavior.

Prospect Boundaries

Creating a smart boundary around your competitor’s location allows you to target potential prospects that are currently in the buying cycle. These boundaries can also be created around locations that your customers would frequent to build a branding or awareness campaign and begin to target farther up the sales funnel. For example, if you were a new car dealer, you could not only create prospect boundaries around your competitors, but also include a separate campaign that monitored service centers near your location to promote your service and parts department.

Conversion Boundaries

Creating a smart boundary around your location(s) provides insight on the performance of your overall marketing efforts and can serve as a suppression audience to conserve marketing dollars. The conversion boundary also creates a new segment in your audience to present a new offer to people who have recently visited your location and make them aware of upcoming events and even loyalty programs to keep them coming back.

Implementing Multi Channel Geo Location Marketing

Knowing the precise location and habits of your prospects is powerful information. You can use this data in order to create effective marketing campaigns that have substantial impact. Using multiple channels, from social media to search engines and display networks, you can reach these pre-defined audiences with a reach and frequency that optimizes spend and increases conversions.

Multi-channel marketing includes online and offline campaigns that include the timely display of ads and posts for your customers already checking their social news feeds, listening to radio, and browsing the Internet. This is in addition to direct mail and email campaigns keeps you in front of your targeted audience to create a “recall” effect that increases organic customer acquisition by staying in front of our targeted audience.

Evolution of Marketing

In the past several years, big data has made a huge impact on the marketing landscape. Marketers are now able to speak directly to customers more effectively than ever before. They have been able to gain extraordinary insight into their interests, habits and shopping behavior from their online activities.

Geo location marketing is the latest evolution of this phenomenon. It uses information already accessible through each user’s mobile device and creates an added dimension to existing marketing data. For brick-and-mortar retailers, it’s an innovative way to get shoppers back in stores and ready to buy.

Now, with partners in the geo location marketing space, this technology is available for use by everyday retailers. In conjunction with established — and essential — online marketing techniques like local search and SEO, and SEM, this is an emerging and powerful way to drive your next marketing push.

For Your Geo Location Marketing

For retailers, marketers, and agencies unaccustomed to the use of this type of prospect data, this latest marketing tool may seem out of reach, but you do not have to develop these campaigns on your own. Partners such as PrimaryLens can help you make sense of the emerging opportunities that geolocation marketing offers.

Data partners like PrimaryLens not only deliver marketing campaigns, but a monthly overview of past initiatives, and you get to keep the data you have commissioned, in order to see what worked and what didn’t. In order to assess your campaign success, you can review this information and revise it as necessary going forward.

PrimaryLens offers essential, powerful tools for modern business. In order to get a feel for how the system works, get in touch with us. We’ll schedule a call for you to discuss how to leverage the power of geolocation marketing as a component of your next marketing campaign.

It’s clear that local search is powerful when it comes to reaching customers, but many businesses fail to take advantage of it. To help out, we’re sharing three expert tips for improving your local SEO on mobile.

Follow this advice, and you’ll soon see an increase in your local leads.

1. Create a Google My Business Page

Creating a Google My Business page is one of the quickest, easiest and most effective ways to boost your local mobile SEO.

You’ll fill in some basic details about your business, including name, address, services and website, and these details will be displayed prominently any time a customer searches for a business like yours on mobile.

Your business will be shown on a local map, and customers will be given the option to get directions, contact you or see more information — without ever having to leave Google. This puts your business right in front of customers at the exact moment they need you.

2. Design Ads That Sound Local

Are you currently taking advantage of paid search ads?

That’s a smart move — but you need to ensure that your ads are location-specific. If they’re not, searchers might assume that you’re a national company, and you could lose customers to other local businesses.

Show that you’re the real deal by referencing local places, using local slang and making references to local events. For example, if you own a clothes shop close to a big festival location, you could create an ad with text like, “Get your last-minute festival look.” Or if you’re close to a beach, you could say something like, “Visiting X beach this weekend? Shop discount swimsuits here first.”

3. Target the Right Search Terms

Are you optimizing your website for search terms that make sense when typed but sound strange out loud? If you want to optimize for mobile, that’s a bad move. Voice searches are growing all the time, and Google reports that 20 percent of mobile queries are voice searches.

That means you need to target terms that make sense when spoken. So, instead of a keyword like, “local plumber Texas,” you might optimize for a phrase like, “Where’s the nearest plumber in Texas?”

Writing website content in a natural, conversational tone makes it easy to incorporate this kind of term and also helps you to move away from old-fashioned keyword-stuffing tactics.

