“Geo-targeting allows businesses to personalise their messaging
and connect with customers on a more intimate level.”
Ryan Holmes
All brands are online today and reach out to their audience through online sources – emails, in-app notifications or push notifications. Most of this is often irrelevant to the user, and their brain immediately spams them. The act of sending out irrelevant information to the user also dehumanises them and makes them a part of a “mass”, instead of acknowledging their identities. Location marketing or geo-marketing not only engages customers better and increases ROI by using geo-targeting to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time and place but also humanises them.
Brands and geo-targeted marketing
Geo-targeting not only helps brands reach out to the audience based on the proximity, but it also brings about increased sales at POS, growth in customer base, increases brand recall, meaningful personalisation and drives foot traffic. This is why some of the topmost national and international brands use this strategy to reach out to their audience and deliver personalised results.
Several brands like Uber, Ola, Swiggy etc have services that are entirely location specific. The suggestions and recommendations on these apps are also based on which restaurant or cafe or vehicle is close to the live location of a user in most cases. Google uses location details to make the search results of a user more relevant to them. This is true of even Google Maps. Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal are other big names that make use of geo-targeting to help their users get more personalised results.
Geo-targeting at MyGate
The MyGate app is used widely, and actively by over 4 million households and 25,000 gated communities across 27 major cities in India for their daily convenience. Apart from this, the wide range of audience MyGate has – economically, gender-wise, and location-wise allows brands to boil down and decide which specific segment they’d want to target. However, several times the choice brands must make is purely based on the location of the users in different gated communities.
Several times, the brands want to draw users to their physical stores to increase footfall and therefore sales in the point of sale (POS). Several big brands that have their locations Pan-India, often reach out to team MyGate which requests so that they can draw the users close-by, by to their stores. Sometimes, they want to spread awareness about their new stores. Not just big brands, but sometimes hyper-local brands like Reach 3 Roads and CMR Shopping Mall reach out to MyGate for similar assistance.
Geo-targeting and privacy concerns
Study reveals that as long as customers feel secure about their privacy and trust that the data collection/protection is being handled in an appropriate, secure manner they agree to share their information to improve their customer experience, especially in exchange for financial incentives. Research suggests that the likelihood of sharing this information for location-based discounts was around 90%. 66% of people would exchange information about loyalty points or programmes.
In several cases, geo-targeting is done through IP addresses, WIFI and beacons. However, MyGate is a community focused app whose users are residents of different gated communities. These gated communities are registered as MyGate communities. Therefore, whenever brands reach out to us for requirements based on locations or pin codes, all MyGate needs to do is study the gated communities that are close to the brand’s store and send out a communication to the users of those specific communities.
Conclusion
Geo-targeting has become an essential marketing tool for businesses to connect with their customers on a more personal level. By using location data, brands can deliver relevant messages and offers to their customers, resulting in increased engagement, sales, and brand loyalty. MyGate, a community-focused app, is one such platform that enables brands to target specific segments of their audience based on their location. While privacy concerns around data collection and protection persist, customers are willing to share their information for better customer experiences and financial incentives.
MyGate