Imagine you are walking out of office after a long day. You might want to have a cup of coffee. You’re browsing on your phone and you see an ad for 50% off on your favorite drink at your favorite café nearby, certainty it catches your attention. Or another example: You walk into your most loved retail store. When you walk in, the sales manager welcomes you by name, talks about the item you were exploring prior in the day on the Internet, and show you some more products you might be interested in. Is that amazing? All that calls Location-Based Marketing. Location-based marketing is a marketing method that changes depending on where potential clients are located. Instead of treating customers as a monolithic entity, location-based marketing adapts to the particular social, cultural and personal traits of customers by making assumptions about their habits and preferences based on their location at a particular moment. Technological advances have allowed companies to know much more about their clients' locations so they can target these clients individually. It is believed that location-based applications started with a check-in/ photo-tagging service called Brightkite, which launched in 2007, it was a novel concept it gave those of us starting to explore social media the ability to check in and find one another at events or in big cities when we were traveling. After Brightkite, Gowalla came out, and then Foursquare. Whrrl, Loopt and Path also entered the market, while the big players like Facebook, Yelp and Instagram started encouraging their members to share their location. The benefit of location-based marketing contributes tremendous opportunities to marketers and businesses. It is estimated that 65% of the consumers that receive the push notifications check and open them. It is quite a good catch. However, it can be annoying. Taking the case of the coffee shop situation above, if the customer is only walking past the store in a rush instead of entering it, receiving a notification about the coffee shop’s offer can cause annoyance. Of course, it can be prevented by turning off the app, but then making the customer to do something repeatedly only causes further annoyance. The potential value for location-based marketing would hit nearly US$ 30 Billion by 2020 (United States) according to David Kaplan on Geo-Marketing published on June 16 2016, Location-based strategies are sure to open doors for huge new opportunities, especially when done right.