Optimizing for local search is a great way to drive leads and connect with local customers. Get started by creating a Google My Business page, designing location-specific ads and targeting keywords that work during voice searches.

Wrapping Up

These are simply starting points to improve your local online presence. If you’ve been nodding your head as you read these, congratulations! Take a few moments to revisit each of these items and make sure that they are up to date and performing at the level you’d expect. That means, updating or adding to the photos on your Google business page, review your search and display ads to make sure that you’re incorporating seasonal changes and events. This is also an excellent time to compare the performance of your existing ads to determine what’s working best and create variations of that creative.

Marketing is never a set it and forget it exercise, and re-examining your processes and efforts needs to become part of your regular routine to find areas for improvement. This is just one area to review, and any successful marketer should have a weekly schedule of marketing initiatives to review for both cost per lead, and more importantly, cost per sale or acquisition.

Odds are your home is one of the 90 million homes that has at least one DVR or set top box in a living room or bedroom recording your favorite shows, which is incredibly convenient.  What you may not have realized is that some of these same boxes also allow the cable and satellite providers to record what shows air on the TVs in your home as well.  Marketers can then combine that information with other publicly available demographic data and segment their target audiences with laser like precision.  Companies like Simulmedia aggregate the set top box data from millions of Americans to help companies target consumers watching “long tail” cable inventory, or shows that are generally cheaper than prime time hits but have an almost cult like following.  For example, a 30 second spot on a “The Today Show” or “Good Morning America” might go for around $43,000, compare that to a “long tail” like “Big Cat Diaries” which also runs mornings for around $650.  The difference is not just the price point, it’s the information about the viewer.  The “Good Morning America” buy offers mass reach, but the “Big Cat Diaries” buy has precision.  In short,  you end up paying less and you know the right person is watching.  It’s king of like choosing between a shotgun or a rifle.

Up until now, the television industry has been in the stone age when it comes to ad-targeting compared to online services.  We can place online ads and segment customers not just based on age, and gender.  We can identify age, gender, geographic location, shopping habits, websites visited, social media habits, and the list goes on.  That kind of precision is one of the reasons that digital ad spends are expected to reach $82 billion by 21018 according to eMarketer.

Companies like Simulmedia began springing up a few years ago as set top box makers began licensing out their data and the result so far has taken place in the background where an advertiser has swapped out the Cheez-It  commercial for Special K.  However, now that Pandora’s box has been opened on your television sets, the next generation of set top boxes may very well begin allowing advertisers to show specific commercials by individual box in the house.  Combine that with the recent announcement of Verizon’s “supercookie” tracking program in January of this past year and it’s not hard to imagine that Zappos display ad following you from your computer to your phone to your tv.

Next a group of at least 500 consumers review all of the ads and ranks them using the same criteria.  The results are then used to generate a scale of 1 to 950 which represents the overall score based on likeability, relevance, watchability, attention, persuasion, and even desire.

Mercedes has generated content for viewers across the spectrum from their light hearted Superbowl ad where the tortoise beats the hare as a result of the AMG GT S which is as stark a contrast as possible to their “crashworthy” campaign which shows what seems like an endless barrage of  Mercedes-Benz going through crash tests.  In a crowded space Mercedes-Benz has connected with consumers on multiple levels and built on common ground with consumers.  The result is over 300,00 Mercedes-Benz sold within the first 10 months of 2015.

Here’s a look back at the tortoise commercial affectionately called “Fable”

https://youtu.be/LQvdIGeUUvo

… and here’s the montage of Mercedes-Benz crash tests also known as “Crashworthy”

https://youtu.be/llKlz6gHVl8

The stage is set when the principal at the local elementary school informs the editor that he can no longer distribute the paper at school until the content is approved.  Jimmy, the editor, refuses and instead begins to deliver it door to door much to the delight of parents who are not accustomed to receiving news without it being obstructed by ads.

