How to Find the Perfect Spot for Your Restaurant

Share this:

A huge key to the success of MULO (multi-location) brands is knowing which cities, neighborhoods, streets (and even which side of the street) to put a location. Technology is now playing a huge role in distribution planning. Brands used to pick their locations using maps and a wide range of demographic data. They would also […]

One Location Wonder: MULO is Not for Everyone

Share this:

Some MULO (multi-location) brands measure success by the number of locations they have. However, other retail, restaurant, and service businesses choose to remain small and mighty. Lisa Richards, Founder and CEO of RPZL (as in Rapunzel), falls into the second category. She has one location now but has found ways to scale creatively without adding […]

Madison Avenue Needs to Think About a .1 Mile Radius

Madison Avenue Needs to Think About a .1 Mile Radius

Share this:

Madison Avenue has long been code for the advertising industry. But, as we know, most agencies are no longer located on that iconic street. In fact, some agencies don’t even have physical offices these days. That doesn’t mean agencies no longer need to think about location! Actually, it’s quite the opposite. Locations are more important […]

Retail Media – Is Fun Dead?

Share this:

Retail media has recently claimed that the fun has been sucked out of shopping. The move to online commerce, the death of some big brands, staffing and service shortages, shopping mall vacancies, and supply chain issues have all impacted the habits of consumers, who used to view shopping and dining as a fun group activity […]

How to Leverage Mobility Data to Bring Consumers Back In-Store

Share this:

Rising inflation is changing the way consumers shop and decreasing the number of trips people make to brick-and-mortar stores. While the change in behavior could be a stumbling block for some specialty retailers, it’s also providing brands with an opportunity to more effectively leverage mobility data to target consumers in ways that weren’t possible prior to the pandemic.

How to Use Location-Based Marketing to Drive Conversions

Share this:

On a very basic level, location-based marketing allows businesses to target consumers by monitoring their geographic location. In this article, we dive deeper into the technological aspects and achievements of location-based marketing. Keep reading for all the information those in the tech industry should know about location-based marketing.

How Privacy-Conscious Advertising Can Generate Results

Share this:

Marketers should see rising privacy standards as an opportunity. A once-in-a-generation opportunity to change the way that we, as an industry, define what an audience means, and how personal advertising can continue to deliver value. The key question is going to be — how?

Putting Context Over Coordinates with New Location Encoding Standard

Share this:

Context over coordinates. That’s the premise behind a new standard universal location ID called Placekey, which launches publicly today.

By offering a standard for identifying any physical place, the team behind Placekey is betting that advertisers and other data scientists will have an easier time joining disparate datasets and unlocking deeper insights. The platform was developed by SafeGraph, and it’s already been endorsed by heavy-hitters such as Esri, CARTO, Billups, Skyhook, and Nielsen.

GroundTruth Uses Location Data to Reach ‘Pick-Up Loyalists’

Share this:

GroundTruth has mapped more than 2,900 Walmart Online Grocery Pick-Up zones within Walmart parking lots, which means brands using GroundTruth’s technology can now build accurate custom audience segments comprised of these specific shoppers.

Expanding on that concept, brands should be able to send different mobile marketing pitches to consumers who are picking up groceries via Walmart+’s curbside program and consumers who are getting out of their cars and shopping in-store. GroundTruth’s technology turns location data on Walmart+ shoppers into useful consumer insights for brands.

LBMA Presents Location Weekly: Predictions for 2020

Share this:

Curious about the future? 2020 will be more dynamic for the location industry than the past year.

This week on the Location-Based Marketing Association podcast, we are talking about our expectations and predictions for location-based marketing.

Mobile Trends Set to Hit the US in 2020

Share this:

2019 was a hectic year for many in the social and technology spaces, and we expect that theme to carry into 2020: the “new normal” will become just “normal.” We are optimistic about this new year but also foresee some systemic changes as to how mobile technology will continue transforming our lives while allowing us more control.

Believe the Hype: The Pragmatic Value of Location-Based Analytics, Audiences, and Attribution

Share this:

After 25 years of framing technologies by level of maturity and adoption, the Gartner Hype Cycle has finally placed location intelligence for marketing where it belongs — in the trough of disillusionment. Sounds like a lousy place to be, but it’s actually the opposite. Why? The trough of disillusionment is the stage right before the slope of enlightenment. Let me back up and explain.

