Technological advances and our hyperconnected lifestyles have led consumers to expect instant gratification and personalization based on location at every turn. As a result, here are five location personalization trends marketers shouldn’t ignore.
1. Content Gets Local & Personal
Think about how many times you’ve told a business exactly what you want and their landing page content simply didn’t match your clearly stated intent. For example, you search for 20-inch Pirelli tyres in Leeds. The search result that you click on then takes you back a brand’s home page. You then have to navigate another three clicks to find the Leeds location in the store locator, the Pirelli brand, and then the 20-inch tyres variant. Only then can you see the pricing and choose to book an appointment in store to get the tires fitted. This is a deeply frustrating experience. After all, you told the brand exactly what you wanted! Manually creating thousands of personalized and localized content page variants is uneconomical. So don’t do it manually, use some of the technology solutions that are at hand. Your conversion rates will also push 30 percent.
2. The Consumer Journey Is Getting Shorter
Increasingly, the combination of our demand for instant gratification and smartphone-enabled location functionality have collapsed the consumer journey for many brands. For instance, according to Google, nearly half of consumers trying to decide on a restaurant do their local search within an hour of actually going to eat. Equally, many shorter customer journeys are a result of a distressed “need it now” moment that could be for locksmiths, shoe repairs, pharmacies, and so on. For businesses, this means taking your national brand down to the local level. If a customer can’t find your product or shop nearby when they want (or need) it, then they will find it somewhere else.
3. Google ‘Near Me’ Autocompletes
Google is encouraging this faster consumer journey by autocompleting our searches in both branded and non-branded categories. Google is anticipating that when users enter words such as “accountants,” “banks,” “toy store” or “Vietnamese food,” chances are that they intend to find something near their location, regardless of platform. As a result, we’ve grown to expect our smartphones to serve relevant, local results. “Near me”, “closest”, and “nearby” – keywords that barely registered just a few years ago – are beginning to dominate the billions of queries every month. In fact, “near me” searches have nearly doubled in the last year.
4. The Introduction Of Google My Business API
Google elevated the importance of location data management with the rollout of the Google My Business API to create and edit locations in Google My Business. The API automates the management of location data ranging from store hours to name, address, and phone information, making it easier for businesses to manage their location data across the search ecosystem, from Google Maps to search engine results. Google is telling us that managing location data as a scalable asset is critical for businesses to be visible when people conduct those “near me” searches. Accurate location data shared with major publishers, such as Google, is the key to visibility. The Google My Business API makes it possible for businesses to meet the need that Google has facilitated.
5. The Integration Of Digital & Physical Worlds
Google research shows that 88 percent of mobile searchers call or visit the business they have found inside 24 hours. Correlating these touchpoints online to sales in store, often referred to as ROPO, are making ROI attribution even more of a headache for brands. There is no silver bullet solution, but this hot topic for retailers is inspiring some significant moves toward a solution. Foursquare recently unveiled an offline sales attribution program powered by a voluntary, non-incentivized panel of 1.3 million Foursquare users who have agreed to leave their location-sharing feature on at all times, meaning Foursquare knows every store they visit — even if they don’t open the app or the company’s sister app, Swarm. The relatively big panel appears to be a differentiator when it comes to other emerging products. Meanwhile, the Goodway Group has launched Validate 360. In the case of restaurant transactions, let’s say a user pays for a meal at a restaurant with his or her credit card. This user also logs into her credit card account both through her desktop browser and an app on her phone. Her account is now linked with those devices, so whenever she is served an ad on any of those devices, we can link that exposure back to a transaction.