“There’s no ads, no sponsored content, no links to click on,” says one parent before he spirals into a rant about the insanity of reading content online:

“Do you know how long it’s been since I was just able to sit back and read the news? I got so used to getting news off the internet, but I feel like I’m always trying to chase the news somehow. It’s like I’m in a black void trying to reach the news story, but then the next thing I know, I’m reading an ad for Geico. So I click out of that and try to read the news story, but it’s not a news story, it’s a slide show. And I’m looking at the worst celebrity plastic surgery jobs ever. So of course I want to see the next slide of plastic surgery gone wrong, so I hit the arrow. But then the arrow wasn’t the arrow for the next slide, it was to take me for an ad for face cream. I wanted to get a new story, but I’m reading about face cream, and I try to click out of it but the ad is following me. It’s following me all over the screen! No! So I click on the close button, but it wasn’t a close button, it was another slide show! And I just want to know what’s happening in the Middle East, but instead I’m looking at the ‘Top 10 scariest movies of all time’! And that’s not the arrow for the next slide, it’s for another ad. Ahhh! But this, this is just news, and I don’t get lost in all the bullshit.”

Here’s the clip of his rant.

https://youtu.be/IVfslRsNXUc

The episode ends on a cliffhanger, and there are still 2 more episodes left so I’m sure that they will wrap it up nicely, but the most important thing for us to learn as advertisers and marketers is that we must deliver quality content and not interrupt what someone is interested in, but instead BE what someone is interested in.

General Motors is planning to launch reviews for all of its PR agency partners around the globe, with the goal of consolidating with one agency of record per brand.

Tony Cervone, senior VP-global communications for the automaker, said the reviews will “take place for the most part in 2016,” except for Cadillac, which will begin before the end of the year.

Each GM brand, such as Chevrolet and Cadillac, will consolidate from multiple PR firms to one global partner, said Mr. Cervone. However, one agency may work on both Buick and GMC.
GM has strong agency support right now, he added, so it’s not an issue of underperformance, but rather the fact that the current structure is too complicated. “We’re not able to fully take advantage of agencies and their abilities to run effectively and globally counsel us and leverage our skill sets,” said Mr. Cervone.
The automaker will invite incumbents, such as Weber Shandwick and MSLGroup, which both do corporate work for GM; FleishmanHillard (Cadillac and Chevrolet) and John Doe (Buick and GMC) among others now on the roster to compete in the reviews.
While Mr. Cervone declined to disclose budgets, he said that they will not be trimmed.
“We’re not trying to drive fear into the agency world,” he said. “It’s really about transforming how we’re working with agencies and the way we’ve historically used agency resources to build on what we do normally day in and day out.”
With a more streamlined communications team, Mr. Cervone said the company and its brands will have better message alignment and consistency around the world, which is “more important than ever today.”
GM ranked as third largest ad spender in the U.S. according to the latest ranking from the Ad Age Datacenter. In 2014, the company spent $3.12 billion on advertising in the U.S.
Earlier this year, GM was one of a several automakers, including Lincoln, Jaguar, Honda, and Acura, that decided not to advertise during the Super Bowl.

Courtesy of AdAge.com

Online marketing often focuses on one area of attraction, and that is new visitors. While that’s an obvious and essential approach, and one that you should never lose focus on, there is one market segment that is passing many marketers by: the in-market buyers segment.

In-market buyers are those prospects who are visiting a website frequently because they are actively considering the purchase of a product or service. These are among the hottest leads you can hope to attract, and it’s important that you hit them with the right marketing before they go to a competitor, or change their mind.

Every good marketing plan should include a section dedicated to “in-market” or “now” customers. But how do you know that you have an in-market audience to play to, and what can you do to convert these visitors into customers?

Retarget With Google

Tools like Google’s in-market audiences feature can help you get closer to your goals. This feature allows you to create display campaigns so that you can reach prospects further up the sales funnel. By tailoring your ads for this specific subset of visitors, you have a better chance of optimizing your conversions. Retargeting, or remarketing in this way, helps to remind interested consumers about your brand by connecting them to your ads.

Let’s say a potential car buyer visits the same car website over a matter of a few hours, or a couple of days. The same prospect has also been looking at car reviews and car comparison sites. That’s a hot lead right there. Google collects this data, making it easier for marketers to tailor their ads and display frequency for this subset of in-market buyers.

The Direct Approach

In-market data can also help you to define precise direct marketing campaigns that make growing or building a brand that much easier. For example, when you know who your in-market buyers are, whether through data collection or sign-ups to your website, you can target them with marketing that is designed for prospects further up the sales funnel. If we use the car buyer analogy above, examples might include an exclusive discount on the exact model they are looking for, technical information about the model, or an email inviting them for a free test drive. When you know who to play to and when, the remarketing possibilities are endless.

Final Thoughts

Improving your reach to potential customers who are actively researching and browsing the products or services you sell is one of the most powerful search marketing strategies you can use. By identifying and targeting those visitors who have demonstrated their intent to purchase, you raise your chances of conversion exponentially.

