In the competition for shoppers, many supermarkets have taken to offering extreme price-cutting deals. Despite the popular opinion that Brits are penny pinchers, new research from TCC Global released last month revealed price is not a deal-breaker when it comes to supermarket store choice. The deciding factor is, in fact, the location of the store.

While many may believe that online is winning in the brick-and-mortar vs. e-commerce race, 89% of purchases are still made in physical locations. Research from xAd’s 2016 Global Mobile Path to Purchase report shows that 47% of UK customers still make trips to physical stores in addition to research they have done on mobile. This means that supermarkets have ample opportunity to attract consumers.

Consumers in charge

We know that over half (56%) of shoppers researching on their mobile make purchase decisions immediately or within an hour. For those looking for something to eat or drink, 77% want to find somewhere within the hour and 20% expect these places to be within walking distance. This shows once again that location is a key factor for shoppers when making a purchase.

Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Just Eat and other location-based mobile apps have truly revolutionised customer expectations and demands, especially when it comes to getting their hands on food fast. The success of such apps may be the catalyst for grocery stores to step up and give what their customers want most – an enjoyable customer experience.

By adopting location-based technology, supermarkets can connect the online and offline worlds and reach people in the moments that matter. With timely, contextualised and consistent messages, grocery stores can deliver the local experience consumers crave.

Path to purchase

Consumers today now go through a more fragmented path to purchase. We may use our mobiles, our PCs and then visit stores when researching a product. However, it’s fair to say that location tells a far more accurate tale of the consumer behaviour that drives a sale than online behaviour. If I look up supermarkets in East London, I may not be looking to visit one, I may be considering moving to the area and wanting to see what stores are available nearby. However, if I visit the same supermarket every day before work, I am likely to be interested in targeted advertising for that particular store.

Grocery stores should be utilising this information to their advantage and using location as a true indicator of intent, allowing them to target their audience more effectively.

More than marketing fuel

Location intelligence offers grocery stores so much more than insights for marketing campaigns – it can be used to provide wider business direction. For example, if footfall suddenly drops in a grocery store; a retailer may not be able to tell where their lost consumers have gone. With location insights, they can see if there has been a shift in footfall from their store to a competitor’s. This information is invaluable as it allows grocery stores to make tactical decisions about how to win back their customers. 

These statistics show that location is hugely important in understanding consumer behaviour. All grocery stores generally offer a similar range of products, but their location is an important differentiator. Focusing on this and developing a location intelligence strategy that uses digital insights and communication to drive consumers in store will be critical for supermarkets this year.   

The post Why Grocery Stores Must Wake Up to the Power of Location appeared first on PerformanceIN.

To many it might seem strange that Amazon has plans to roll out physical convenience stores. There’s method in the madness, though. The e-commerce giant’s aim is to capture a share of the grocery market, which currently enjoys 20% of all consumer spending.

However, what is less apparent at this stage is how effective Amazon’s launch onto the high street will be in capturing this physical market share. Competition in this space is intense and Amazon’s ability to effectively market its new services will be critical to its offline success.

Optimising online campaigns is simple, with every consumer action being immediately measurable against digital ad spend, but how will Amazon continue to measure the effects of its marketing on its new brick and mortar stores?

Linking online and offline

This is where location technology comes into play, enabling retailers to understand whether consumers have visited their stores as a result of a specific ad. For the first time, brands are able to understand the link between online ad spend and real world sales.

The real opportunity rests in the fact that 89% of all purchases are still made through brick-and-mortar stores. Convenience stores give consumers the crucial option of being able to “touch and feel” the product before a purchase. According to xAd’s 2016 UK Mobile Path to Purchase, over half (57%) of respondents still visit a location as part of their research before making a purchase.

The importance of driving real world footfall through digital marketing has already started to filter into the weighting of digital ad spending. The recent PwC / Internet Advertising Bureau UK Digital Adspend report highlighted that spend on mobile display ads (£802 million) has overtaken PC and tablet display (£762 million) for the first time. In addition, Trinity Mirror reports that 72.3% of mobile marketers are now using location within their marketing.

As we head deeper into the ‘always on’ way of life, brands increasingly have the opportunity to influence and assist our purchase journey in the real world. The key question for brands focused on real world impact then is how they measure the success of online ads in driving consumers in-store and ultimately through to purchase?

A real-world cookie

As consumers travel from one place to the next throughout the day, they regularly engage with their phones. Through this engagement, they often share their device location information with their favourite sites and applications, essentially turning a mobile’s location data into a new kind of digital cookie. More than this, ultimately, location is the highest indicator of purchase intent and there is a huge opportunity to drive offline sales when brands use this location intelligence effectively.

