Location marketing has continued to grow steadily and incrementally. Where once seen as exclusively about SMBs, enterprises have more recently awakened to its importance, to mirror their customers’ path to purchase. What’s different over the past couple of years is the addition of more and more transactional tools (booking, ordering) that recognize the influence and impact of online on offline. Google Maps and Google My Business continue to move in this direction, most recently reflected in Google enabling Maps users to pay for parking in Austin, Texas. Apple is beefing up its own mapping product as well. It has been heavily investing in upgrading its mapping infrastructure over the past few years and now (with iOS14) it’s adding native reviews and the ability to add photos and other content directly — rather than via partners Yelp and TripAdvisor, points out Greg Sterling, Vice President of Insights at location marketing company Uberall, in an interview. Excerpts
Trends in location marketing industry
In the larger scheme of things, location brings together the physical and digital worlds, which is the world we’re now living in — a hybrid reality, also reflected in “buy online pick up in store.” In a related vein, augmented reality overlays on the real world will ultimately become significant in “location marketing” but we’re still in the relatively early stages of that. But then Apple has a major AR initiative going and Google Maps has implemented AR walking directions. This is another merger or deeper integration of the digital and physical worlds that will continue to develop.
ALSO READ: More data privacy headaches for Facebook and Google
In terms of location data and location analytics, just as enterprises are using it in a meaningful way and discovering its myriad use cases (audiences, targeting, attribution, BI), and as marketers are recognizing it as a cookie replacement, Apple is making it harder to access location in iOS 14, where users will need to opt-in to tracking. That will make it much harder to get accurate location data from iOS users. It will need to be modeled based on Android users to a large degree going forward. But ad targeting and offline attribution for iPhone users will become very challenging.
Impact of COVID-19 on location industry
Business closures are the major issue during COVID-19. The big search and social platforms (Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc.) have all released tools and services to address this. Doing more online and in a way that minimizes in-store and in-person activity has been a major focus. The online platforms have helped facilitate increased communication between businesses and customers as well as online ordering/booking. But there are variations by industry: restaurants, department stores, home services and so on.
There are a range of location analytics or intelligence companies that track visits to stores using mobile-location data. Those companies were helping marketers define audiences (business travelers, auto intenders, etc.) and then tracking the efficacy of ad campaigns on offline actions (e.g., store visits). This type of location data is now being used to measure foot traffic recovery in different places around the country and by vertical or business category — which businesses are doing well in terms of visits and which ones are not compared with a baseline in February.
That’s helpful to people interested in monitoring movements and consumer activity — to some degree to see if people are complying with social distancing — and tracking the recovery.
I would say location analytics have had to adapt to the current environment and that they’re busy to be sure. But not more than normal. The use cases above (targeting, attribution) have been negatively impacted by a decline in marketing spending in Q1 and Q2, although the outlook improved in Q2.
While there has been an explosion of e-commerce, location and local commerce remain critical. Think, for example, about buy online, pick up in store — there’s an online transaction but local fulfillment. Consumers are still spending most of their money locally despite all the focus on online shopping. There are still plenty of local ads and local online content being created. E-commerce is growing rapidly but remains a small percentage of overall “local” spending. There’s also huge pent-up demand to return to “normal” life offline (e.g., in-store shopping, travel, dine-in restaurants).
ALSO READ: Geospatial 2.0 Companies – New Direction. New Conversations
Debate around data privacy and ethics
Location is a particularly sensitive topic when it comes to privacy for obvious reasons. China is the cautionary tale for the abuse of these technologies.
Apple’s forthcoming iOS 14 location privacy controls reflect that the battle over location data is only becoming more intense just as marketers recognize location’s immense value. Marketers, going forward, will have to persuade users in one form or another to opt-in to offer up their location data. That’s going to be inherently challenging because most consumers will provide location in exchange for immediate value (e.g., restaurant search, weather, retail offers) but they don’t want to be “tracked” or have their data transferred to third parties.
