How Small Businesses Can Leverage Location-Based Technology
Market forces can change overnight and turn the tides in favour of your competitors, leaving you standing clueless for the next stage. Thus, it becomes imperative for business owners like you to keep contingencies in place.
But why the sudden shift in the business landscape only affect the small businesses like yours? Why it doesn’t lead to a sudden stop for large organisations? The answer is technology.
Small business owners like you can take advantage of location-based technology to improve customer relationship, prepare better campaigns, improve sales, etc. Let us explore.
Location-based technology and Marketing
Have you ever felt weird that when you go someplace, you start seeing mobile ads typically for businesses in that region? Or maybe you regularly receive SMS updates from businesses in your area? How does that happen?
Through mobile. If other businesses can do this to you, you can also do this for your customers! It is that simple, I swear! But wait, how did the business know who is in their vicinity? Through mobile location.
Which location-based technology shows this? GPS!
Now, who should you show your ads to? A customer who is in geofence of your business or everyone in your city? The former, of course! That is why you should start thinking about using location-based technology as a potential investment.
Uses of Location-Based Technology
Well, while navigation might be the most popular use of location-based technology, it isn’t limited to that. As discussed in the example above, you can even use technology for marketing. So, if your business is not into that kind of offering, don’t be disheartened. Small businesses can use location-based technology in:
1. Search
Whenever you search for a restaurant in food delivery apps, they always ask you to select your location. Why? Because it enhances the search. Once entered, the app shows you restaurants in your area only.
Similarly, you can use location-based technology for your business so that your customers in the area can search for you. It also helps you to refine the user search, offer curated search results, and improve customer experience. You don’t need to be a Fortune 500 company to be able to do this.
2. Advertising
Using location-based technology, you can create ad campaigns that show your offering to the people who are within the geofence defined by you. For example, let us assume that you are running an offer on your famous pasta and want people to dine in.
You can create a campaign to show your offer who are within 30 km radius of your business and have searched for “pasta” in their browser recently. How will your ad manager show the ads? Using location-based technology, of course!
3. Check-In
Foursquare was the first company to offer a check-in facility to the users. It was mimicked by major players and now the feature is offered by almost all social media platforms. Businesses are using it to let their users connect.
As a small business owner, you too can use location-based technology for offering check-ins to users and creating a community of users who would like to be connected and with your brand. But this one sounds boring, doesn’t it?
Here is something useful for you.
4. Fraud Prevention
Imagine that a customer is sitting at his home and receives an SMS notification saying a transaction was performed at a place 1000 km away using his credit card. Several other customers are facing the exact same issue. How can it be resolved? You can use location-based technology for added security.
What does it do? Just offer them the facility to match the location of the smartphone with that of where the transaction takes place. If the location doesn’t match, the transaction will not go through.
Yeah, Good. But What Is Its Use?
Glad that you asked. See, location-based technology is useful for small businesses like yours to great extents. As I said earlier, Fortune 500 companies do not suffer a great setback because of a change in market forces. But you can. So, with the help of location-based technology, you get the following benefits:
1. Boost your customer numbers
Now, who doesn’t like a good old-fashioned discount or coupon? With your location-based technology directed advertising, you can significantly attract new customers to purchase from you.
2. KYC
If you could know how many people are present in a store at any moment, how many people enter your shop and leave within 5 mins, and how many people in nearby areas are searching for what you are offering, wouldn’t you be able to grow your sales? Location-based technology gives you all these insights which let you to Know Your Customer.
3. Collaboration
You can partner with other businesses which are using location-based technology to offer a more customised user experience. For example, let us say you own a small adventure sports area and want to attract people. You can partner with a weather app to show your advertisement to the people when the weather is pleasant.
One Story for All — Proximity Marketing
Whatever I have discussed in the entire blog, it all comes under the umbrella of proximity marketing. Well, at least most of what I talked about. But what is a proximity marketing and how can it help you to grow your business? Well, that’s a question that you need to get an answer to by talking to an expert here at Beaconstac.
© Prakhar Bansal, 2020. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Prakhar Bansal with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