Considering that people are awake an average of 16 to 18 hours per day, the total consumption of 12 hours of media may seem virtually impossible, but to be fair, you have to consider that a lot of that time is spent while doing other things. In fact, if it weren’t for multitasking we probably wouldn’t get anything done at all. The reality, however, is that in a “media day” we are not limited to the traditional 24 linear hours we use to measure time. For example, everyone reading this has at one point or another picked up their phone, tablet, or laptop during a commercial on television. This creates a phenomenon known as “multiple stream media traffic”. As the number of simultaneous media streams increases, and our multi-tasking increases, a lot of content falls into the background; and as we continue to increase our multi-tasking, the total hours will grow despite the fact that the total number of physical hours remain constant. This increasing level of multi-tasking creates competition between media streams which reinforces the necessity for us to adhere to the golden rule of advertising:

“Reach x Frequency + Compelling Message = Success”

In a multi-tasking, multiple media stream world the question of where and how to put your advertising dollars can become a daunting task with multiple vendors parading pages of statistics regarding consumer behavior and the reach of their platform. Today, we are going to boil this down to the absolute simplest formula possible. Ready?

There are only 4 ways to sell a product:

• Print
• Digital
• Radio
• Television

Everything falls into one of those four simple categories. There are of course subsets within each, and I would never try to convince anyone that a newspaper ad is the same as a direct mail piece, or that video pre-roll is the same as an SEM campaign, but those are print and digital campaigns

How to allocate your advertising spend

This is where the rubber meets the road, and budget is going to determine everything! In the automotive world, we know from previous studies by NADA that the average shopper visits between 1 and 2 dealerships before purchasing. JD Power also recently released a report indicating that 96% of Americans began their vehicle purchase path online. So throw most of your budget at your digital spend, right? NO! Digital MUST be a component of every advertising plan, but digital marketing is not intrusive media. In fact, most digital marketing is more like a taxi. The customer will go nowhere until he or she decides on a destination, and this is where the advertising mediums that exist farther up the marketing funnel come in to play. To see a complete picture of the marketing funnel and where different media campaigns apply, click here.

The proper use of intrusive media to help strengthen your brand is critical. This gives you the advantage of having an in-market shopper tell the taxi go directly to your store to start their search. Choosing the right blend of intrusive media is influenced mostly by budget. Basically, if you can’t afford to be there with both a high reach and frequency, then stay away from it altogether. If you can only afford to do 3 weeks on a medium versus 4 to reach your goal, then do so, but I would never recommend compromising beyond that. For example, if your budget forces you to choose between 2 weeks of cable, or 4 weeks of radio at a higher frequency, then choose radio every time.

Plan by Quarter or pay more

Too many times, I see clients budgeting month by month rather than setting up a marketing plan for an entire quarter at a time. It requires exactly the same amount of work to layout an entire quarter at once rather than in monthly increments and in most cases, it also gives you additional buying power when dealing with radio or cable representatives. Your monthly incentives may change, but your themes and best-selling models will not. Don’t sell yourself short and consume more of your time than necessary with the trappings of launching monthly marketing campaigns.

Audit Yourself

As we approach the second quarter, force yourself to go through the exercise of auditing your expenses across all your marketing efforts. That means listing out EVERY spend you have in your budget. Include your direct mail, television, radio, website provider, SEM, SEO, newspaper, and don’t forget to list your 3rd party lead providers such as Autotrader.com, Cars.com. If you’d like a worksheet to help you lay everything out, give me a call at 813-334-5291 or let me know on Linkedin and I’ll get something over to you.

Mini – Defy Labels
Mini spent their 30 seconds of fame trying to dispel the myth that they were only a car for a very specific demographic by parading a slew of celebrities across the screen.  The disappointing aspect was that the Mini just sat there throughout the entire commercial and they never highlighted the vehicle itself.

https://youtu.be/T0wyOTaC0a0

Jeep – Portraits
Jeep immediately pulled at your heartstrings by showing a series of images from World War II to Jurassic Park.  The limitation here was that your connection to the commercial was limited to your experience with their brand throughout your life.  A very powerful message to the existing “cult” of Jeep owners, but it fell a little bit short of appealing to new customers.

