Conference Notebook: Location Is an Obvious Asset for Trulia

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MMA-Gearing-Up-for-SM2-Every-Moment-is-Mobile-300x225It’s Advertising Week in New York, and that means the marketers from around the world come together to talk shop, make deals, and blow off some steam. At the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2014 SM2 Conference Wednesday, marketers from some of the nation’s largest brands talked about the evolving role of location in their marketing mix and the challenges in balancing an appetite for new technologies with the needs of an existing brand.

Trulia Uses Location to Connect on Mobile Through the Home Buying Process
When thinking of possible use cases for location and mobile, one of the obvious industries that may come to mind is real estate, the industry that literally sells location. At the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2014 SM2 Conference, Kira Wampler, Chief Marketing Officer at Trulia, spoke about how the real estate company leverages location.

“Mobile is all about local, which is the definition of real estate — local, local, local,” she said.

Trulia leverages location across mobile devices and platforms to engage consumers throughout the home-buying process. Not only does the company take advantage of location on the traditional iOS and Android smartphone apps and sites, but it also uses it on newer devices like the Android Wear smartwatch.

In May, the company launched a new feature called Nearby Home Alerts which notifies Trulia customers when a nearby house that meets their criteria goes on sale: “When you are deep in the process and a serious home buyer you want to know if there’s a house near you that meets your criteria,” Wampler said. “You get the notification and can decide what to do next — do you want to look at it on your phone or move on.”

After launching the feature on the smartphone app, Trulia created a version of it for Android Wear to take it to the next level. According to Wampler, it was the perfect application for a smartwatch —and the numbers support her gut feeling.

Before the campaign Trulia was experiencing roughly 20% year-over-year growth in audience cross platforms, and in July, the company announced that its numbers were close to 40% year-over-year growth with 90% year-over-year growth in mobile and a record number of subscribers in Q2 earnings.

“When we were invited by Google to be on Android Wear we knew we wanted to build on it,” Wampler said. “We made sure to make this project work hard for us.”

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Also Noted
Urban Airship and Gimbal announced a partnership to further location opportunities with beacons for marketers… Executives from 1800Flowers, ThinkNear, Untether.tv, and DigitasLBi all agreed that location data has been pretty messy, with most information being lumped together and converted to lat/long. However, they were optimistic about the opportunities that are emerging to clean this data and derive useful location information to accurately target consumers…  Sarah Ohle from xAd spoke about moving beyond click-through rates as the measurement of success on mobile and looking at how impacts other stages in the funnel using metrics like secondary action rates and store visitation lift.

Rebecca Borison is a contributor to Street Fight.

Hear more about how brands are targeting consumers on mobile devices at Street Fight Summit in NYC on November 4th!

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