It’s Friday. You’re walking out the door of your office, heading home for the weekend when you get a text from your spouse. Your 7-year-old daughter has a birthday party the next morning, and you need to stop to buy a gift. Instinctively, you pull out your phone, search for this month’s best-selling toys, read a review or two, and locate a big box retailer that has your gift of choice in stock.
This is a mobile moment. We have them every day.
Mobile moments are situations where we turn to our phones for immediate access to something we need – information, weather reports, and increasingly, nearby retail stores. In fact, 69% of us turn to mobile search first in a moment of need, according to Google.
Even in this ever-changing digital landscape, 90% of today’s shoppers are still buying in-store. According to Forrester Research, 2016 saw mobile influence $1.05 trillion in offline sales. Moreover, 52% of consumers compare prices, 47% look up product information, and 32% seek out stores near them – all over mobile.
At the same time, mobile phones are different than desktop computers in their access to GPS or Wi-Fi powered location data. Marketers understand all of this, which explains the proliferation of mobile ad campaigns that use location-based targeting.
The pitfall of these campaigns arrives when they rely too heavily on mobile location targeting. Toy retailers looking to drive consumers into their stores are not keen in targeting recent college grads, no matter how close to the store they may be. Likewise, clothing and accessories retailers who target teens and college students are not seeking 65-year-old retirees spending their days at the mall, no matter how many times they walk by.
To that point, shopping behavior matters! Marketers want to spend their precious resources targeting only the right prospects. In other words, advertisers are missing a critical supplement to their location targeting strategies through – you got it – shopping behavior data. But where does this coveted data come from?
Second-party shopping data, or transparent access to a non-competitive and relevant partner’s first-party data, not only expands digital marketing initiatives significantly through scalability, but is also a reflection of your shoppers’ dynamic behavior on mobile.
While most location targeting techniques rely on broad third-party data aggregated through various external platforms and websites (such as demographics), second-party shopping data makes use of a specified store’s or brand’s most relevant data as it relates to audience interests and browsing behavior online, thereby personalizing the campaign at the user-level and predicting offline buying behavior. Moreover, because with second-party data you get choose your data provider, your data accuracy via transparency is improved dramatically.
For more, access this new eGuide, Why Your Mobile Location Campaigns Miss the Mark, to explore the pitfalls of today’s mobile location-based campaigns. Learn why the next generation of ad targeting will combine the best of location and user-level mobile shopping behavior to maximize in-store outcomes.