https://youtu.be/wKn5K5V7tRo

Toyota – The Longest Chase
Here again, a manufacturer spent their precious air time dispelling myths about their vehicle when a group of bank robbers has their get away car towed and has to commandeer a Toyota Prius as their get away vehicle.  The commercial highlights the acceleration, backup camera, fuel efficiency, autonomous braking, etc. of the new Prius IV.  The car is highlighted throughout the commercial, and the only real inconsistency is that the cameo appearances by the season 2 cast of “The Wire” shows them as bank robbers instead of the drug smugglers they played on the show.

https://youtu.be/rHzLUdd7kZ8

Hyundai – Ryanville
Hyundai went BIG this year with multiple commercials for the Elantra.  In this spot Hyundai creates a parallel bizzaro universe where all men look like Ryan Reynolds to highlight another autonomous braking system that even works on pedestrians.

https://youtu.be/njKapVGzbuc

Hyundai – Talking Bears
This Hyundai Elantra commercial focuses on the vehicle’s smart phone integration by featuring a couple being chased through the woods by a pair of ravenous bears.  Just before they arrive at the vehicle the drivers engages his smartwatch and “tells” the car to start.  The bears only eating humans on an “cheat” day for their diet adds comic relief, but you have to wonder if this was in production before or after the release of “The Revenant”.

https://youtu.be/LT6n1HcJOio

Hyundai – First Date
Hyundai again, focused on just one of their vehicle’s features in the Hyundai Genesis First Date commercial featuring Kevin Hart as an overprotective father who uses Hyundai’s car finder system to track and spy on his daughter and her date as they spend their evening at the movie theater, carnival, and “parking”.

https://youtu.be/-R_483zeVF8

Acura – What He Said
As well produced as this commercial was, I can’t help but feel that it was a bit of a reach for Acura.  The NSX has never been one of those iconic vehicles that fostered an enormous following.  Nonetheless, the new model is beautiful, but at a price tag of $157,000 it is definitely not a car for the masses.

https://youtu.be/JSlPxMLDP-Q

Buick – The Big Day
I have never been a huge fan of the ongoing “it’s a Buick” themed commercials where everyone is surprised that the vehicle in the ad is a Buick.  Unfortunately, this one is no exception.  Buick launched this campaign style back in March of 2014 and I think that they’ve milked it for all it’s worth.  After almost 2 years of advertising, I think that there was a lost opportunity here to launch a new theme on the largest stage of them all, however, if it’s still moving units…..

https://youtu.be/cYyWq_Vads8

Audi R8 – Commander
This in my opinion is what Acura missed out on with the NSX commercial.  Featuring an aging astronaut who has lost his zeal for life until hi son turns over the keys to a 205mph Audi R8 commercial immediately endears the American public to an import by connecting with one of the most compelling moments in American history, the race to the moon.

https://youtu.be/diU_09jb4bI

I won’t bore you with any count downs or long drawn out explanations.  If we were to choose by manufacturer, it would be tough to beat out Hyundai who appears to have laid out a VERY strategic campaign promoting their brand by using the absolute best of the features offered by multiple vehicles in their lineup, but that’s not what this was about.  This was a review of each :30 second segment.  That being said, in my opinion, it was Audi who scored best with a universal message that would connect with the masses balanced with all the best the R8 model has to offer.

“Programmatic Advertising – The use of software to purchase digital advertising in lieu of  manual insertion orders.”

Plain and simple, programmatic advertising is nothing more than the process of using software to purchase digital advertising on various platforms and or sites instead of letting humans negotiate rates and place insertion orders.  The main reason that this “matters” is as a result of the increased speed and efficiency that it brings and the elimination of menial tasks that we’ve had to deal with in the past like sending insertion orders in to publishers etc.  That doesn’t mean that the machines are taking over.  It still takes a marketer with a keen vision to architect a successful strategy, put the pieces together, and optimize campaigns.

Ironically, the benefit here is also the danger.  Think of it in terms of a hammer and nail versus a nail gun.  As inefficient as the use of a hammer and nail are, they force the absolute deliberate placement of each nail because of the effort required.  The manual placement process was fairly similar.  It required a certain deliberate intent, review, and confirmation.  The effortlessness of a single mouse click that automates purchases, much like the nail gun analogy, creates a process that if left unchecked could cost clients money.

In the end everything moves forward at the rate that the market dictates, and no doubt that this year we will hear about more success stories like Red Roof Inn’s programmatic buying of ads in airports when flights were cancelled that increased booking rates by 60%, but we will also hear stories like Gary Vaynerchuk never buying a Samsung product again because their ads kept blocking the screen on his mobile phone when he refreshed a page while waiting for an update.  After all, a tool is only as good as the person that uses it.