The Location Vocation: The Dawn of Location-Based Services
For the social media addict, they’re a way to share the fun places they’re going. For advertisers, they’re a way to target services with pinpoint relevance. However you use them, Location-Based Services are one of the fastest and most efficient ways to collate data; up-to-the-minute information on who, and where. 2017 is predicted to be the year of location-focussed advertising, with many businesses and services prioritising a location-first approach to their mobile marketing.
It makes sense; having established the unanimous popularity of mobile devices, it now behoves service providers to narrow down the habits of their market. It’s been discovered that over 90% of mobile owners in the US keep their location services enabled at all times, mostly for directions, local recommendations or simply more information on their location.
Marketing Benefits
For marketers, the benefits are obvious. You have an entire population, the vast majority of which are connected via smartphone, set up to be updated wherever there’s network coverage. Given that mobile users are more forgiving (or perhaps, unaware) of the kind of data that services like Facebook and Google hoover up, it will be even easier to personalise these adverts; Facebook, for example, can determine your net worth, home type, even your political preferences – look it up, if you fancy being slightly disturbed.
When it comes to marketing, data is invaluable; and if marketers can pinpoint the exact location of its audience, then the data can pinpoint exactly what is relevant to them. Yet it’s perhaps a little premature to be entirely dependent on it. Location data experts Rippll are keen to dispel some of the more sensationalist claims of what the service can offer, and from their own findings it seems the technology requires a great many refinements before it can be truly accurate. It isn’t real-time, for example – which is to say it doesn’t ‘track’ users as they journey, whilst many companies are as many as 25 metres off when detecting a user’s position. That’s the difference between one retail location, and a great many others nearby.
kate-torline-VeiqoYAEeis-unsplash
Consumer Concerns
There’s also the question of what this all means for the most important people involved: the consumers. Whilst the gradual perfection of this marketing data is exciting for the corporate advertiser, it might be a little too early to celebrate for the sake of their audience. Having been used to the instant gratification of things such as voice recognition or web-shopping, the buying public will be discerning of the service’s accuracy; so it need not only balance that fine line between informing and intruding, it also needs to be unerringly accurate.
Yet even if technology could track, pinpoint and target with absolute certainty, it then has another problem to overcome – trust. Not everybody is convinced that their privacy can be sacrificed for convenience, and, having considered the discerning nature of the public, many will undoubtedly be cautious knowing that a company keeps an unfathomable amount of personal details on them. Location feels like the tip of that particular iceberg; when companies can learn nearly everything about a person, the only thing left to find out is where they have been or where they are right now. For some this, reasonably, is troubling.
Future Thinking
Location services are an exciting prospect, but they might be some way from perfection. The prospect of inaccurate services and invaded privacy won’t sit comfortably with the end-user, so there’s a sense that the technology currently benefits the company more than the customer. However, with a careful and considered rollout, the possibility for on-the-spot promotion, pinpoint-accurate information and timely service updates could revolutionise the relationship between company and customer.
