The year 2020 has wreaked havoc on the economy, forcing marketers to clamber to keep businesses afloat. Businesses have had to alter their marketing strategies to adjust to the marketplace’s current climate to remain relevant. What even is ‘normal’ now!? Fortunately, though, as the new year approaches and the world tries its best to stabilize, it is now time for marketers to reexamine their strategies, goals, KPIs, and performance metrics. The year 2021 is on its way, bringing us a fresh start and an opportunity to thrive again!

Digital Marketing Trends in 2021

It brings us great pleasure to state that there is quite a lot of cautious optimism surrounding the year 2021. Various organizations are analyzing the prospects and shaping their strategies accordingly, in hopes of flourishing. While new trends and technologies are suspected to emerge, a large chunk of the future digital marketing trends is not new. Still, it features enhanced and evolved versions of the trends we are already familiar with. However, these trends may be old but are growing in quite drastic ways, which is why it is essential to prepare and equip businesses with the tools required to adapt. One of such trends is Location-based marketing; it is a marketing strategy that offers innumerable benefits and is in a constant state of evolution.

What is Location-Based Marketing?

Location-based marketing is a trend that has taken over the marketplace with immense speed, enabling marketers to attain unique marketing goals. As data-driven marketing flourishes, location-based marketing gains popularity throughout the digital landscape. Another aspect that has increased the significance of location-based marketing is the dramatic rise of mobile phone usage, which provides the marketer with deeper insights into audience behavior. Essentially, location data is a branch of big data. Big data gets its name primarily because of the significant impact that it has. Similarly, location data can also be considered significant, owing to its quality in insights and application. Location data is big data that utilizes information regarding an audience’s behavior patterns and movement to uncover broader consumer patterns and trends. It provides unparalleled and valuable insights into your consumers’ behavior, based primarily on their geographical location.

How Does it Work?

Location data stems from mobile devices, which detect it with the help of sensors. The entire process is anonymized to keep the consumer’s details private. The sensors come in numerous forms, such as beacons, geo-fences, and WiFi.

How Can Your Business Benefit from Location-Based Marketing?

Incorporating location data into your marketing strategy makes it significantly more effective, providing you with quick and reliable results. It enables you to target the kind of audience that is right for your type of business, significantly increasing your sales and conversion and retention rates. It also allows you to uncover patterns in consumer behavior and construct your campaign strategy accordingly. There are numerous location-based marketing trends that you should focus on to help your business grow dramatically in 2021.

Location-Based Marketing Trends:

Here are a few location-based marketing trends to keep an eye out for:

Personalized Advertising

There is countless evidence backing up the efficacy of personalized marketing. Consumers are said to be significantly more responsive to customized ads according to their likes and preferences, in one way or another. Customized messages are more successful in appealing to the consumer, encouraging them to make a purchase. Entrepreneur’s study revealed that location-based marketing has proven to be about 20 times more effective than generic ads. However, there is still room for improvement in making the communications more relevant and useful. This is one area where location-based marketing will see enhancement in 2021. Location-based marketing is likely to be a game-changer in 2021 in terms of personalization. Ensure that your business is up to date with the tools and techniques required to utilize customers’ location data to ensure that they are solely being sent relevant and useful information at valuable times. For example, when a consumer enters a mall, they may receive a nearby clothing store notification about some sale or exciting offer. In this case, the consumer is more likely to consider visiting the store to avail of this particular offer.

Geo-fencing and Hyperlocal Marketing

For any marketing strategy, we know that efficiency and accuracy are the primary concerns. This is why it is essential to reach as many consumers as possible with minimum wastage of resources. One way to make your strategy useful and severely accurate is through hyperlocal marketing, targeting consumers based on their specific locations inside a designated geographically restricted area. These selected destinations are often points of interest for the brand, and the site around these destinations within which the consumers send a message is called a geo-fence. Undeniably, geo-fencing is becoming an increasingly popular trend for location-based marketing and may evolve even further in 2021. Hyperlocal marketing and geofencing provide numerous benefits to both big and small businesses as they allow them to capitalize on the notion that consumers are likely to buy from the stores near the area they live in.

Mobile App Localization

It is a widely held belief that mobile app localization is on its way to becoming a mainstream marketing strategy. Owed to the increasing number of mobile phone users, it is also becoming quite useful and accurate. Businesses utilize this strategy and localize their mobile app content and construct their content strategy to target that particular region. This allows for the effective segmentation of the audience to enable the brand to deliver an enhanced overall customer experience while also drastically increasing the efficacy of their campaigns.

Smart Spaces

Essentially, smart spaces are physical environments that enable people to interact with interconnected networks. Examples of smart spaces can be your assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or even your home security systems. An emerging trend that is likely to be significantly furthered in 2021 is the collaboration of these smart spaces with location-based marketing. Smart spaces are being increasingly prevalent in our environment and incorporate in numerous ways. This makes it easier for brands to reach out and connect with them through these devices. Your refrigerator may remind you to buy eggs as you near the vicinity of a grocery store– and you may like it! The collaboration of smart spaces and location-based marketing enables you to monitor the behavior of your consumers better. It provides you with more opportunities to present targeted ads in a non-intrusive way. Consumers are also becoming increasingly dependent on smart products, thus opening doors of extraordinary opportunities for brands. Make sure that in 2021, you utilize this opportunity to construct an unparalleled customer experience that leads you to boundless profits!

Increased Consumer Participation

There is no denying that one of the significant challenges of location-based marketing is keeping in line with privacy laws and acquiring consumer consent. There is an increased awareness among consumers regarding their privacy settings, which makes it difficult for brands to obtain a consumer’s location or keep track of them in any way. However, consumers are becoming more relaxed, and there is a dramatic increase in the number of consumers who share their location data with specific apps they interact with. Furthermore, consumers are also becoming more aware of the benefits of collaborating with brands to receive offers and deals, making it even easier to implement location-based marketing campaigns. Another thing that helps consumers engage with location-based marketing is the rise of proximity marketing apps that allow the consumer to have control over the messages they receive. This ensures that brands are only sending out relevant messages to the interested consumers, quite a win-win situation! With the increasing integration of apps and data into our lives, it is likely that customer participation and acceptance of location-based marketing strategies will further increase in the coming year.

VR Technology

There is no denying that technological advancement is increasing and traverses all fields. Marketing and technology benefit quite a lot from one another, which is why this is another trend to watch out for in 2021. Businesses have begun to empower their marketing strategies by utilizing immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences to engage with their target audience. The use of VR and augmented reality is increasing quite rapidly, which is why more and more brands are now looking to make use of VR. As these technologies become more intertwined in our lives, they will enable marketers to create extraordinarily engaging campaigns. An example of such a campaign is Ikea Palace, which is an augmented reality furniture mockup app of Ike. It makes the use of VR technologies to provide consumers with a realistic simulation of the products they are interested in; they can test out furniture and feel pillows, etc. There is no doubt that such developments will see a significant increase in 2021; make sure your business prepares for it!

Conclusion

Data holds immense power. Thus, data-based location marketing can provide brands with valuable insights that enable them to construct effective campaigns. There are various trends of location-based marketing on the rise; make sure your company is equipped with the tools required to utilize them to the fullest.