The Power and Shifting Meaning of Local

Share this:

Urban, suburban, and rural residents have different shopping habits in their “local” areas. Many marketers are investing in mobile location-based ads — BIA/Kelsey predicts US spending will top $26 billion this year — yet as a retailer your goal isn’t just to reach consumers but to connect with them by acknowledging their different perspectives.

Talking to your customers requires a customized strategy that prioritizes location and takes their everyday lives into consideration. Harnessing the power of local starts with knowledge: where your customers live, what they want, and how to deliver it on behalf of your brand.

Why Your Location-Based Ad Campaign Isn’t Working (And How to Make It Better)

Share this:

Many low-accuracy solutions produce horizontal location data only – location in multi-story buildings is not even a possibility. The result is that advertisers are designing campaigns with the equivalent of one hand tied behind their back, generating two-dimensional campaigns for a three-dimensional world.

What advertisers really need is the ability to reach consumers wherever they are, including the floor level in a multi-story mall, and entice them to enter the store. To achieve this, high-accuracy 3D location is needed. Fortunately, new capabilities are in place to help retailers design more effective campaigns, which will drive better results and raise consumers’ expectations to new heights (pun intended!). 

Three Ways Indoor Maps Do More for Complex Retail Buildings

Share this:

Once a venue’s maps have been digitized for wayfinding purposes, there are many ways to drive additional ROI from that same set of indoor maps. When location technologies are designed with interoperability in mind, it becomes possible to blend different technologies together to create smart solutions that provide value not only to business operations but also to consumers. By integrating digitized, layer-based indoor maps with other solutions such as the indoor equivalent of GPS, known as Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS), asset tracking and business intelligence, great things become possible. 

Here is a shortlist of the top use cases that malls can implement to generate further ROI from their indoor mapping investments.

Turning a Unique Vanity Phone Number into Many

Share this:

Just over half of Americans now use their personal mobile phone numbers as their only phone numbers. A majority of Americans also no longer have landline phones in their homes, and that’s convenient because anyone, anywhere in the world, can now reach you with just that one number. But the opposite is true in the business world, where brands can leverage new technologies to create multiple vanity numbers in order to engage their customers across local, regional, and national marketing campaigns. 

That statistic I cited above isn’t just an interesting bit of trivia. It highlights how the phone, an ancient communications medium compared to social media platforms, chatbots, messaging apps, and email, remains important to a brand’s marketing efforts.

Gimbal Innovates to Track Consumer Trends in the Physical World

Share this:

For years, marketers have used Google Trends to uncover insights based on search data. Now, executives at the advertising and marketing automation platform Gimbal are hoping their newest product will serve the same purpose for the physical world.

Built on top of an independent location data set, Gimbal Trends has been designed to provide marketers with a comprehensive view of consumer behavior in the real world. The product was released this morning, and already Gimbal is seeing interest from companies in the entertainment industry that are interested in leveraging the data to optimize their decision-making processes about upcoming events.

LBMA Vidcast: Google Launches Location Groups, Bumble Explores Physical Space

Share this:

On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: PatientPoint’s proximity in healthcare, Boen Wines using NFC with Guala Closures, Bumble gets into physical space, Puma geotargets on Firefly’s DOOH, Google launches “seasonality” and “location groups”, Groupon acquires Presence AI for voice & text.

Chatmeter Scores New Funding Amid Hiring Spree

Share this:

Local brand management platform Chatmeter announced a new investment by Providence Strategic Growth aimed at helping the company increase its ambitions further after hiring 25 employees over the course of six months. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In the Wake of Spam Reports, Google Focuses on Brand and Small Business Engagement

Share this:

Google’s calculated risk in creating a low bar for verification works out fine in a world where most business owners simply want to gain legitimate access to their own listings, and most businesses do operate within those ethical boundaries. But as we’ve seen elsewhere at this stage in the evolution of social networks, fraud and deceptive manipulation have become a kind of ghost in the machine, dominating darker sectors of the local marketplace and creating an atmosphere of distrust that may eventually prove more broadly contagious. 

All of this is only possible when lots of activity is consolidated on a few platforms. Just as fake accounts attempting to engineer the 2016 election thrived in the vast and complex Facebook ecosystem, so too has Google’s dominance in local attracted its own horde of opportunists, drawn like moths to its flame. Indeed, fraud in local listings is just the latest in a long history of attempts, from link farms to keyword spam, to manipulate loopholes in Google’s regulations and algorithms.