Using Location Based Marketing as a Shopping Marketer

# Using Location Based Marketing as a Shopping Marketer

As a shopping marketer, you want to use all the tools you have at your disposal to attract more customers to your store, from countertop sign holders to the latest technology.

With the spread of smartphones to nearly every adult and young adult in the country, there are more marketing methods than ever before, including a range of location-based ones that rely on the GPS and other location information from smartphones.

## Understanding the Marketing Method

To use location-based marketing effectively, you need to better understand what it is. For retail stores, location-based marketing involves seeing where your current or potential customers are at a given moment and using that to your advantage.

You can offer things like coupons for customers who are close to your store or who check in at your location regularly.

## Using Your Retail-Branded Application

The ideal way of using location-based marketing to supplement your traditional advertising is via your own retail application. Adidas provides a perfect example of this.

Its system is designed to detect a client's location based on his or her phone's GPS. It then pushes certain products or notifies clients of sales that are specific to the Adidas store closest to them. This way, a discount can be advertised at a single location, even for a limited time.

## Using Check-in Applications

At the very least, you should strongly consider using check-in applications, such as FourSquare, Placecast, Neer, Loopt, and Gowalla, to encourage your clients to check in. All these applications encourage people to check in when they visit a store, restaurant, or entertainment center.

They then provide opportunities for interaction with other clients. To make it more fun, they let people compete with each other to see who can earn the most check-ins from a particular store.

You can take advantage of this and bring in more business by offering discounts to people with a certain number of check-ins or a particular badge in an application.

## Consider Micro-Location Services

Although they are still new, you will want to strongly consider using micro-location services, also known as hyper-location. This system involves placing sensors around the store that detect where in the building a client is.

Current methods involve sound waves and require the microphone, but some stores are working on advancements.

Setting up sensors or adjusting the Wi-Fi signal to add location information can let you figure out which countertop sign holders in your store clients are by and offer deals on the products right next to them as a way to encourage impulse purchases.