For instance, just because Amazon vouchers are a popular search result, doesn’t mean Amazon has found the perfect audience for future online advertising. For example, many of these online customers are likely to be buying vouchers for family and friends. However, using location-based technology, Amazon can see anonymous and aggregated audiences who visit real-world Tesco stores, providing the opportunity to target these audiences with an appealing offer before they set off on their weekly shop.

Capitalising on location insights

Not only do retailers have the opportunity to see how online ad spend is making a real-world impact on sales through location intelligence, but they can also engage growing numbers of impatient and impulse shoppers in the moment by using location as the context to serve the best experiences. Take the findings of our Mobile Path to Purchase study; 20% of people who carry out retail related research on their phone want businesses to be within one mile of their current location.

Amazon, and every other grocery retailer alike, will need to rely on location more as competition increases to give people the best experiences across digital and real-world channels. Utilising location intelligence for audience insights, and location to deliver contextual experiences, will help deliver sales and serve customers better over multiple channels.

The post Why Amazon Needs to Up its Location Marketing Game appeared first on PerformanceIN.

“We are moving into the unknown of interactive experiences, changing mankind’s perception of itself.” 

Certainly the Guardian’s Changing Media Summit was not short on big ideas and futuristic concepts, and yet the technology to which Parallel66’s CEO, Martin McDonald, was referring to is one with which we all have at least some familiarity.

The release of the Oculus Rift over Easter saw virtual reality take another leap towards becoming a regular feature in the way we experience games, film and wider media. But as Martin’s opening remarks for the Summit’s ensuing roundtable, “A walk down the high street of the future” inferred, we’re only beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to the application of experiential technology.

During my time sat alongside the roundtable’s panellists including Hemal Kuntawala, head of M&S Venture Labs, and Karl Woolley, creative technologist at Framestore VR Studio, our discussion moved on to the application of experiential tech in the retail industry, delving into the technologies that are preparing today’s consumers for the brave new world ahead.

“The high street of the future”

According to the panel, experiential commerce, whether it is virtual reality headsets in-store or augmented reality tools that let you arrange furniture and appliances at home, will continue to grow but we aren’t at the point of full immersion yet. Encouraging consumers to move outside of what they know is very tricky, particularly in a world where 90% of commerce still happens in bricks and mortar stores.

Mobile, as the online touchpoint in any physical location, is bridging the gap. Real-time location data from the device goes far beyond just informing where and who someone is and what they might be interested in. It will play a vital role in the experiential story and we have to stop delivering irrelevant and untargeted content to this platform.

Static banner ads and pop-ups no longer cut it; brands and publishers must experiment beyond these aggravators to raise the bar and make buying frictionless. This relies on letting consumers dictate the line between assistance and annoyance. No matter how creative or immersive we build these enhanced realities to be, we can’t get away from the need to reach consumers at the right point in their path to purchase, targeting them at the precise time and place they are most able to commit to the experience.

Building an identity

Proactively achieving this is down to the effective use of data. As an industry, we have awoken to the need to pool and understand data from different channels in order to build this clear picture of the consumer journey. The hard part comes in explaining this and converting brands otherwise invested in a culture of listening to just one platform.

Bad data is just as important as good data in evidencing the need to fully embrace the widening multi-channel landscape. When it comes to good data though, it doesn’t get much better than device IDs. Through these unique codes, marketers can begin connecting the dots with other brand touchpoints to work out what consumers are doing in the real world. Helping brands to do this and better understand the role of every platform in the path to purchase is a priority for the industry today.

What brands also really want to know is how they understand a purchase decision. Simply by accepting that 70% of the target market uses mobile to buy, means you can start to close the loop on it, which allows you to use search, social and location to drive mobile payments following in-store experiences.

Spotting the moment to engage

Experiential commerce will always be a balancing act. Just as consumers share this all important first-party data, they will expect their experiences to improve correspondingly. This is where identifying not only who the person is, but when to engage them becomes very important in the value exchange.

Using location, we can hone in on visitation history, alongside real-time data so we can know exactly where someone is and when. In the real world, this means spotting someone within the proximity of a KFC store and proactively engaging them via the mobile touchpoint to make them aware of their latest offerings, as well as directing them toward their closest shop.

There are plenty more examples where the consumer would invite interaction from a brand they know and trust. For example, the daily commute sees millions of professionals locked into journeys on public transport, cut off from most of their day-to-day entertainments. At this point, utilising visitation history to share a relevant offer from a coffee shop on their way to work or suggesting something for the weekend can steal their attention and immerse them in the brand.

Capturing consumer interest in these moments and delivering helpful, creative experiences that form part of their decision making process will pave the way for bigger and bolder plans in experiential commerce. As the key to unlocking mobile’s potential, location data needs to find its rightful place in brand strategy to ensure the ad experiences they deliver are genuinely there to augment the customers’ reality and prepare them for the virtual world.

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