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Survey: 87% of mobile marketers see success with location targeting

Benefits include better response, higher engagement and customer insights.

Greg Sterling on June 11, 2018 at 11:15 am

A new survey of 700 in-house and agency marketers using mobile marketing finds that 87 percent are using location targeting. A large majority of respondents reported positive results.

The report was written by Lawless Research and commissioned by Factual. Survey respondents were from a wide range of industries including automotive, CPG, financial services, travel and others. The breakdown of respondents included over 530 from brands/in-house marketers and the remainder from agencies. They were screened on the basis of whether they did mobile marketing and were then asked about their use of location and location data.

How are you or your company using location data?

As one would expect, ad targeting was the main use of location, but personalization and improved customer experience were close behind, as was “audience engagement.” The reported benefits seen by respondents largely mirrored those objectives: customer growth and engagement. Audience insights also ranked highly.

Benefits from using location-based marketing and/or advertising

Personalization is a buzzword that’s frequently used in marketing discussions or collateral but without much definition. It’s not typically associated with location in people’s minds. It can involve retargeting, contextual targeting, dayparting, audience segmentation or, in this case, location-based targeting. It can also involve a combination of these tactics.

Here, location-based personalization yielded positive results including greater “understanding of audiences.” More than half (53 percent) of respondents said these campaigns resulted in higher conversions. Unfortunately, the report doesn’t discuss how location data were specifically used for personalization (beyond the fact of being used).

Benefits of location-based ad personalization

The report also contains a critique of “duopoly” Facebook and Google and asserts that transparent, location-data driven campaigns (presumably programmatic) represent an alternative vehicle to reach intended audiences at scale.

About The Author

Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.