When it comes to location-based marketing and proximity-marketing, more often than not, marketers seem fascinated by the beacon technology.

With 82% of shoppers making their actual purchasing decision in-aisle, it’s no wonder that vendors are betting on beacons and indoor positioning systems to help marketers interact with consumers in real time.

A year ago, Forrester warned of the hype around beacons. Despite huge interest and numerous successful pilots, we have yet to see very many successful commercial rollouts. This is not so much about the technology (even though battery life and operational deployments raise technology issue), but primarily because reach is limited today and because few marketers can deliver smart contextual messages at scale. They must also define engagement scenarios and automated rules to deliver relevant messages to individual customers.

Location data alone is dumb. Sending someone a coupon to redeem in a nearby store just because they’re passing by isn’t enough. For ads and messages to be relevant, firms must combine location data with insights like past behaviors, preferences, needs, and situations. It is also likely they will have to combine multiple technologies to reduce the complexity of in-store operational deployments and boost the accuracy of location data.

There are many more opportunities than just pushing marketing messages in real-time. Using location data is more important than just capturing the attention of nearby smartphone owners — it’s about powering contextual marketing.

In particular, marketers should fuel contextual marketing with location data to:

  • Increase brand preference by delivering personalized experiences
  • Improve the customer experience on location
  • Advertise more efficiently
  • Unlock audience targeting and offer intention data
  • Rediscover customers and their behaviors in the real world
  • Trigger predictive marketing
  • Solve the offline online attribution challenge

Clients who want to know more can download our latest report on this topic: “Fuel Contextual Marketing With Location Data”.

I had the opportunity to talk to many different and innovative players in the space among which Yext, Gravy, Place IQ, Factual, adsquare, GPShopper. SmartFocus, WiForia and Uepaa. If you have an interesting story to tell to serve B2C marketers, feel free to contact me.